Iggy Pop begins the night as an emasculated anarchist Val Doonican, sitting on the edge of the stage with his acoustic guitar, wallowing in cod Jim Morrison poetry about confronting death and singing about a Nazi girlfriend whom he wants to "fuck... on the floor among my books of ancient lore". It is not engaging, not punk, not deep, just pitiful, but it is almost worth sitting through just for the thermonuclear moment when he leaps up, eyes bulging, and begins to do the dance of the electrocuted ant to Raw Power and Search And Destroy. This is Richter scale excitement, shattering the mystical barrier that separates audience from sex imp performer.
Iggy continues in this fashion: one incongruous, sluggish, half-spoken ballad and two obscene chants for every three chunks of apoplectic, hedonist ecstasy. Iggy's peers are David Bowie and Lou Reed, but, even at the best of times, seeing Bowie or Reed seems like settling for a second-rate shadow. Iggy still glows like the real thing - it is not all that different from seeing The Stooges in 1973: same rock-hard, preternatural naked torso, same snarling proto-punk riffs, same ritualistic crowd-swimming, same dainty pirouettes at the close of each song. He could be 52 (which he is), or 24, or 71 - it is impossible to tell. It is almost as if Iggy, having recently split from his wife, has plunged further into the role of rebel without a pause than ever before, relinquished the idea of a graceful twilight period (despite the middle-aged ruminations of Avenue B, his morose, self-indulgent new album), and capitulated to punk immortality. His biggest fans - men twice his size and half his age who desperately, inexplicably, want to be him - love it.
The question must be asked, of course, why he is playing a venue as small and overstuffed as the Astoria 2. Was it a nervous record company ploy following the less than spectacular commercial performance of Avenue B? Or a genuine attempt to allow a selection of hardcore Igheads to feel a true measure of the weird, intimate machismo and anarchy of an early Stooges show? It is immaterial.
As a showman and trendsetter, Iggy's legend is more than the sum of his recorded parts, and tonight it rises up, limbs-flailing, and transcends punk-rock itself.
