Watch Iggy Pop perform a seedy rendition of ‘Lust for Life’ in 1977
Nobody moves quite like Iggy Pop. When it comes to showmanship, the one-time Stooges frontman is an absolute master, throwing himself about with the elasticity and rebound of a sugar-addled toddler. If you’re struggling to remember what it is that makes Iggy Pop so irreplaceable, make sure you check out this footage of him performing his 1977 track ‘Lust For Life’.
Discussing the origins of his performance style during a conversation with Grammy, Iggy Pop said: “In the first gigs, the structural aspect of the songs would be that there was a riff and I would have a secret hand signal, and at the hand single, they [The Stooges] would fade off that riff but don’t stop playing and go to the next riff. And the reason was not to give the audience a chance to disapprove, but the unexpected side effect was that it kind of helped mesmerise them. Again, there’s something about those two brothers [Ron and Scott Asheton], they had a very primal groove; there were certain things that I was doing that enhanced that.”
This footage, taken from an unknown 1977 TV broadcast, sees Iggy at the height of his powers. With a rudimentary green screen providing a futuristic setting for his antics, he jitters himself into a frenzy, only to fall down in a slump before getting back up again with fresh intensity. There’s chair-smashing, paint-duabing and a whole heap of shakey leg action – it’s bloody brilliant.
Written while David Bowie and Iggy Pop were living in Berlin, ‘Lust For Life’ came together in a hotel room while the two recovering heroin addicts – who had chosen as their rehab the “heroin capital of Europe” – watched American television on the Armed Forces Network and resisted the urge to shoot up. In between broadcasts, the AFN would play its station ident. On hearing the electronic beeping for what must have felt like the thousandth time, Bowie stood up, grabbed his son Duncan’s ukulele, and began playing the same staccato rhythm. Soon, the two friends had shaped the riff into something with a solid structure. “Call this one ‘Lust for Life’,” Bowie told Iggy. And so he did.
When the pair got to the studio, Pop employed an improvised lyrical technique he’d developed with The Stooges. Having plundered William Burroughs’ novels for fragments of imagery such as “flesh machines” and “hypnotising chickens,” his lyrics came out in a splurge of seediness. Make sure you check out his equally seedy performance above if you haven’t already.
