Iggy & the Stooges

It’s incredibly exciting to hear a song like ‘1969’ played live in this day and age, but just imagine how pumped you’d have been to have witnessed it upon its initial release. With the Beatles not even split up yet, it must have sounded like a glimpse of a terrifyingly exciting future. Indeed, one feeling common to take away from an Iggy & The Stooges gig in the twenty first century is actually how little rock music has progressed in the years since they laid down the blueprint for punk rock, a genre which itself would take another eight years or so to catch up with their precedent. Leather skinned frontman Iggy Pop still proves impossible to take one’s eyes off, inviting audience members to join him on stage within minutes of setting foot on the thing himself, strutting around like a half-naked, sun-baked Mick Jagger devoid of any self awareness but dripping with punk rock cool. Though the band have undertaken a couple of line up changes in recent years, the Minutemen’s Mike Watt is the perfect addition on bass – clearly himself a student of the Stooges’ music, and also their attitude, he’s a man who both gets the aesthetic and delivers it with equal force.