Josh Homme on Iggy Pop: ‘Lemmy is gone. Bowie is gone. He’s the last of the one-and-onlys’
At 68, the punk icon has recorded a new album with the Queens Of The Stone Age frontman. In a frank conversation, the pair discuss sex, death and David Bowie.
Josh Homme on Iggy Pop: ‘Lemmy is gone. Bowie is gone. He’s the last of the one-and-onlys’
Who would have guessed, when David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop were reinventing rock’n’roll in their own image, that it would be the guy rolling around in broken glass bare chested who’d be the last one standing?
Yet here he is, stalking into a New York hotel suite, fresh from practising serene Chinese exercise Qigong: grizzled beard, bleached hair, skin of melted leather. Iggy has scoliosis, one leg an inch-and-a-half shorter than the other and stands only 5ft 6in, but he’s still twice as commanding as the next guy. Even when the next guy is the towering Queens Of The Stone Age frontman (and drummer for Eagles Of Death Metal) Josh Homme, here recast as adoring fanboy.
Now 68, Iggy realised he might only have one last shot at making a “real album” as great as those incendiary first three Stooges efforts, or his pair of peerless Bowie-produced Berlin records. He sent word to Homme, who in turn recruited Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders and regular QOTSA sideman Dean Fertita. Together, they went to the desert and came back with Post Pop Depression, an eerie, sinuous album record mixing sex and death with gallows humour; Iggy’s baritone underscored by Homme’s desert blues.
What did they learn? “I’ve taken lessons about longevity from him, especially knowing that I can do whatever I want now and still bounce back,” says Helders. Well, maybe – but could anyone without Iggy’s lizard DNA live as he’s done and survive?
Yet there’s always been more to Iggy than the self-destructive caricature. He’s a punk with a poet’s heart, Walt Whitman in leather trousers. He sits down with Homme in New York to discuss the new album that could be his swansong.
How did you two first meet?
Iggy: We met at the Kerrang! awards in 1912, or whenever it was. I was getting a lifetime achievement award. Did you get anything?
Josh: I got drunk, that’s about it.
Iggy, what made you contact Josh to make Post Pop Depression?
Iggy: I was looking to make high-quality, non-band solo work, where you really put both feet into it. I’d been skirting around it: doing an album in French, or a soundtrack, or a reunion band album. I wanted to find the best and he’s the best. I sent him a dossier on me by FedEx: written form, no email. I sent him three essays I’d written on my sex life about specific people. I also sent him an interview I did with an eminent critic here in New York about his concerns about my career. I sent him some poetry about…
Josh: Chairs!
Iggy: I was pretty much homeless a lot of my life. I now have dwellings, and I like chairs. In this one particular dwelling I had 34. I have African chairs. I have Norman chairs. I have Louis XVI chairs. I have French club chairs from the 30s. I wrote about wondering what’s going to happen to my favourite chair when I’m gone.
Josh: When I got his package it was so inspiring, and a bit overwhelming. I didn’t send anything back for three months.
Iggy: I thought you might have been grossed out by the sexual details. “You dirty old man!”
Josh: You had no way of knowing, but it hit me in the bullseye. I feel like I’ve always been sending out a frequency. The frequency finally pinged back, and it was you. We cast a wide net of interests. We spoke a lot about Germany.
Iggy: I sent him a very technically specific description of exactly how The Idiot and Lust For Life were made. What we used to make them, little things about the atmosphere.
Did you talk about writing with David Bowie?
Iggy: Yeah. The Passenger was partly written about the fact I’d been riding around North America and Europe in David’s car ad infinitum. I didn’t have a driver’s licence or a vehicle.
Josh: It’s such a night-time song. If you’ve ever been in a foreign city as a night-time participant you understand that song.
Weren’t you and Bowie arrested on that tour?
Iggy: We were arrested in Rochester, New York [for possession of marijuana]. I was very nervous, all the way until we got to court. David was always looking out for me. He bought me a suit! I paid back everything I ever owed him later on, but at the time I just didn’t have enough dough.
With Bowie’s death and the Paris terror attacks, did you feel it was time to write about your own mortality? Is there a sense that you have to rock now because life’s short?
Iggy: Music can be a reminder that you’re close. Like a skull ring.
Josh: That notion of talismans, to have a touchstone of your own mortality… so much of today’s world is about not focusing on what’s beyond. Stay focused on buying something! Or something to that effect. To live while knowing it’s close, and you can be young or old, it doesn’t matter. Being able to keep it there, even at arm’s length… I think you live better because of that awareness. Awareness is worth a lot.
Iggy: I’m not sure what the current valuation of honour is, in present times.
Josh: I know the importance of it out in the desert.
Iggy: Yes, exactly. I wanted to write about those things.
