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A Teatime Dub Encounter with Iggy Pop & Underworld by Irvine Welsh
07.09.2018
07:40 am
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Photo credit: Rob Baker Ashton

A Teatime Dub Encounter with Iggy Pop & Underworld by Irvine Welsh

You know the drill. I’ve idolised Iggy Pop since the seventies, loved Underworld through the burgeoning dance music scene in the late 80’s. In the 90’s I did a novel, Trainspotting, about being fucked up, practically ghostwritten by Iggy and underscored by the beats of dance music. It was made into a movie. The two iconic tracks of the film, “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” and “Lust For Life” were by Iggy and Underworld. So now, in stormy Miami, they are collaborating on a four track EP and I’m pretty damn thrilled to take a smidgen of indirect credit for that.

Like Iggy, I’m now a resident of Miami, and something of a buddy of his, though to me that still feels a bit like a royal family biographer pretending to be bezzy mates with the Queen. To be fair to him, Iggy never makes me feel like the semi-awkward fanboy I am, but there’s a lot of angsty teen baggage on my part to get through, when Raw Power, Kill City, Funhouse and The Stooges were the soundtrack to youth well-spent misspending. Iggy was the liberator, ossifying a petulant punk sensibility, which has never completely left me: both a personal boon and occasional curse.

Karl Hyde is, like Iggy, an old trailer park resident, in his case in the West Midlands, rather than Michigan. I remember Karl from the 90’s, his flat in Soho was a legendary retreat for casualties stuck in the West End. I haven’t met Rick, before and doing so, is a pleasure. So we chatted all weekend, at a restaurant, a plush hotel over cream tea, and Iggy’s swamp man pad on the river. Here’s a massively summarised version of what we said:

IRVINE
Did you ever smoke on an airplane, Jim?

IGGY
I used to enjoy it when I first just got a little tiny bit of money, just enough to have $50 in my pocket. I had a girlfriend in Cleveland, which was like, what a 48 minute flight from Detroit, and it was 25 bucks, and I was like, “I have enough money to fly to Cleveland, and hit on the girl, and go home!”

IRVINE
And you could light up anytime?

IGGY
Well I was smoking cigarettes constantly at this time, but then in the incident described in the song “Bells & Circles,” I was out with the last gasp, truly derelict desperate Stooges, in ‘74. We were on our way to DC and I did snort a gram.

IRVINE
A gram of cocaine?

IGGY
Yeah I put down the tray table, and snorted the whole gram, and this beautiful tall, very dark stewardess was available, but then I started drinking: I had to take the edge off.

IRVINE
What you do after a gram, yeah…

IGGY
When I got to the hotel I realised I’d forgotten her number, which was terrible, and because I didn’t hook up with her, I got together with a notorious groupie who had a friend who had some angel dust, so I took it before the gig.

IRVINE
They didn’t mind about coke on planes in those days?

IGGY
Well, I didn’t mind!

Iggy and I then swap cocaine stories, before agreeing that it’s terrible drug but you need to test it thoroughly and repeatedly to be absolutely sure.

IRVINE
So what about this 4-track EP, how did it come about? How did you guys get together?

RICK
Danny Boyle, asked me to help with T2 Trainspotting, and we got quite excited how to look at music differently from the first film, because then there was no composer involved. We thought, ‘What if we had an original piece of music from Iggy, that would play in this particular scene’, so my manager chased a connection with Iggy. The timing kind of worked out, and you were in London, about to do some shows?

IGGY
I was on tour doing the Post Pop Depression tour with Josh Homme.
         
RICK
You were at The Savoy and graciously said yeah, because you know, we both felt a strong connection to Trainspotting and I turned up thinking I’ve got one chance here to convince this gentleman that we should work together on a piece of music. So I brought basically half my studio and we hired a hotel room and I set it up and sat waiting.

IGGY
Well yeah the thing was traumatic for me really, the whole thing, the way it came at me was I was on this tour with guys 25 years younger than me doing the rock tour schedule and I get ‘Danny Boyle wants to talk to you about doing something for a movie’. I thought ‘well that sounds great but I’m in the middle of a tour. My performance is a big deal to me, but they had this song “Shotgun Mouthwash” (a track by Underworld collaborator High Contrast that ended up as the opening music in T2 Trainspotting). So I listened to it and I thought ‘well that’s fine, what do they need me for?’ And Danny said ‘well we like that but we wondered if we could get some Iggy Pop into “Shotgun Mouthwash,” and I thought ‘no you can’t fucking get Iggy Pop into the fucking “Shotgun Mouthwash” but I didn’t say that, I said ‘well I could just see what I can do.’

Time for some editorialising from me: the venue for collaboration for this fusion of punk and techno was The Savoy. That’s right, none other that the posh hotel on the Strand where Churchill held cabinet meetings. It does have a rock n roll connection though, Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video was shot in the adjoining alley for that ‘street’ feel. But, uh, how come chaps?

IGGY
I was at the Savoy just getting ready to play London and met with Rick, whom I liked as he was very polite and that goes a long way with me. We were able to get to know each other a little. He had a number of tracks ready. And then my mind was racing because when you are confronted with somebody who has a whole damn studio there in the hotel room in front of you and 30 finished pieces of very polished music, you don’t want to be the wimp that goes ‘uh uhhh’...

IRVINE
That view of friendship that you have on that track, “I’ll See Big,” is fairly consistent in everything you’ve done and written throughout the years. If you think about it, “I’m Bored” on New Values, “I’m free to bore my robot friends…” So has that been a kind of theme or an issue: that you’re keeping old friendships, but also sort of you being conscious of being successful and that possible tension?

IGGY
I wrestle with the whole concept, about half the time I feel like a chump. And then the other half of the time it’s like ‘well what else am I gonna do, like just be empty all the time’. You know you go back and forth, because there is an extreme to which some people can operate through dominance, acquisition, manipulation. I was able to talk about these things because this was still in my mind, somehow connected to the hapless heroes of Trainspotting. You know like when the war is over the old buddies break up.

Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.09.2018
07:40 am
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