Iggy Pop’s house in the Miami neighbourhood of Little Haiti, a sweet two-bedroom bungalow that would look unassuming were it not for the enormous Rolls-Royce convertible parked outside, has a palm-fringed garden backing on to a river. “The river once went to the sea, but they dammed it up in the Seventies so they could build a racetrack. That’s when the neighbourhood lost its value and became ethnic,” says Pop, born James Osterberg 75 years ago, as he sits topless under a straw cabana, his long hair and black-rimmed glasses completing the look of an elder rock’n’roll gentleman.
“I like places that have the bones of the upper part of the social structure, but are in a f***ed-up period so you can live there without dealing with those people and their weird plastic stores.” By this I think he’s referring to the flashy boutiques of Miami’s South Beach and their status-obsessed clientele. “For the first two years of living here I didn’t even lock the doors. Then in 2007 I was on tour with the Stooges and someone came along with a pick-up truck and took everything. A month ago we opened up to find a guy sleeping under the cabana.” He does a comic imitation of a bogeyman: “Whoo! Big deal!”
Not for Pop the usual rock-star choice of an immaculate mansion in a gated compound, although he does have what he calls “the family house” in Miami’s upmarket Coconut Grove, where he lives with his Irish-Nigerian wife, Nina Alu, and a shrieking cockatoo called Biggy Pop. “This is somewhere to get away from that bird and think about what I’m doing,” he explains. “I bought it when I thought I would be stuck in the Stooges until the day I died and, if I was a good modern celebrity, I would say I had ‘depression’. Actually I was just feeling depressed.”
Pop puts together his hugely popular Sunday afternoon BBC 6 Music show Iggy Confidential here, and it sounds like the house looks: tasteful but ramshackle. “I tend to like the wilder shit,” he says of his DJ choices. “Or the dramatic shit. It’s Rumble by Link Wray or Walk On By by Dionne Warwick, not much between.”
The little house is filled with Pop’s scratchy, impressionistic paintings, a full-size sculpture of a naked woman that takes up an armchair in the living room, memorabilia from half a century in rock’n’roll — a Stooges mug is utilised as a pen holder — and a lot of photographs. On a chest of drawers is a framed one of his mother, another of his father, and a third of Pop in the bath, grinning and holding a glass of wine. “Mum, dad and their delinquent son. Hope I didn’t cause them too much pain.”
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Pop has made a new album called Every Loser, and it sounds like a consolidation of everything he has done. It begins with Frenzy, a suitably frantic punk rant that could have come from any of the three albums he made with the primal garage pioneers the Stooges from 1969 to 1973, before touching on the angular art rock he and David Bowie fashioned in mid-Seventies Berlin on his solo classics The Idiot and Lust for Life. The thunderous title track of the latter album introduced Pop to a new generation when the film director Danny Boyle used it for his 1996 black comedy Trainspotting.
Every Loser is his best album in decades, which comes as a surprise. Post Pop Depression, from 2016, ended with a song called Paraguay on which he threatened to escape to South America, never to return. It seemed as if a lifetime of kicking against everything, of approaching his craft with the untamed energy of a toddler in the thick of a temper tantrum, had finally got to him.
“Paraguay was an ‘up yours’ to my whole career,” Pop confirms. “Sometimes, when things aren’t going well, I think maybe I shouldn’t deal with all this shit. But something won’t let me stop. I have a doctor in Miami and he said when they retire, they lose their minds.”
Pop has spent much of his life doing all the things we are told not to do: taking drugs, having sex with lots of people, jumping off stages to hurl his battered body into baying crowds. There has to be a price to pay.
“Put it this way: you do not want to be me at seven in the morning,” he growls with a toothy, childlike grin. “I have scoliosis, arthritis, a dislocated limb, a couple of broken limbs and a short leg. The worst of it is the nervous energy. There is an endless ritual of well-wishers trying to get into the dressing room before a gig and it takes it out of me. I’ll go on stage and the endorphins kick in and afterwards I’ll have something to eat, a glass of wine, asleep by one o’clock. Then at 5am I wake up and everything is throbbing, my nervous system is heightened and I have three or four hours of sitting there, thinking, ‘This is not f***ing it!’ ”
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He reflects on his lot for a moment. “Hey, don’t feel bad for me. I’ve been lucky. Hooking up with Bowie to do those albums in the Seventies took me in a straighter direction and since 1983 it’s been early to bed, early to rise, sorry guys, can’t do blow in the bathroom at midnight any more. But now there is evidence that your brain starts shrinking after only one drink.” He throws his sinewy arms in the air. “OK, I’m shrinking. I give up!”
