THE STOOGES IN OSTRAVA

The first time I saw Iggy Pop was at the Apollo in Manchester in 1977. On the negative side, the Stooges, with whom he had made three albums that I had done my level best to wear out my copies of with constant playing, were history, but, in the plus column, so, as an NME journalist put it at the time, was “the singer’s propensity for getting utterly gaga on nefarious pharmaceuticals” and his frequently looking like a red-hot candidate for the next premature rock’n’roll death. Oozing rude health and working together with David Bowie, who was then probably at the peak of his powers, he was in the middle of the burst of creativity that spawned both ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Lust for Life’. It was brilliant, one of the standout gigs of a period of my life when it seemed that music really was going to be the answer to most of the questions. It wasn’t, of course.

Iggy’s live performances continued to be the stuff of legend, but his studio output was non-essential for me after that – competent big-noise rock with a bunch of sidemen who knew what they were doing, but not a patch on, say, this:

The first time I saw Ostrava was in 1991. I was expecting the worst. I’d read in the very first edition of the Rough Guide to Czechoslovakia that “If you told a Czech you were going to Ostrava, they’d probably think you were mad” and everybody I knew said much the same – not many of them had been there, but that didn’t stand in the way of their knowing it was rough and primitive and dirty and full of morlocks and football hooligans and bleached blonde leopardskin women like Bet Lynch. What I found was a big scruffy industrial city which I liked straight away; more than anywhere else here it reminded me of home. It was a lot like its counterparts in the north of England, and the people had a directness and style to them that felt comfortable to me.

I’ve been back there many times now. I go there several times a year for one reason or another. It’s changed a lot since then; like so many other post-industrial cities worldwide, it’s been busy trying to reinvent itself. There’s Stodolni, with its bars and nightlife, there’s an ambitious bid to become the European City of Culture in 2015, and there’s an annual music festival, Colours of Ostrava, which is held in the heart of this surprisingly green city and just grows and grows. This year was its tenth anniversary and it was sold out the best part of a month beforehand, apparently the first time this has ever happened in the Czech Republic.

The headline act this year was Iggy. Not with a bunch of LA henchmen, though, but with as many of the original Dum Dum Boys from forty years ago as possible – Dave Alexander is dead, Ron Asheton likewise, but the others – Rock Action, James Williamson, and Steve Mackay – were all going to be there. Four out of six of them surviving till now is actually quite an achievement, given the talent for self-destruction those guys had. But were they going to be any good? Although the music on their distinctly pedestrian 2007 album ‘The Weirdness’ suggested they might not be, word of mouth and reviews of other live shows they’d done said that they were going to be present and probably far more correct than back in the day.

It rained on and off the whole day, not enough to really dampen spirits but enough to thin out the crowd a bit, which was just fine by me – my days in the moshpit are well in the past. Ten o’clock came round, and then, after a brief word from the festival organizers, the Stooges trooped on and a launched straight into their first selection.

Iggy started out in a singlet, which had me thinking that maybe age was getting to him – he is 63, after all, an age when early to bed with a nice cup of cocoa is perhaps more in order than stirring up a crowd of thousands – but within thirty seconds it had gone and the most renowned torso in the business was stripped for action. He may have the face of a badly done Egyptian mummy these days and the body might not be what it once was, but he’s still got the voice and the moves and the sheer presence and can rip it up better than almost anyone I’ve ever seen play live, working the stage like some wild mix of a big jungle cat, a pole dancer, an anaconda going through a fit, and a hooker in a display window while behind him the band laid down a maelstrom of pure vicious noise that had the ground beneath my feet vibrating.

You can’t really talk about Greatest Hits in the Stooge context, as they never had any, but the set they played was all killer, no filler: ‘Raw Power’ was followed by ‘Kill City’ and ‘Search and Destroy’, and I can’t come up with the names of too many bands that have triple whammies of that calibre to kick off with. There wasn’t a lot of banter between songs, although at one point, to the bemusement of the no-necks guarding the stage, Iggy did mischievously invite a bunch of guys to join them and dance. They did most of ‘Raw Power’ (although not my personal favourite, ‘Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell’); ‘1970’ and ‘Fun House’ from the second album, as well as a few more left-field choices such as ‘Open Up And Bleed’, ‘I Got A Right’, and ‘Cock In My Pocket’ (introduced as ‘Up Your Ass’), plus ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and, to finish with, ‘No Fun’, which may have been accurate forty-one years ago (!) when it was written, but certainly wasn’t true on Sunday night in Ostrava in the rain. It was the biggest fun I’ve had at a concert for years, up there with the best of them. Gentlemen, I thank you.