Iggy Pop: Free review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week
(Caroline International)
This strange patchwork of jazz, poetry, ambience, lamentable lyrics and the odd pub-singer moment works fitfully at best
In 2007, in the middle of the re-formed Stooges’ chaotic Glastonbury performance, Iggy Pop suddenly struck up with an a cappella rendition of 1965 movie theme The Shadow of Your Smile. This clearly wasn’t something the audience were expecting: No Fun, yes; I Wanna Be Your Dog, of course; an easy listening ballad made famous by Johnny Mathis and subsequently covered by Engelbert Humperdinck, not so much. But it wasn’t an isolated incident: throughout the Stooges’ career, Pop showed a propensity for launching into The Shadow of Your Smile at unlikely moments. He sang it in 1972, for CBS Records boss Clive Davis, in the hope of convincing him to sign the Stooges at a point in their career when the band had been written off as a joke: a move that paid off. Later that year, he sang it during the Stooges’ mythic performance at London’s Scala cinema, to an audience who were largely bemused or horrified by what was happening on stage. There are muddy bootleg recordings of him singing it at whatever godforsaken venues the Stooges were reduced to playing in 1974, during the original band’s harrowing terminal phase. Pop, it seems, has always been keen to demonstrate that, amid the chaos and bloodshed and visceral rock’n’roll on which his reputation is based, he’s a man of many, perhaps improbable, parts.