Iggy Pop applies for work

Iggy Pop wanted to work with Josh Homme, so he, erm, sent him stuff:

"I was looking to make high-quality, non-band solo work, where you really put both feet into it," he said. "I’d been skirting around it: doing an album in French, or a soundtrack, or a reunion band album. I wanted to find the best and he’s the best. I sent him a dossier on me by FedEx: written form, no email. I sent him three essays I’d written on my sex life about specific people. I also sent him an interview I did with an eminent critic here in New York about his concerns about my career."

I'm not Homme's biggest fan, but even I recognise he probably wouldn't have needed an Iggy Pop primer to decide if he wanted to work with him. Homme would be unlikely to have got a note about working with Iggy Pop and needed to fire up Wikipedia.

Maybe that's wasn't what Pop was going for. Maybe he thought Homme needed persuasion and would have been on the phone screaming "okay, no more details about what you put into whose butthole. I'll work with you, just stop sending the stuff..."

When life gives you lemons, you just push back the deadline

A general lack of interest in giving insurance salesperson Iggy Pop money to make a film in which Iggy played The Sandman looked set to keep the movie unmade.

Trouble is, rather than shrugging off the failure to raise the crowdfunding target, they just pushed the deadline back by a month.

For the time being, though, you'll just have to make do with this:

The horror: if you say 'Iggy' three times, you lose your no-claims bonus and have to pay a £500 excess.

Insurance salesman joins radio station

Iggy Pop, who used to sell insurance on the television until he was replaced by some talking dogs, has got a new job, presenting a programme on 6Music:

The Stooges think they know what we want

Why are The Stooges making a new album?

Experts aren't certain, but the best bet is that Iggy Pop is finding time sitting heavy on his hands since they replaced him with animated dogs in the insurance adverts. It's possible the album won't see the light of day if Pop gets round to clearing out the crawl space before winter.

Glamobit: Alex Kirst

Alex Kirst has been killed by a hit-and-run driver.

Kirst was drummer with The Nymphs; the New Jersey act relocated to LA with high hopes but managed only one album before they split. More recently, Kirst had been drumming for Iggy Pop after the band he formed with his brother, The Trolls, became Pop's backing group of choice.

Alex Kirst was 47 years old; he died after being struck by a car in Cathedral City last week.

Iggy Pop adds Frank Sidebottom rip-off to awful insurance ads

Even Iggy admitted that his Swiftcover adverts were awful - "embarrassing" was his actual word, I think - but they're still happy to throw cash at him, so he's making new adverts which appear to rip off Frank Sidebottom quite badly:

Swiftcover.com's marketing director Tina Shortle said he was still keen to work with the company on their 2010 campaign.

"Iggy loved the fact that last year's campaign stirred up a lot of emotion, so this year we've played on the controversy with even more irreverent humour," she said. "The introduction of 'Little Iggy' allowed Iggy to play against type and become the chilled-out, golf-playing rock star whilst 'Little Iggy' causes havoc."

You know he does. He really does.

Iggy has a pop

To promote his new record, Iggy Pop has issued a video suggesting that a new record from him is required:

Iggy Pop alluded to certain bands in a promotional video for his new album, Preliminaires, in which he said he made the disc because he "got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music." He's not explained who exactly he was referring to with that comment.

"Anyone from Smashing Pumpkins to — what's the one with Fred Durst?" he told the U.K.'s The Sun tabloid.

"Yeah, and there are a million billion of them. And people think they're gods, man."

Well, yes. You might suggest that Corgan and Durst have about as much to offer pop as insurance salesman, eh, Iggy?

Iggy Pop isn't selling car insurance. Not any more.

The ASA has banned Iggy Pop from advertising SwiftCover car insurance. Not because they want to save him from himself, but because Swiftcover don't cover musicians:

Because the policy was promoted by a well-known musician, which might lead some viewers to believe the policy covered those who worked in entertainment, when it did not, and because Iggy Pop did not have a policy with Swiftcover, we concluded the ad was misleading.

Interesting - so it's unacceptable for an insurance advert to feature an entertainer who would be ineligible for that product? I wonder if that ruling will affect anyone else?

