Apathy for the Devil (10 page)

But I’m getting slightly ahead of the actual flow of events in early 1972. Sometime in late February I’d managed to meet Iggy Pop, an encounter that had a cataclysmic effect on me personally. During one of my fruitless attempts to snag a David Bowie interview, an employer at his management firm Mainman had let slip that Iggy had lately become one of their clients too and had just moved from the States to take up temporary residence in a house in London’s Maida Vale. He even gave me the address. At first I was too scared to make direct contact, having read all about the singer’s unpredictable ways whilst fronting the early Stooges, but then I became friendly with a girl called Debbie Boushell, who’d recently left her native Michigan to immerse herself in swinging London. Back in the day she’d known both the MC
₅
and the Stooges personally, and when she heard that I knew Iggy’s exact whereabouts in England she eagerly suggested we visit his premises together at the earliest opportunity.

One sunny afternoon we actually made the trek, walking for ages along streets rimmed with elegantly cropped hedgerows and exquisitely maintained gardens until we came to the Stooges’ UK headquarters. I rang the bell, half-expecting a naked wild man to suddenly materialise and wrestle me to the ground. But instead the door was opened by a slender young person dressed in a woman’s sleeveless smock and a pair of circulation-constrictingly tight silver leather trousers. I’d always imagined Iggy Pop to be a bull-in-a-china-shop kind of guy-a walking sea of turbulence - but the fellow facing me - for it was he - was the epitome of charm and well-mannered cordiality.

In point of fact, I didn’t really meet Iggy Pop that day. I was treated to an encounter with his alter ego, Jim Osterberg, instead. This was most fortuitous: Jim can be a genuinely nice human being to spend time with, Iggy less so. He was attempting to lead a chemical-free existence at this precise moment and Iggy only came out to play back then when the drugs started kicking in. I couldn’t get over how polite and intelligent he was. He had exquisite manners and spoke penetratingly about Gore Vidal’s novels and avant-garde European cinema. He was trying to assimilate English culture and I remember we watched an episode of
Steptoe and Son
on his black-and-white television, me attempting to explain the rag-and-bone back-story behind its plot line. As per usual, Albert and Harold Steptoe were constantly at each other’s throats over some petty infraction, shouting comic insults at each other across the scrapyard. Iggy turned to his guitarist James Williamson, who was sharing the Maida Vale digs with him. ‘That’ll be you and me in a couple of weeks’ time.’

He and Williamson couldn’t get over the fact that television in Great Britain during 1972 tended to cease broadcasting after 10.30 in the evening. Back in Michigan, the Stooges had bonded over after-midnight reruns of George Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead
flickering in the old homestead. Now all they had to while away the witching hours was a test pattern. The pair were both acquainted with the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Street Fighting Man’ and its refrain about sleepy London town, and now they were discovering for themselves the reality of its sentiments. London simply wasn’t swinging any more. Everything closed down too early and the only places that stayed open after midnight seemed to be hosting a perpetual gloomy wake for the sixties.

At first Iggy tried to make sense of his new surroundings, to
check out the English way at close quarters. I saw him a lot during the next few months. He could often be espied walking around the city alone, mapping out the London terrain street by street until he’d covered every postal district on foot. Like Napoleon, he was busy working up his own plan of attack on the metropolis. He’d sometimes turn up to a gig alone and lurk in the audience, scoping out the competition. He spoke highly of a T.Rex concert he’d witnessed at Wembley - the same show that was filmed by Ringo Starr for the
Born to Boogie
film. Iggy was quite a fan of Bolan’s back in the day - he’d even managed to get hold of a pre-release white-label acetate of
The Slider
album and played it a lot at the Stooges’ London headquarters. He seemed to hold Bolan in higher esteem than his new pal Bowie - at least on a musical level.

