Was this the best gig ever?
Iggy Pop all but ripped the roof off the Royal Albert Hall on Friday night. Showing none of the usual showbusiness deference to this august venue, he attacked the stage with a fierce, rude energy. “Turn up the lights in this f---ing dump!” he called out, exulting in the sight of 5,000 fans on their feet, some standing on seats, roaring in delight, reflecting back his own uninhibited glee.
From the moment the curtain went up, Pop bounced and contorted like Mick Jagger after a session of electroconvulsive therapy, writhing and twisting while a swaggering fivepiece band in matching red-brocade smoking jackets stirred up his 1977 anthem Lust For Life. The sentiment of the song was the theme of the evening.
Pop’s own jacket didn’t last long. He was stripped to his waist by the third song, crowd-surfing by the fourth and bleeding from the head by the sixth (presumably from some collision caused by his reckless stage diving). A woman many decades Pop’s junior scrambled on stage to kiss him on the lips while a streak of blood ran down his cheek. Other fans were clambering over rows of seats to get closer to their hero.
“Let go of my pants, baby!” yelped Pop as someone pulled him off the stage by his trousers. He waded among the audience, circumnavigating the entire arena floor in a crush of bodies as his fantastic band stretched out dark rock grooves with formidable elasticity. “Free the mother----ing people!” he cried. “Free the mother---ing hall!”
At 69, Pop still displays a physical bravura that seems almost an affront to the ageing process. His body is battered from a lifetime of reckless performance. He struts with a limping gait, loose, wrinkly flesh hanging from the once taut sinews of his bare torso. He is small, just 5ft 7in, with a big head full of grinning teeth and the demeanour of a demented geek from Todd Browning’s cult cinema classic
Freaks, one of humanity’s rejects who confronts us with the very essence of humanity. That is the role James Osterberg has always played as Iggy Pop, and he’s damned good at it.
With the Stooges and solo, Pop has been on the rock frontline for more than 40 years without ever having a hit, coursing through his career on charisma and commitment. But together with versatile Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Josh Homme and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders, he has recently made a fantastic album, Post Pop Depression, which links back both musically and emotionally to two great solo albums Pop made with David Bowie in 1977,
The Idiot and Lust For Life. The set was drawn from those three albums that represent Pop’s finest work, fired up by a band visibly inspired by their frontman. They were incredible, stirring up a vortex of ripping guitars, wonky keyboards and thundering drums, while Pop held the centre with his gritty baritone, carrying tunes from defiant proclamation to surprising vulnerability.
There is something about the naked exuberance with which Pop confronts audiences that encourages them to respond in kind. This veteran showman understands the rock ritual of catharsis, how to use sound and performance to transform a crowd of strangers into a community, transmuting the daily agonies of ordinary lives into a brief shared expression of liberation and joy.
But, even by his standards, something special seemed to happen when this rock imp encountered this venerable old building. “That felt personal,” he declared in the dying echo of encores, a triumphant fist aloft.
Indeed it did. I have been going to gigs for a very long time and this was one of the best I have ever seen.