Calm down, dear... it's just the ASA...

Roger Daltrey defends Iggy's insurance spots

BBC News asks Roger Daltrey if selling out isn't so bad after all:

You've just re-released your third album, The Who Sell Out - which attacked the commercialisation of rock. What do you think of people like Iggy Pop making car insurance adverts?

Who cares? Everybody's trying to feed their kids and earn a living. That advert will be gone in two years and people will forget about it. He's still Iggy Pop, he does great performances and he's still a great artist.

It's perhaps unsurprising that Daltrey has no problem with people shuffling from the edge of the counterculture into doing telly spots for financial services products. But he might be kidding himself if thinks nobody will remember them a couple of years on. For example, I can't quite shake the image of, ooh, somebody doing TV spots for American Express from the edge of his trout farm a couple of decades ago...

No wonder Iggy got a response so quickly

Iggy Pop's status-draining Swift car insurance advert isn't only undignified; it turns out to be a bit of a fib: Swift won't insure musicians:

Tim Soong, the 30-year-old bass guitarist in Roguetune, found that "entertainers" are excluded from cover.

Soong, of Kennington, phoned the Guildford-based company, which is part of the Axa insurance group, and said: "The customer services operator told me that they don't insure musicians. When I mentioned Iggy Pop, she said his case was different because he is American.

"I'm reporting Swiftcover to the Advertising Standards Authority."

Aha. He's an American. That would be different, then.

Punkobit: Ron Asheton

Founder member of The Stooges Ron Asheton has been found dead at his Ann Arbor home.

Before he picked up his first guitar at the age of ten, he'd already mastered one instrument - the accordion. It was an unusual choice of instrument for a five year-old, but he was under the spell of his great aunt Ruthie, a vaudevillian star, who had already tried to interest him in the violin. That experiment had ended in failure when Asheton's mum took the hand-me-down instrument off him to turn into a planter.

Inspired by the Beatles and the Stones, the 16 year-old Asheton made a pop pilgrimage to England, visiting London, of course Liverpool and, perhaps more surprisingly, Southport. He was surprised by some of the reactions:

We got more aggravation than we did here in this sheltered college town, by Rockers and Mods. English people still had prejudices against that kind of look in '65 so we got a lot of flack. We were kinda shocked that "where's Ringo? We haven't seen him yet!" We got to Southport which was a little calmer but still got into trouble with some of the Rockers there- they'd kick your ass if you didn't run fast enough.

Back in America, he and brother Scott hooked up with James Newell Osterberg to form The Stooges in 1967. The trio came together at Discount Records, where Osterberg was working. It was the Asheton brothers who started to call Osterberg "Pop", which got amalgamated with his other nickname, Iggy, to create a stage persona and theme for future insurance adverts.

If Ron was instrumental in giving Iggy his name, he was no less significant in crafting the Stooge's sound: it's his guitar which drives the first two albums. For Raw Power, he switched to bass, edged out from both guitaring and songwriting during a period of turbulence that had seen the band dropped by Elektra Records. Pop had tried to completely restaff the band and it's fair to say Asheton wasn't entirely delighted at being brought back when that ploy had failed. Ron had already struggled with being the only sober member of a band awash with heroin, and his attempts to stay straight exacerbated the splits in the band.

The Stooges finally fell apart in February 1974 while Asheton moved on to The New Order (not that one), Destroy All Monsters and New Race.

In the late 90s, when Michael Stipe was pulling together musicians for the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, Asheton proved to be the obvious choice for guitarist on the Stooges-like Wylde Rattz. It was this job that would lead to The Stooges reforming, as fellow Rattz J Mascis started to play with Asheton after a visit to Ann Arbor; the band were apparently so good as to tempt Iggy Pop over to have a look. From there, the reunion of The Stooges became almost inevitable, a process which moved from live dates to the perhaps-somewhat-ill-advised 2007 The Weirdness album.

Asheton is believed to have died from a heart attack around New Year's Day; his body was only discovered yesterday. He was 60.

[Thanks to Karl T]

Truck found; still empty

They've found the truck that was stolen from Iggy and the Stooges; trouble is, it was without the kit.