Iggy and Bowie may have been linked by management and general word of mouth but their individual agendas were poles apart. Bowie was a culture-vulture tourist, a magpie chameleon furiously ransacking all manner of cutting-edge influences in order to create a sophisticated multi-layered pop consciousness for himself and his audience to share in. Iggy meanwhile was a fervent purist intent on rechannelling the bedrock blues aesthetic - two or three chords and a hypnotic groove - through the whole white bohemian stream-of-consciousness mindset mixed in with some performance art. Put simply, Ziggy Stardust was ‘show business’ whilst the Stooges were ‘soul business’. The first was deeply glamorous and alluring to behold, the latter less attractive but potentially more life-changing to be exposed to.

Some might now see it as the difference between art and artifice but that would be a wrong-headed claim to make. Bowie’s Ziggy-era music was certainly artfully conceived and he had a far
more sophisticated and varied approach to basic songcraft than Iggy. Bowie understood what was happening in the cultural Zeitgeist and was able to play on its various ongoing obsessions - the sci-fi-inspired future, Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
scenario, androgyny,
Clockwork Orange
, Warholesque superstardom - to his own inspired purposes. Iggy by contrast was a musical primitive not unlike John Lee Hooker and proud to be so. They could only enjoy a meaningful creative and personal relationship when Bowie finally elected to leave all his personality-transforming masks back in the closet, which he did in the mid-seventies when the pair moved to Berlin together. During the early seventies, though, they were often at cross-purposes. Bowie adored Iggy but was less enamoured by the Stooges’ input, feeling the singer would be better served with a more conventionally proficient back-up ensemble. Iggy meanwhile had his own private reservations about Bowie’s effetely theatrical live shows as well as the Bromley alien’s unfortunate tendency to hire mime artists to share the stage with him. One was fated to levitate to the very toppermost of the global poppermost over the next two years, whilst the other was doomed to lay destitute in its outer margins during the same period of time. Partly this was due to their manager Tony Defries, who focused ruthlessly on Bowie’s career throughout 1972, keeping Iggy and the Stooges out on the sidelines and unemployed, save for the recording of one album and a single live performance. But mostly it was due to the fact that the world was still not ready to accept what the Stooges had to offer it.

Their one and only European show took place on July 21st 1972 on a Saturday night at London’s King’s Cross Cinema (later known as the Scala), just across the road from the train station.
The night before, Lou Reed had made his UK live debut at the same venue and the fledgling glitterati
du jour
had all come out in force to feast their eyes and ears on the revered former Velvet Underground kingpin’s latest musical venture. Members of a fascinating new English act known as Roxy Music were amongst the gauchely attired attendees seated up in the balcony. The Stooges were there too, scoping out the competition with their customary snake-eyed nonchalance. Backstage I caught a glimpse of Reed before he went on. Slumped in a corner of his makeshift dressing room, his whole body was shaking uncontrollably and his facial expression was that of a man awaiting his own execution. His performance that night quickly degenerated into a fiasco. The backing band he’d hired - and christened the Tots - managed only to transform his old Velvets repertoire from edgy art rock to feckless-sounding bubblegum pop. And Reed’s stage fright was so palpable his voice kept cancelling out on him because his vocal cords and neck muscles had become rigid with fear. He was also seriously overweight, a condition not helped by his choice of apparel - a rhinestone-encrusted black velvet suit several sizes too small for his portly girth. After four songs, his trousers burst their seams, his zipper broke and the waistband began to slowly descend, billowing around his thighs. Iggy and James Williamson - standing at the front of the stage - found this spectacle particularly amusing and began pointing at the falling strides with suitably contemptuous facial expressions.

There were no such wardrobe malfunctions when the Stooges took the same stage just twenty-four hours later. But there was only a fraction of the audience that had turned out for Reed. No celebrity onlookers could be found in the building - no Roxy, Reed or Bowie, although the latter pair had been photographed
arm in arm with Iggy that very afternoon during a joint press conference at a London hotel. No more than 200 people were present for the show and at least half of them were only there because it was a cheaply priced all-night event that provided warmth and shelter to cushion the hours before London’s tube trains began operating again at 6 a.m. Many in the balcony were already fast asleep when the Stooges began playing at 2 in the morning. They didn’t stay that way for long. From the opening notes, the big room was suddenly sucked into a world rife with menace and malevolence.

