Every dog has his day

Iggy Pop Glasgow Barrowland HHH

THERE'S a key moment tonight. It's when a dapper elderly gent - silver hair, dress suit, spectacles, the spitting image of Samuel Beckett, in fact - grabs me enthusiastically round the neck with the crook of his elbow and screams "I WANNA BE YOUR DOG!" while simultaneously punching the air like a piston. The point? There's a little bit of Iggy Pop in all of us.

The man himself is marionetting around the Barrowlands stage looking exactly like Iggy Pop has done for roughly the past hundred years; whippet-thin and stripped to the waist, sporting dirty jeans and Timotei hair, snarling lyrics in his graveyard growl. Punk might be dead, but apparently no-one remembered to CC the memo to 55-year- old James Osterberg.

But while his supersonic retread of The Stooges' 1969 classic ignites not just the fire inside Mr Beckett but the whole damn place, it's one of the few high points in a night of suffocatingly muddy rock'n'roll.

The problem is two-fold. Iggy's recent output has been pretty iffy, to be honest, but he still plays a meaty selection of it. And his backing band - while they undoubtedly look the part with poodle perms and leather keks - conspire to accompany him with an unbelievably sludgy hair metal racket. So while it's rather thrilling to watch - you're never sure what Iggy is about to do next, and the look of sheer brainwashed nutterdom that ghosts across his face seconds before he launches himself into the crowd is actually scary - the soundtrack to Pop's non-stop action movie of a performance never really soars like full-throttle hot rod rock'n'roll should.

The guitarist even manages to screw up the choppy riff of The Passenger with some wonky-sounding blues chords, but then he might have been momentarily distracted by the dispiritingly stage-managed crowd invasion that takes place halfway through the first round of la- la-las. Those who make it next to Iggy are beaming with pride, enjoying the chance to pogo around with the Godfather of Punk. But the last chord hasn't even finished echoing round the amp when The Man - in the form of the security team - swoops and yanks punters out of the way.

Iggy himself is pretty much beyond criticism, though. He's an indestructible rock jabberwocky, and, while all his gurning and cavorting should really look like pantomime at his age, be brings a nuclear intensity to his performance that transcends the dirge belching from the speakers.

Copyright 2002
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