Pop left behind his life in his parents’ trailer in Ypsilanti, Michigan, an A-grade student and star of the high school baseball team, after falling in with Ron and Scott Asheton, wayward blue-collar brothers from the nearby town of Ann Arbor. They formed the Stooges in 1967 with Ron on guitar and Scott on drums and, although proving too wild for mass acceptance, their influence was huge. When they got back together in 2003, a lot of animosity from his fellow Stooges was directed at the now-famous Pop.
“It was distrust. Ron would say, ‘That Jim . . . he’s always thinking.’ Ron was a hail-fellow-well-met type, loved high school reunions, loved a drink, but work? Not so much. Scott had the tough-guy all-American vibe. I got a call from the band’s accountants one day after a tour to say they had written Scott a cheque for $200,000 and it hadn’t been deposited. Turns out he dropped it on the floor of his truck.”
After the first two albums went nowhere, Pop was rescued — not for the last time — by Bowie and taken to London where he and the Stooges’ virtuoso new guitarist James Williamson were ensconced by Bowie’s manager Tony Defries in various flats and hotel rooms with a view to writing Raw Power, their 1973 masterpiece. And write it they did, with Pop coming up with its peerless opening manifesto Search and Destroy after smoking Chinese heroin under a tree in Hyde Park.
“At first it was great,” Pop says of the period. “I would never have dared to go to a park in Detroit with my little brown rock, and some sort of junior lord who liked hanging out with rock guys became my drug dealer. I dated a girl called Jilly, who I chatted up after spotting her walking down the street, and it turned out she was a cover girl for Men Only. James and I lived in [Bowie’s music publisher] Laurence Myers’s house in St John’s Wood until James dropped his cornflakes all over the shag carpet and didn’t bother to clean it up. Then they put us in the bridal suite of the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, which was droll English humour: Iggy and his bride James. Finally they put me in the basement of Blakes hotel, where [the actress turned hotelier] Anouska Hempel would show up alongside some kind of royal . . . Princess Margaret, I think it was.”
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The thought of rock’s premier delinquent hanging out with the Queen’s sister notwithstanding, this glamorous life was replaced by what turned out to be Pop’s nadir: a spell in Los Angeles. It began in 1973 with a launch party for Raw Power at the Hyatt Regency hotel and ended in 1976 with Pop, homeless and strung out, checking into a psychiatric hospital as a way of getting clean.
“We didn’t belong in LA, but we did make some good rock’n’roll there,” Pop concedes. “Cock in My Pocket is a terrific song and it means more than people think. By that point my cock was the last thing of value I possessed . . . and I knew I had a good one.” Another song from the period, She Creatures of the Hollywood Hills, was a tribute to the groupies hanging around Sunset Strip, several of whom — including the teenage super-groupie Sable Starr — Pop had flings with.
“They were the spiritual antecedents of Kim Kardashian,” he says. “The most sophisticated one was the writer Eve Babitz. She wrote to Marcel Duchamp: ‘I’m 17 and stacked and I love what you do.’ She took me to see Super Fly at a drive-in movie theatre.”
The big problem seems to have been Pop’s worsening drug addiction, although he says it was the city’s spiritual emptiness that destroyed him. “Drugs had been a problem before. It was LSD and weed in the early days, and in the Midwest you could get away with being a weekend band, sharing an old farmhouse, not getting your shit together. Los Angeles was not so forgiving and the values were skewed. California is predicated on success. And successful people are so f***ing boring.”
Perhaps that’s why Pop, who has only had one actual hit (Real Wild Child in 1986), has endured. Failure is much more interesting than success because it involves taking risks and staying true to yourself rather than making something with the market in mind, which makes Pop’s perceived failures all part of his artistic journey. It is something that the producer of Every Loser, 32-year-old Andrew Watt, seems to have realised.
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“Once in a while, you get someone interested in who I actually am,” he says of Watt. “Most producers say, ‘The problem with this guy is that he doesn’t get the hit,’ but the hit is based on boring stupidity and hideous ugliness in the name of music. People say, ‘You could be Neil Young.’ I don’t want to be Neil Young! ‘How about we record some Dylan numbers?’ How about we don’t?”
