The night of Iggy Pop’s bizarre collaboration with The Pretty Things: “In the end I’m covered in blood”
That night the Roxy felt as fizzed-up and ready to burst as the inside of a champagne bottle at a Formula One race. There was a fabled metaphysical energy in the air, the sort that can turn a once conservative accountant into a spiritualist of the most incense-addicted order if they’ve had just the right amount of shandies.
The Pretty Things peered out into this vibrant melee, pleased to have secured a special guest.
At this stage, the English rock ‘n’ rollers were no strangers to mixing it with their peers. In fact, they were in the middle of a break during a long-running tour with Led Zeppelin. That also made them no strangers to mayhem. Carnage was so commonplace to the eternally touring outfit, that mundanity, by contrast, would’ve felt disturbingly odd.
But what unfurled this particular evening stupified even Phil May, a frontman who up until that point had seen almost everything a singer can ever see. He’d been on double dates with Judy Garland and a Russian defector. He’d “shared a girlfriend” with Jimi Hendrix. And he’d seen his band hailed as the model garage band despite joking that they couldn’t even “afford a garage”. But life, still had surprises in store for him in the 1970s, and a show with Iggy Pop proved that.
The Roxy had become The Stooges adopted patch. The band had absconded from Michigan in search of more salubrious weather, better drugs, and an absence of fueding biker gangs – all ostensibly health-driven choices. But this shot at a better life did not materialise in better chart positions. They floundered around in a state of perennial magic, so potent that it precluded mainstream acceptance. Their highest charting album peaked at 106.
In truth, the Roxy’s far-out crowd barely accepted them, either. Iggy Pop was not the sort of performer, at that point in his life, who you can idly enjoy after half a lager on a school night. Needless to say, May wasn’t fully aware of this fact when he chatted to a shifty Mr Pop backstage.
All he knew was that The Stooges were a daring, emerging band who just so happened to be huge fans of The Pretty Things. As a man always open to collaboration, this presented May with a promising proposition. At some point, he must’ve uttered, ‘Do you want to come on stage with us?’ That was like asking a wasp along to a picnic.
However, The Pretty Things were so well-versed in impromptu guest get-togethers that they didn’t really run through much of a plan with Iggy Pop. Plans weren’t very rock ‘n’ roll. And they certainly didn’t seem all that apt when the Roxy was bubbling over with a hullabaloo of anticipation. But they did, at least, expect Iggy Pop to sing along. That seemed like a perfectly reasonable expectation.
They were wrong. Possessed by some unknown force (and, most likely, a barely known substance). Iggy Pop performed the unthinkable. “We thought that he was going to sing. But he didn’t, he just ran from one side of the stage to the other and head-butted the wall.”
Too early into the Pretty Things’ set to draw upon the defence that he was caught up in the furore of a furiously unfurling rock show, Pop simply turned on his heels and ran headfirst into an oncoming wall. The whys and wherefores of this remain as mysterious as the whims of the architects behind Stone Henge.
Was it a spiritual act? Did Pop have any idea of the design of his actions himself or was he surrendered to the wont of a higher rock ‘n’ roll power? Did he suppose that he might readily pas through the wall in a manner that the CIA were presently trialling?
There are no answers to these questions, but all that can be derived for definite from this incident is that Pop’s capacity to remain conscious despite the grave odds would probably have made him a formidable boxer had the proto-punk stuff failed any further. He simply looked at the wall in the same nonplussed manner one might look upon a broadband advert, and returned to his unfathomable mutiny against norms.
He didn’t sing a single note the show, May recalls, but did continue to be irreconcilably weird. “In the end I’m covered in blood, because he’d come up and danced around me. He’d completely split his forehead open and covered the band in blood and wasn’t even aware of it,” the frontman told Louder Sound.
Adding, “With our history of having had two drummers who caused complete mayhem this wasn’t unusual, but it was still strange because I was expecting him to sing along. Instead we got carnage.”
