“The best there is”: the artist Iggy Pop called the light of his life
People often talk about ‘the invisible string theory’ in a romantic context – the idea that two people were joined together by an invisible string, to one day eventually find each other in the middle of it. It’s all very cute. But surely the same theory applies to friendships, more specifically, Iggy Pop and David Bowie?
It’s hard to actually label the pair as friends. They were, in part, brothers and part lovers, according to the rock and roll rumour mill. But whatever it was that they exactly were, there seemed to be some preassigned destiny at play, for the pair were both one and the same at the height of their creative careers.
It all began when Bowie produced The Stooges’ seminal album Raw Power in 1971. From there, the Londoner and Iggy realised they shared a musical symbiosis, one built on a desire to achieve musical catharsis at all costs, and so from there, the pair embarked on a wild and innovative journey through the rest of the decade.
Bowie would invite Iggy on the Station To Station tour, before the pair packed their bags and headed for the German capital, in a creative chapter that would live long in the history of music. Inspired by a need to escape drugs, the pair not only created some of the greatest art-rock albums of all-time, but they reached a brief stage of personal tranquillity, devoid of the hedonism that sought to cripple them.
Despite tales of schoolboy naughtiness that swapped packed lunches for bags of drugs, the move to Berlin was ultimately the life tonic that the pair needed. Prior to doing so, Iggy’s career was at a crossroads, where said addiction was stifling the momentum of his career, particularly in the wake of The Stooges’ break-up, which threatened to send Iggy into cultural irrelevance altogether.
Bowie knew that there was an artist hiding beneath the depths of the trauma, and so took him under his wing and creatively rehabilitated him in Berlin. Something Iggy would never forget.
“The friendship was basically that this guy salvaged me from certain professional and maybe personal annihilation – simple as that,” Iggy said following Bowie’s death. “A lot of people were curious about me, but only he was the one who had enough truly in common with me, and who actually really liked what I did and could get on board with it, and who also had decent enough intentions to help me out. He did a good thing.”
Elsewhere in the wake of Bowie’s death, Iggy simply said, “David’s friendship was the light of my life. I never met such a brilliant person. He was the best there is.”
Bowie’s contribution to music is more than I could care to summarise in a single sentence. However, beyond his own albums and projects that spearheaded art into a continued state of innovation, perhaps one of his greatest achievements was stewarding a true generational talent in Iggy Pop, into fulfilling his own potential.