Living in Miami provides no escape from such thinking. “When we have Art Basel, I run away and hide. Some artist taped an ATM machine on to a wall, where you could put in your card and the money in your account would be displayed on a screen. I’m sure someone bought it for a good price and will get it out at parties, but my mentality is too obstinate for that kind of thing.”
Bowie certainly recognised the value of that mentality, leading to a complex, co-dependent relationship during their time together in Berlin; Bowie benefited from Pop’s credibility and Pop got a new level of exposure in return. When I ask if his 1977 solo debut, The Idiot, was named after the Dostoevsky novel, he replies: “That was Bowie’s little joke. He was saying, ‘This guy is the Dostoevsky character, and he’s also a f***ing idiot.’ Bowie was always ‘aware’. He was seen to be working with the progenitor of punk, and that had a lot of street energy at the time.”
Pop is only too aware of what was in it for the bigger star. He says the solo records he made with Bowie were test runs for the latter’s own material. The Idiot was recorded at Château d’Hérouville in France before Bowie’s Low, and Lust for Life at Hansa studios in Berlin, before Bowie’s Heroes.
“It was a chance for him to get to know the studio and the technical personnel,” Pop says. “Maybe you don’t like your bedroom, or a piece of equipment is broken; you can sort all that out during Iggy’s album before bringing in the brilliant Brian Eno for your own project. I do think there was a bit of brotherly love in there too, but us working together even came down to visa restrictions. When we made Blah-Blah-Blah in Montreaux in 1986 he was a Swiss resident and had to be there for a certain amount of time. I was a way of giving him something to do when it wasn’t ski season.”
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In 1976 Pop wrote the stately, haunting China Girl on the toy piano of Bowie’s son Zowie (now the film director Duncan Jones) at Château d’Hérouville. The single went nowhere. Then Bowie recorded China Girl and went to No 2 with it in 1983. Pop thought up the song after a fling with a Vietnamese woman called Kuelan Nguyen who was hanging out at the château with her boyfriend, the French singer Jacques Higelin.
“Higelin was never around, so biff-bam-boom. She was the key to the song, but at the time the Chinese government was opening stores in European capitals to sell Chinese robes and Little Red Books and I saw this cultural change as a coming thing. The line, ‘I’ll give you television’ was about that.”
When we stop for a lunch of Baja shrimp tacos, I cannot help but feel that Pop’s life has been one well lived. He has kept his integrity, become a household name without being tainted by commercial vulgarity, built up a respected body of work, and reached the mid-point of his eighth decade in some form of domestic contentment. Yet Every Loser is filled with all kinds of gripes, from Morning Show, which laments the challenge of facing the world each day, to Comments, which includes the bleak realisation: “The problem with life is that it stops.”
● Review: ★★★★★ for Every Loser
I ask if he’s happy. “I feel pretty sure that I’ve known happiness,” he says in a low, slow, considered tone, leaning back in a wicker chair. “I have felt it, but most of the time I’m slogging along like everyone else. In the Seventies I couldn’t get into a record store. In the Eighties I could get into a record bin, way at the back behind an 8ft cardboard cut-out of Bruce Springsteen. Now people can at least find my music.”
There will always be, I offer, an 8ft cardboard cut-out of Bruce Springsteen in some form or another. “That’s true, and if I measure fulfilment against other people’s achievements it will never be enough. I’ll be out in Europe playing for 2,200 people a night, nice concert halls, proud of the work. Then I hear the Stones are up the road playing to 63,000 people and I think, ‘You worm.’ I guess I’ve accepted that I’m a wild card in certain ways. And when a track is bitching and I sound interesting, I do get fulfilment.”
There should also be fulfilment in knowing he has made misfits the world over feel a bit braver, a little less alone, a little more excited about what life has to offer.
“The producer Steve Albini gave me advice on the disastrous The Weirdness,” Pop concludes, citing the Stooges’ 2007 reunion album. “He said, ‘You want the listener to think they are the only person in the world who likes this.’ It’s a typically American over-the-top way of saying it, but he was talking about the connection you are hoping for. That’s what it’s all about, really.”
Every Loser is out on Atlantic/Gold Tooth. Iggy Pop headlines the Dog Day Afternoon festival at Crystal Palace Bowl, London SE19, July 1. Iggy Confidential is on BBC Radio 6 Music, Sundays, 4pm