Pop rolled

Sadly, stories of bands having their kit nicked after gigs are all too common, but normally the victims are the sort of groups who have to hump their own stuff to the van. Last night, though, Iggy Pop and the Stooges became victim to gear-pinchers, after someone made off with their van in Montreal.

Police are asking anyone offered a pair of see-through vinyl trousers and very, very sweaty guitars at a cheap price to get in touch.

Oh, yes... Madonna went in

Last night was the induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, celebrating Cleveland's role rock history by, erm, holding it in New York.

MTV reports:

Madonna Shocks, Justin Timberlake Pays Tribute At Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Ceremony

Madonna 'shocks', does she? Or - and let's just take a wild guess here - did she conform to the worn stereotype by doing something supposedly outrageous but probably scripted?

the sinewy singer ascended the stage and thanked seemingly everyone who helped shape her career, from her earliest dancing teachers to the critics who've blasted her over the years, and told her she "was talentless, that I was chubby, that I couldn't sing, that I was a one-hit wonder — they helped me too, because they made me question myself and they pushed me to be better, and I am grateful for their resistance."

After quoting from the Talmud, she called Timberlake — who'd said, "She became the biggest name on the planet the old-fashioned way: She earned it" — a "fucker." Moments later, she blurted out the word "motherfucker" for no discernable reason.

No discernable reason? How about 'in a desperate bid to make people notice the ceremony even existed'?

By the way, how exactly does Justin Timberlake induct Madonna into the Hall? He's not qualified to be a member himself - either chronologically or artistically - so how does he have the power to elevate someone to its portals?

The Iggy Pop came on, and sang some Madonna songs, and swore.

Billy Joel was on next - he also swore, which is mildly more surprising. But while all this cussing might make the giant-sized picture of Tipper Gore at the museum weep real tears, is it really that surprising?

Curiously, MTV chose not to mention Madonna's brief reference to taking drucks in her speech.

Iggy: I did say it, and I'm sorry

Despite some fans arguing that he'd meant "packie" shop, in the American sense of a takeaway, Iggy has confirmed he did use the phrase 'paki shop' during the BBC's Glastonbury coverage:

“I’m sorry. It was one in the morning... that was a phrase I learned from English people while I was living there.

“But it’s terrible. More fool me. Shame on me.”

We're not quite sure that it being one in the morning counts as an extenuating circumstance ("come on, we all get a little bit racist after midnight, don't we?") and you wonder what the people he was living with in England where he could pick up the phrase and not know it was abusive, but at least he's had the balls to admit he was in the wrong, and apologise for the slip. Unlike, ooh, Jo O'Meara, say.

Amazon leaves us in no doubt...

... who really wrote Nick Kent's stuff for him.

Pop's sloppy shop shock

We wouldn't take it from Jo O'Meara, and we won't take it from Iggy Pop: During part of the BBC's Glastonbury coverage, Pop started to throw the word "paki" around:

Referring to the time he appeared on music show The White Room in 1997 in a pair of see through, skin-tight trousers and without underwear, the 60-year-old used the phrase [paki shop] while impersonating a imaginary English person reacting his attire, according to the BBC spokesman.

The BBC have apologised - apparently they had three complaints, even at 1.20am on a Sunday morning - but it's really Iggy who needs to be explaining himself.

Broadsheet round-up: The last knockings

This is an emergency message: Christopher Howse, are you alright? The Telegraph's virgin-in-a-tie last posted just after lunch yesterday, and hasn't been heard of since. We fear he may have been sacrificed in a distant corner of Worthy Farm. Or, worse, succumbed to the spirit and is, even now, heading onto the next festival in a camper van, naked except for daubings. And his tie.

In the Telegraph proper, Tom Horan suggests that Babyshambles were "compelling" (perhaps you had to be there), the Klaxons "all outfits and no content was about the sum of it".

It's a measure of how much stuff goes on at Glastonbury that even with the breadth of the internet, you still miss stuff. Horan, for example, tells us that Lily Allen sprung a surprise:

Her bright and breezy ska sound and acerbic delivery were a treat, and to top it all she produced Terry Hall and Lynval Golding, two of the founder members of Coventry band the Specials, who had not played together since the 1980s. They did their timeless first single Gangsters and the hillside was transformed into a riot of silly dancing.