Josh: I love that we have these quick little chats and they go into the songs. They’re not bullshit. They’re as real as it gets. That’s something I really learned on this session: “Oh you like that? Let’s take it and start using it, then.” With the nonchalance that you do it. There’s an innocence that’s hard to do.
How did those discussions evolve into songs like American Valhalla?
Iggy: Well, someone [Stooges guitarist James Williamson] used the phrase “Hard pill to swallow” to insult me earlier that year. I took the negative and thought: “I know this is going to be a bitchin’ line in a song.” I was thinking: “What is the pill that’s hard to swallow?” It’s knowing that you’re going to die. It’s dealing with your own mortality. It’s having to parcel out enough money until I’m 90, but on the other hand… I can’t think about it!
Josh: We talked about the different forms of heaven, and the ways to get in. With Valhalla, you have to face someone who’s worthy of you.
Iggy: Josh compared Valhalla with the Islamic paradise. I replied saying: “Is there an American Valhalla? In America, we want it now. So where is it? Is it Las Vegas? Is it social security? Where?”
Do you think about your legacy?
Iggy: What I think about is feeling I’m going to blow it. I have this picture of myself in some little old people’s home with a bunch of other old geezers, and a flannel robe with holes in it, waiting for somebody. Even 15 years ago, my accountant was saying: “You will never be poor, don’t worry.” But I do worry. I worry constantly. It drives me nuts.
Is that good for the music, if it keeps you hungry?
Iggy: This is true. [Michel] Houellebecq has a great line where he says: “Money is an excellent motivator for a great piece of art.”
Josh: As long as it encourages risk. Safety equals death. If you reach a certain status, or age, or a monetary thing, people play it safe, they lose the plot, they quit on themselves, they copy themselves. They’re afraid. They say: “I only play the blues!” I’m like: “What, why?”
What would you be doing if you were a kid starting a band now?
Iggy: Let me tell you, the way I started was I took the legs off a Farfisa organ and I put it on the floor. I sat cross-legged and tried to make art music. I was writing songs about prescient mice! That was the first song I tried to work out with the guys in the Stooges. But the game down at the local club, and at the ballroom in Detroit, was the other thing. By the first time I went out as a vocalist I was wearing a fright wig and a maternity dress and operating instruments I’d made myself from junkyard things. Anything to make it different. The guys in the group were going: “Can’t we just be the Rolling Stones?” I wanted to transcend.
How do you see the future of the music industry?
Iggy: I hate it. Part of the gestation of this record was like saving up for a car. I knew before I contacted Josh that I had a figure in mind of my own money I wanted to spend to make a good album. I didn’t give a fuck, and I didn’t want anybody interfering with me because I’ve been fucked with all my life! THESE PEOPLE!
Josh: We paid for this ourselves, and when you do that you forget all about that world.
Iggy: You really do. But as soon as they’re in there, they can’t help it. They operate through the deft application of negative energy.
Josh: I love this situation because I’ve gotten adept at putting a knife in my teeth and crawling up the wall while the party’s going on. When you finish your record first you can say: “That’s it. Who wants it?”
There have been awful “supergroups”. Was there a risk you’d be another?
Josh: But this is an Iggy Pop record! I’ll be honest, if I may: I don’t play the “What if?” game. What if your dick turned into a snake and bit you on the face?
Iggy: I feel like it ended up being an Iggy record, but I have super-guys. They’re all supermen. I’m the smallest thing, but it’s like: “Well it was my idea…”
Do you still have to fight the temptation to get your dick out?
Iggy: No, I don’t fight it. If I have a temptation I go for it.
Josh: Dude, it’s Iggy!
Iggy: On stage is where I feel I can do whatever I’m capable of. I wouldn’t have a problem. I’ve shown my butt a couple of times recently. In the last couple of years I’ve flashed some pubic hair every once in a while. Less and less. Last year I did about 16 shows and I don’t think I did more than six stagedives. Maybe seven. Once in a while… It came out at one show in France, I remember…
Josh: I love that: “It came out.” It came out on its own.
Iggy: Sometimes when I wasn’t getting a reaction I’d think: “What do I have to do?!” It just comes from within.
It’s getting late. Iggy heads off into the night in search of some pho, but Josh isn’t done. He’s such an endearing hype man that you imagine if he were a bit younger he’d be running a Fuck Yeah Iggy Tumblr. He pulls me into another room, lights up an American Spirit, and launches into a 20-minute soliloquy about his hero.
“Lemmy is gone. Bowie is gone. He’s the last of the one-and-onlys,” he says. “It took balls to be him: a little guy with a big dick scaring people in Detroit. Everyone should take a knee for Iggy. He deserves it. He never got [the respect or the acclaim], mostly by his own hand, but he made the shit that’s spawned more bands than any other person, ever. Bring on the statues, you motherfuckers!”