29-05-2025
Iggy Pop: 78 years old and still shirtless, still sensational
An upended coffin stood ominously stage left, as Iggy Pop (now 78), who notoriously cheated death with his hard-drugs habits well into middle age, slunk onstage and tore off his skimpy leather waistcoat to perform, as ever, topless.
While his excellent younger band blasted forth a headlong TV Eye, a menacing grind that Iggy first created with his chaotic first band The Stooges in 1970, later to influence punk rockers of every stripe, the wrinkly-torso'd singer slipped his cordless microphone suggestively inside the waist of his black slacks.
As he lolloped around up there, in what proved a terrific and explicitly life-affirming show, it was hard to forget his incorrigible antics as a performer over the years: as recently as the mid-2010s, Iggy, né James Newell Osterberg, was nightly defying doctor's orders by hurling himself repeatedly into the crowd, exacerbating his spinal scoliosis, and necessitating hip replacements.
For six decades now, he has been reliably deranged in his commitment to performative shock and awe, a consistency, through all the craziness, that has made him one of rock's most enduring live attractions. Certainly, I'd place at least five or six Iggy shows in the Top Ten rock gigs I ever attended. But now that the stagediving has stopped and Stooges reunions are no longer possible, I did wonder beforehand how this incandescent stage presence can keep going deeper into his pensionable years.
Inside Ally Pally's cavernous 10,000-capacity Great Hall, such doubts were quickly blown aside. As his two guitarists, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, and Cuban-Argentinian femme-punk from Miami Ale Campos, joyfully clanged forth another iconic proto-punk riff, from 1973's Raw Power, brutally accented by a two-piece brass section, a pattern formed of Iggy's outright bangers ringing out in high-intensity performances, which plainly galvanised the man himself.
Following a massed singalong of The Passenger's la-la-la chorus, he told the audience, 'F---ing bless you!', and his propulsive rhythm section then thumped forth the robust beat to Lust For Life, also from his mid-'70s Berlin period alongside David Bowie.
Make no mistake, these were electrifying versions of Iggy's classics: in the here and now, at full pelt, with our diminutive hero by turns purring adorably like a benign monarch, and, on a feral, wailing-brass I Wanna Be Your Dog, yowling like a teenage delinquent. And just to remind us how lucky we all were to experience this, there was that coffin looming as a signifier of Iggy's survival after lifelong self-destruction. 'This is what it was like to be young in 1970', he announced before The Stooges' 1970, and as its heedless lyrics, 'Out of my mind on Saturday night/ I feel alright, I feel alright', resounded, it felt mighty good in 2025, too – the most fun this writer has had in many months.
After two hours onstage, Iggy toyed with the coffin door, and finally, during his familiar cover of the early rock'n'roll standard Real Wild Child (Wild One), he hopped inside, snaking out an arm to wave comically. He then jumped out and, to huge applause, gestured that he wasn't ready to accept that fate any time soon.
