Iggy and the Stooges | Pop review (original) (raw)

Perhaps the most compelling argument against legendary bands reforming and playing a classic album in its entirety is that, by design, it robs rock music of its essential spontaneity: you buy tickets knowing precisely what you're going to get. That said, a lack of spontaneity certainly wasn't an issue with the reformed Stooges, as anyone who witnessed the broiling chaos of their 2005 show at the same venue would doubtless attest. They didn't so much play their 1970 album Fun House as mount a particularly reckless assault on it. For all the voices carping about the inadvisability of singing "last year I was 21" if last year you were 57, it was hard to see how they could have sounded any more viscerally thrilling in their youth.

But that was five years ago. In the interim, original guitarist Ron Asheton has died – James Williamson, the man who took over guitar duties in 1971, has been enticed away from an improbable post-Stooges career as vice-president of technology standards at Sony to do so again – and the Stooges have become a ubiquitous sight at festivals.

It should have dulled their impact, and yet it becomes clear from tonight's opening notes that quite the opposite has happened. Williamson's arrival has clearly re-energised the band: I Wanna Be Your Dog presses you flat, 1970 comes complete with a genuinely disturbing undercurrent of nihilistic desperation.

But it's on the tracks from 1972's Raw Power that Williamson comes into his own. The disparity between his appearance and the noise he makes is now perhaps the most striking visual aspect of the Stooges. That's no mean feat when you're sharing the stage with a 63-year-old man, stripped to the waist, who flings himself into the audience at the slightest provocation. Clearly, reports that Iggy Pop had given up stagediving have been exaggerated. But your eyes keep returning to the semi-mythic figure of Williamson. No longer the cadaverous, pock-marked ghoul that glowers from old photos, he now looks, well, rather like you would expect the vice-president of technology standards at Sony to look: the apparent effortlessness with which he peels off the frenetic soloing that punctuate Search and Destroy only compounds its impact.

As well as Raw Power, they play Open Up and Bleed and Cock in My Pocket ("It's shovin' up through my pants," sings Pop in the latter, which it certainly seems to be), songs from the Stooges' harrowing terminal phase, when audiences turned up largely to jeer and throw bottles at them, and when the chorus of Death Trip – "honey, we're going down in history" – must have seemed like a terrible ironic joke. Tonight, it sounds like a valedictory statement of fact: the Stooges' astounding lap of honour deserves its place in the history books every bit as much as their original albums.