139. Iggy Pop

rOYAL ALBERT HALL

13 MAY 2016

You have to hand it to the organisers, booking Iggy Pop at the Royal Albert Hall was either a stroke of genius or a clerical error. A shirtless punk demigod in a venue built for polite applause and string quartets. You half-expected the ushers to faint at the first “Hey!” of Lust for Life.

But Iggy doesn’t do decorum. He came on like a man who’d just broken out of the zoo, and the crowd roared like we’d been waiting all our lives to see a pensioner explode. Within minutes he was topless (obviously), veins bulging, eyes blazing, hurling himself into songs like a man testing whether his own skeleton still worked. “The Passenger” sounded glorious, “China Girl” was all sleazy menace, and “Mass Production” turned the grand old hall into a throbbing Berlin bunker.

And here’s the kicker: halfway through Lust for Life, I realise I’m dancing like an absolute idiot next to Mani from the Happy Mondays. Didn’t clock him at first, too busy soaking in the chaos. Then we hit the same groove, two middle-aged blokes bouncing under the chandeliers like it’s still 1989. Rock ’n’ roll elegance, if you squint hard enough. He grins and me and I nod back.

My mate, the guitarist from the John Corabi support act, was also in the crowd. My old mate and me, both also present at that Corabi gig, meet him later at the Gore Hotel for cocktails, like a survivor’s therapy-circle, all still half-deaf and grinning like loons. Iggy had turned the Albert Hall into a sweat lodge, and we are all glad we were left standing.

Say what you like about Pop being 69 at the time, he’s still more alive than most bands a third his age. There’s no nostalgia with Iggy; it’s just pure, unfiltered vitality, the kind of performance that makes you feel both invincible and very much out of shape.