Good lord, bringing on the Specials? It's like Ronald McDonald giving a job in the kitchens to Mrs Beeton.

Is the spirit of the festival fighting back against the 2007 wheel-heeled attendees? The Times reports that the people who splashed over a thousand pounds to hire a teepee for the weekend ended up getting splashed themselves, as the teepees peed:

Unlike traditional tepees, which have a fire in the middle to keep the damp out, Glaston-bury’s tepee village is banned from lighting fires for safety reasons. The problem is usually overcome by placing a “rain cap” over the hole, but families who thought they had paid for a premium service were told that there were only a handful to go around the 300 tents.

Kevin Stockton, 49, a water maintenance consultant, also found that most tents were not fitted with waterproof groundsheets, so he was soaked not only from above but from the soggy ground beneath. “We’ve been flooded out every time it has rained,” he told The Times. “About 5 or 10 per cent of tepees have rain caps. When we asked reception why they couldn’t give us one, they said that they didn’t predict the weather was going to be so bad.”

It's hard to feel sympathy for someone who would pay so much for a posh tent. The irony is that a thirty quid job from Millets would probably have kept everyone nice and dry.

Over in the Guardian, Alexis Petridis weighs the weekend's peformances:

Saturday night's headliners offer an intriguing study in opposites. The Killers offer pyrotechnics, ruthlessly efficient mainstream indie rock hits and the steely, unwavering professionalism of a band abundantly aware of how a successful Glastonbury headlining slot can affect album sales in the next financial quarter.

Over on the Other Stage, meanwhile, havoc reigns. Whether or not Iggy And The Stooges really fit with the Glastonbury ethos is a matter of some debate. The reconstituted punk pioneers are rightly legendary, but the violence and glowering negativity of their music seems at odds with the Glastonbury vibe of bucolic togetherness and abundant good cheer.

Blog round-up: Press red for disappointment

Good lord, it's a sprawling site this year, isn't it? In a bid to test the theory that there might be more to Glastonbury than any one person could see, the BBC's Ian Youngs attempted to visit every stage in a day:

It is a place to see up-and-coming indie starlets, while in the Chill 'n' Charge Tent there is yet another stage set up beside hundreds of people who are recharging their mobile phones.

In the end, he manages to trot past 44 venues, but admits that he might "have missed some" and only managed it by sticking to music sites.

Still, at least he could get around. Charlotte from Still Life With Plaster had planned on going, but then something snapped. Her leg:

I must admit to longing to be able to slip something of the sort on myself instead of this boring old plaster, & Alice can second that emotion - these things were designed by bloody sadists! Watching the festival coverage, & the prevailing conditions, we're both actually glad we didn't make the effort to attend after all - the plasters would have been disasters, I think, what with attempting to crutch up & down muddy hills , stand in sodden, muddy fields, slopping & sloshing around, etc, it would probably have all been too distressing & physically demanding if not impossible. I read yesterday that around 1000 people had been injured, slipping around, mostly minor but still: I dread to think how it might have been possible to cope with a full leg plaster, even in clement weather conditions (which, from experience, occasionally do prevail!).

Still, they're able to enjoy the BBC coverage. Baria's blog is impressed with the choice, if not all the presentation:

Four channels with interactive screens and choices of genres and bands and who knows what else. Totally stunning use of the new media that is unsurpassed anywhere on the globe. If you don't live in the UK you really should come for a visit just to see it.

But there are some elements that make me really tetchy. The main one being that once the presenters - like Phil Jupitous and Mark Radcliffe - get some mud on their Drizabones they suddenly end up doing crap imitations of John Peel.

There are lots of "errrms and right that was... ermmmm where are we?" and so on.

It is a bitter disappointment when their radio shows are so much better. Jupitus spent the last broadcast complaining about his back ache. Loose weight large person and all will be resolved say I.

But watching all this leads me to think that perhaps the revellers at Glastonbury are the same people I met in Camden a few months ago. A bunch of late boomers (sic) who will not give up the cause.

