Monday, 03 May 2010
Raw Awesome, Beautiful Power. A sobering thought, when Iggy Pop stagedives his tense and muscled torso - looking like a man wearing a skin too small for his physique - is that this 62 year old man is stronger, harder, fasted, and more focused than anyone else in this room.
Last month, Iggy renounced stage diving when he leapt off the stage at an Awards Ceremony to land on the floor and almost break his back. It takes about 7 minutes tonight - during the third song - for Iggy to break his vow. He glides over the barrier and lands in a joyous crowd.
Never, have I known a band play louder, faster, harder. The Stooges don't do slow songs. This band, both a new incarnation of the reformed Stooges and a brand new reformation, are fierce. After reforming in 2003 and touring five years with the initial lineup, this version supplant the deceased Ron Asheton with James Williamson (Asheton's co-guitarist and replacement in 1971), with whom The Stooges recorded the immense Raw Power and a multitude of other material, including Kill City, which became Pop's first solo album.
So, tonight, with Williamson on guitar, the band perform a set that, in the vast majority, hasn't been performed in London - or anywhere in the world - since 1972. It's the third show Williamson has performed with the band in thirty six years. Not that you would know : the band race out of the traps with the title track "Raw Power", before setting fire to convention and respectability. Scott Asheton and Mike Watt lock into a tight groove that is solid, unrelenting, and thunderous. Steve Mackey issues forth rude sax and percussion.
But it is James Williamson, recently retired Vice President Of Technology for Sony Communications, who calmly stands behind his guitar and unleashes a fury of sound. Effortlessly, the Balrog roar of noise from his fingers sounds like a symphony of angry bears. The impenetrable rhythm forms a forcefield, whilst Williamson simultaneously proffers the lead parts at the same time. All whilst resembling a chunky James Cameron. I've never heard a guitarist so dense and so wide. And louder than an angry God.
Aside from the white-hot, angry roar of sound, Iggy And The Stooges are recieved rapturously. By the time of the fifth song, Shake Appeal, the stage is filled with hundreds. After the urgent dispatching of the entire "Raw Power" album - an album filled with the rage of clarity that has never sounded more relevant, the band move without breath to the vast array of lost Stooges songs. There's poetry in this electricity, in Pop's vocabulary of a ruined, post-Vietnam world, which resembles a state of war and poverty. Therefore, these songs sound utterly of this present moment as well in an age of spiritual austeurity.
These songs - titles that populate a million dodgy compilation albums dredged from rehearsals - are pure goddamn gold. As strong as anything from "Raw Power", it's criminal that a song as perfect as "I Got A Right" exists only in such a mundane form. But tonight, the band roar, and Pop screams an articulate howl that matches up with any anthem of the sixties that cuts straight to the core of what it is to be he human, and to demand rights. It's a three minute manifesto of equality to everyone who ever wanted to follow their own path : anytime I want, I got a right, no matter what they say. As important to my heart - more so - than any fucking Bob Dylan dirge about answers floatin' in the poxy wind.
Should I list names and titles they would mean nothing to you. Only the unleashed raw fucking power of riffs. Aside from the canon of Raw Power, and the arsenal of lesser-known material that backends the set, Iggy And The Stooges also unleash a trio of songs from Iggy's Kill City, which was, to all intents and purposes both the final Stooges record and the first solo Iggy album. And each song is a diamond, a nuclear weapon, lead by a voice that is part animal, part Sinatra, and verbally the match of any superior wordsmith.
With a combined age, amongst the five of them, at around 300, Iggy And The Stooges are a band that outpace everyone else I've ever seen. A harnessed explosion. A targeted, directed force of power. What are The Stooges now? Lead by a walking warhead, the band are a lithe, disciplined focus, the equivalent of a musical A-Bomb aimed at one room in London. The songs, the sound of angry twenty somethings at the edge of poverty and trading on the fag ends of battered dreams of escape from conformity, sound still true. There might be nothing but old songs, but the passion and the integrity with which they are dispatched makes this nothing more and nothing less than a ferecious statement that some things never change, the dreams we had in our youth are often still the ideals we hold after decades of experience, and that this is not nostalgia, but the essential consistency of the human condition.
The show ends with a furious romp through "Johanna" and an improvised rant/jam, which sees Iggy close the night with a retrospective, but furious statement of intent whilst Williamson makes his guitar sound like Hell creaking open on a Sunday morning : "We made this album when we were little and young and everyone said we were shit. Now we’re old and we’re all going to die, but at least before we died we played the fucking album".There's been a lot of words said about the night and the music, most from me, but it's a long way of proclaiming a short and essential truth : The Stooges are fucking awesome.
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