‘Nightclubbing’: The gruesome recording session that birthed Iggy Pop’s masterpiece
The Stooges might be remembered as the band who changed the course of music, but at the time, they scarcely altered the course of Iggy Pop’s life. Having broken up in disarray following 1973’s now-iconic Raw Power, Iggy’s existence post-Stooges was docked in the tempestuous bay of bewilderment, booze and substance abuse. Through a caustic combination of excesses and artistic exile, the shirtless frontman wound up in a Californian mental institution.
Things weren’t looking that much more favourable for him when David Bowie and Dennis Hopper wandered into the facility dressed as spacemen to deliver the patient a stash of cocaine. It could’ve ended there, and then for Iggy, a punk luminary had gone awry and resigned to the ‘have you ever heard of’ pages of history. The same could pretty much be said for Bowie during those days, too.
The man who fell to earth was on the brink of total collapse. He had entered the phase of The Thin White Duke, developed a fascination with fascism, and an even greater fascination with acquainting his nose with vast piles of coke. Hastened by the haze of these heady days and sensing that their days as serious artistic forces were severely numbered, Iggy and Bowie decided to clean themselves up in Berlin, the heroin capital of Europe.
Their staggered jaunt towards sobriety was a beautiful thing to behold. Many masterpieces might have followed, but they were essentially borne from two lads mucking about in a bid to support each other by sticking to cheap sausages and shunning any snorting. Nothing typifies this quite like ‘Nightclubbing’, one of the greatest songs of the whole era.
Pop had accompanied Bowie on the extensive Isolar 1976 tour in support of the Station To Station. Following the tour, in July 1976, Bowie and Pop took up residence in the legendry studio Château d’Hérouville. The pair had wrestled their way back from the brink to some sort of normality and now set about crafting the tunes which would relaunch the former Stooges man and feature on his new record, The Idiot.
Along with bassist Laurent Thibault and drummer Michel Santangeli, the four seminal musicians looked to embellish Bowie’s spare demos into worthy gems. But the demos weren’t the only things going spare in the Château d’Hérouville. After scouting around the 18th-century abode, Bowie and his buddy managed to find a few garish masks. The presence of these hideous face coverings is largely a mystery, but somehow, they filled the duo with a sudden sense of inspiration.
They wore these ghoulish masquerades, and Bowie began formulating a plan. His first instruction was for Iggy to “sing like Mae West” as they looked to bring on old-timey cabaret sound to the song. They looked for old corners and nooks where the sonorous quality of the genre would be amplified. It fit Pop’s pipes perfectly. Quite why Bowie wore a mask as the producer is an unanswered question that perhaps underlines why the Starman is often referred to as a ‘true artist’.
With this ghoulishness established, Iggy didn’t have to overthink his lyrical inspiration. In part, the pageantry and pomp of Berlin’s 1930s heyday is what drew the duo to the region and they had spent much of their time there dropping into the same subterranean bars that remained. So, whether still makes or otherwise, Pop picked up a pen and began writing the lyrics “mostly based on my experiences tagging along to the discos of Europe”.
Suddenly, thanks to two daft masks, a pair of idiots had turned a dodgy piano ref on a dogeared demo into a brilliant brutalist masterpiece that projected the darkness of the past in a haunting way. ‘Nightclubbing’ captures the morning after in every which way.
This was, ironically, exactly what Iggy wanted to capture all along. As he once explained to Bowie, “I admired the beauty of the American industrial culture that was rotting away where I grew up.” This notion of capturing fading youth became the lifeblood of the record. If the Stooges’ visceral energy is built on youth’s passion, ‘Nightclubbing’ is the haunted echo of that howl.
This masked upsurge in creativity led to a slew of songs, which were later taken back to Berlin to be polished up at the legendary Hansa Studios, where Tony Visconti would assist with the final mixes, ensuring Iggy Pop’s decrepit vision was brought perfectly to vivid life.
