The night Iggy Pop met the “little turd” Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp is not just an acclaimed actor; he is also a genuinely talented musician. The fact that he has regularly played shows with one of the greatest guitarists of all time, Jeff Beck, goes to show that Depp possesses a musical prowess of his own and can cut it with the best of them. In fact, Depp had ambitions to become a professional musician prior to his acting career taking off.
Depp received his first guitar when he was 12 years old, gifted to him by his mother. Later, he dropped out of high school at age 16 in an attempt to become a rockstar; the first foray into this ambition came in 1980 when he started a band named The Kids. The band moved from Florida to Los Angeles in pursuit of a record deal.
Before the Los Angeles move, however, Depp was fortunate enough to play with one of his musical idols back in Florida. He said: “I was 17 years old, we were on tour, we did sort of a lot of opening act stuff around, and we had two shows with Iggy Pop in Gainesville; he was one of my heroes.”
Depp added, “So I’m 17 years old, we are doing the gigs with Iggy, it’s a second night, I know he’s splitting, I will never see him again, I want to meet him, but I don’t want to go ‘Oh man, I love your music’. I needed something different, so I got caught in, you know, incoherent me, drunk, vodka, to work up the nerve to say something.”
The opportunity to meet one of your heroes does not come along often, but the occasion had clearly got to Depp, and rather than humbly meet Iggy Pop, he decided to get a bit cocky, perhaps hoping to impress the punk legend with a bit of brazenness. However, he was not expecting what Pop’s reply would be.
Depp revealed, “So he was walking around with the beagle, I don’t know why, after the show, the lights were on, he doesn’t know either. So I thought, ‘We’ll get him’ and I just started screaming, ‘Iggy Flop, Piggy Slop,’ you know?”
He added, “He walked towards me with the beagle on a leash, and he got like that close to my face, and I’m looking at Pop’s blue eyes, and he takes so much time and he just says, ‘You little turd.’ To this day, it’s one of the best moments in my life.”