The songs the Stooges chose to perform that night had never been heard outside of the group’s rehearsal studio - and they never would be again. Nothing was reprised from their previous two Elektra albums and nothing they played would be later immortalised on
Raw Power
. Instead, they performed a jolting succession of primitive works in progress. ‘This next selection is entitled “Penetration”,’ Iggy would inform the genuinely terrified crowd. But the song they performed had absolutely nothing in common with the hypnotic track of the same name that would appear eight months later on the Stooges’ third album. ‘Thank you,’ Iggy then announced. ‘This next selection is called “Penetration” too.’ And off they’d go again bashing out this scary, Neanderthal jungle music that no one present had ever heard the likes of before this night.

Iggy meanwhile gave one of the most superhuman physical displays ever seen in public. Every nuance of his performance is still engraved in my memory - his absolute fearlessness, his Nijinsky-like body language and the mind-boggling way he seemed able to defy even the laws of gravity. At one point he placed his mike stand right at the lip of the stage, bent backward
until his head touched the ground and then threw his whole body forward onto it. As he and the stand descended into the audience pit, he managed to execute a full somersault on it whilst still in mid-air. Landing on the floor in a deft pirouette, he then proceeded to crawl around the crowd’s feet on his chest like a reptile.

No one had ever witnessed anything like this in England before. The Who had been loud, anarchic-sounding and genuinely shocking as a live attraction once upon a time but they’d never physically confronted their audiences in such an alarming fashion. Four years hence, UK crowds would become totally entranced by just this sort of spectacle but in 1972 it was way too much way too soon. The audience at the Stooges show looked genuinely traumatised by the end. As soon as Iggy had leapt off the stage and into the crowd, people generally scattered backwards and stood close to the exit doors, peering nervously at the action and praying that the singer wouldn’t come over and start tormenting them. At the same time, they couldn’t keep their eyes off him so it made for an interesting dynamic in the room, to say the least. John Lydon has always claimed he was one of those present in the audience that night and that he was left unimpressed by the Stooges’ performance, but that is quite frankly impossible to believe. For what Iggy and co. achieved that night was to provide the basic blueprint for what the Sex Pistols attempted three and a half years later: short sharp shock rock that mesmerised whilst at the same time scaring its audience witless. Take it from one who was actually there and saw the whole process slowly developing throughout the early seventies: Iggy and the Stooges invented punk just like James Brown and the Famous Flames created funk. They were the first and they were
the best. Many self-styled punk experts have since come forward to chronicle the genre in lofty tomes but unless you were one of those 200 jittery punters watching the Stooges’ only European show in the summer of ’72, you weren’t there at the real beginning and don’t really know what you’re talking about. End of sermon.

The performance had a profound effect on me, anyway. It offered me a definitive glimpse into the decade’s real future - the new wild frontier of Western pop culture - as well as providing the catalyst for more gainful employment. A week or so later, I got an unexpected phone call from a gentleman I’d never spoken to before named Nick Logan, who claimed to be the assistant editor of the
New Musical Express
. He told me the paper was looking to run an article on Iggy and the Stooges but that they’d been unable to secure any kind of interview via their management. As I’d already encountered the group and had recently seen them perform, would I be at all interested in penning a short article on the subject for their next issue? He then spoke the magic words: fifteen quid would be paid for every thousand words I could come up with. I said ‘yes’ on the spot and agreed to visit the paper’s offices in Long Acre in order to discuss further projects.

The
NME
and I already had one thing in common: the broadsheet publication first appeared in 1951, the year of my birth. Its premier issue featured my dad’s pal Vera Lynn - the former ‘forces’ favourite’ - as its cover star. But the weekly periodical’s initial focus on fifties crooners and light-entertainment flavours of the month soon changed to embrace a younger demographic when Elvis Presley exploded over in America leading the way for home-grown imitators like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard to beguile Britain’s post-war youth.

By the early sixties the journal was on a circulation ascendant as the country’s pre-eminent pop sheet. Beatles fans bought it religiously each week in order to find out all the latest info about their mop-haired saviours. Its golden era to date had been the so-called British invasion beat group years but it started to come seriously unstuck during the second half of the decade when rock went counter-cultural and pop was suddenly viewed as music for morons.