Rock n Roll isn't a youth movement anymore. It is a middle aged lifestyle and whilst it makes me sad it also frees the possibilities for the future.

Interestingly, Stuffem watches and also worries about the audience while enjoying the breadth of the coverage:

I think I’m all Glastonbury’d out from the massive Glastonbury coverage. With interweaving coverage on BBC2, BBC3,BBC4 and the Freeview interactive channels over the three days including today. It’s always hard to follow and filter it all. I think I had my ‘Tut tut , (rolls eyes)today’s generation’ moment last night whilst watching the Iggy and the Stooges footage after Iggy Pop encouraged the front rows onto the stage , causing self imposed anarchy to the proceedings and was watching a plethora of teenies and twenty somethings having to be coaxed into doing something faintly rebellious by a 60 year with more energy than all of them put together. So given their sudden stage sharing platform, what’s the most rebellious act I see? A banner held aloft by a small group keen to bring back the Cadbury Wispa chocolate bar!! Did I feel faintly superior that my own generation at their age would probably have seized the moment to proclaim ’say no to cruise’ (the missile, not the Scientology film celebrity).

Still, better that than Mika's stage dressing, as captured by Q. In tribute to his patronising song supposedly celebrating Big Girls, he had two big girls on stage. Giant, inflatable women. Do you see what he did there?

Some acts adapt to Glastonbury better than others - Ian McCulloch's fear of the mud is now legendary, for example - so it's a round of applause for Shirley Bassey, captured by a Guardian blogger as she strode fabulously across the site, with only mongrammed DSB wellies to protect her from the elements.

Music Every Single Day Of Lives remembers that last night's headliners were making a statement by taking the gig:

The Killers did not want to headline Glastonbury 2 years ago as they did not think having one album under their arm was enough to carry the weight of 170,000 people. This year they took the gamble. It paid off.

You could argue that by the middle of the festival, Archie's Educated Chickens could keep the pyramid stage happy - especially with some fireworks - and so it's not so much of a gamble. Has there ever been a headliner in the modern Glastonbury who hasn't been met by a positive response?

GlastOn TV: Cape, Killers, and a dodgy Cold War metaphor

Eventually, the BBC played out Babyshambles in full. With his busted voice, and ladyscarf dangling from his pocket, it was a bit like a 1970s Rod Stewart tribute act. We'd actually turned on to a different screen before Kate Moss turned up.

There was no Carl Barat on stage with Pete, and Pete didn't wander on during the Dirty Pretty Things set, either. It would be foolish to try and set the two performances up in some sort of competition with each other, but that's never stopped us. DPT were West Germany to Babyshamble's pre-unification East; you're always aware that, just as the West never lost the faith that one day Berlin would be restored at the seat of power, so Carl has a look in his eye that reunification might be a possibility, but for now, is reveling in the freedom, while Babysshambles feels like a grimmer place to be, where even the fun comes with a sense of predetermination. There is no negotiation; the party line is the only line.

Seriously: would you rather be bouncing up and down to You Fucking Love It, or hoping your smile looks genuine as Comrade Moss comes on to perform her part on La Belle?

Also, Pete: your penis looks horrible. Please, never go near TV cameras without putting underpants on, ever again. Thank you.

An even bigger fashion mistake was Patrick Wolf, who seemed to have come dressed like a Pinnochio doll from a pound shop.

And we're still not sure if the guy who was hanging round the front of the Get Cape Wear Cape Fly stage in a big red cape was a fan paying homage, a support crew member with a sense of humour, or simply enacting a Get Cape Wear Cape Steal Equipment plan. GCWCF was the highlight of yesterday evening, though - even incoporating a backdrop with a fairtrade message, which is the closest anyone's come to that much-touted "glastonbury radical spirit" we keep hearing so much about.

By contrast, The Killers had some sort of pile of dead antlers to balance their keyboards on. And, of course, they had fireworks at the end. Isn't it about time one of the headline acts could come up with a more interesting idea than just letting off a few small-scale explosions to mark the end of their set?

Iggy Pop's skin: it looks like it's made of the stuff that they used in the 1960s when fake leather technology had yet to advance to a point where it could manage to replicate the flexibility of cowhide.