Soundtrack Saturday

Iggy Pop plays at Manchester's Victoria Warehouse tonight and I'm going to be there. Iggy feels like the last man standing in a way. He hasn't played in Manchester for years and at 78 years old I can't imagine there'll be too many opportunities to see him on home turf again. Although it wouldn't surprise me if Iggy lived to be 100 and carried on performing with his shirt off for another two decades. 

Two weeks ago the Soundtrack Saturday featured Iggy's title song to the 1984 Alex Cox film Repo Man. Iggy got a massive boost in the 90s when his songs were included on the soundtrack to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Included seems a bit reductionist- it's fair to say that the film, its publicity and its opening scene would be nowhere near as memorable as they were without this song bursting out of the cinema speakers as a shoplifting Ewan McGregor attempt to outrun security guards and ends up almost splayed across the bonnet of a car, laughing at the poor driver...

Lust For Life

Lust For Life was the title song from Iggy's 1977 second solo album, recorded at Hansa in West Berlin with David Bowie in the producer's seat. The band were Iggy's touring line up- Ricky Gardiner on guitar and Tony and Hunt Sales on bass and drums. Ricky Gardiner came up the famous guitar riff, based on the Morse code  opening to the US Armed Forces Network news programme and written on a ukulele. The guitars are great but its the drums which are first out of the traps, the loudest, most perfectly recorded drums. But there's no escaping the riff, everything just has to fall into line and follow. 

On top of this, essentially punk crossed with a sped up Motown backbeat, Iggy songs and sneers, at the top of his game, lines about Johnny Yen, liqour and rugs, hypnotising chickens, flesh machines and GTOs fired off, always coming back to the hilariously brilliant, 'well I'm just a modern guy... I got a lust for life'. Jon Savage (I think) once wrote that in just four years, from Raw Power to Lust For Life, Iggy went from Death Trip to Lust For Life and what a strange trip it was. 

Trainspotting also featured Iggy's song Nightclubbing, a genuine solo Iggy Pop classic, from Iggy's solo debut The Idiot (also recorded with Bowie but at Chateau d'Herouville, France). Bowie and Iggy had both left the USA to kick addictions and ended up in Europe making records that soaked up the new sounds of West German rock and electronics. Nightclubbing has Bowie on keys and a very mechanistic drum machine, a weird, dislocated electronic pulse, cocaine numbness and Iggy intoning his lyric about what it was like hanging out with Bowie every night, seeing people, 'brand new people', and doing 'brand new dances like the nuclear bomb'. Bowie wanted to replace the drum machine with 'proper' drums but Iggy stuck his ground, correctly, seeing that the drum machine gives the song its blank, lurching edge.

Nightclubbing

Iggy wrote the words in ten minutes in the studio and later said Nightclubbing was about "about the incredible coldness and deathly feeling you have after you've done something like that and how much you enjoy it. It could be Los Angeles or Paris or New York or anywhere, really." In Trainspotting the song soundtracks a scene involving shooting up in a desolate Edinburgh apartment and ends with the death of a baby. 

The Trainspotting soundtrack is a superb 90s soundtrack. It turned Born Slippy into a massive hit and rebirthed Lou Reed's Perfect Day. It included Brian Eno's Deep Blue Day and Pulp's Mile End and a ten minute Weatherall produced Primal Scream title track, a slow, snakey instrumental with the street sounds from an all day session outside a pub in Soho, the assembled Scream party people shouting to friends and associates from the street to a first or second floor room. 

Trainspotting