Iggy Pop (38 page)

David Bowie had been commendably just in his dealings with Jim back in the Berlin era, careful to point out that they were equals and avoid any patronising implications that he had rescued his friend. And although David’s recording of ‘China Girl’ brought huge financial benefits for Jim, the song was undoubtedly included on
Let’s Dance
because of its obvious commercial potential. Yet it’s hard to see the recording of ‘Neighborhood Threat’ and ‘Don’t Look Down’, both fine but hardly commercial songs, as anything other than an act of charity, an impression deepened by Padgham’s memories of David, during the quieter moments in Morin Heights, proudly telling him, ‘You know, I rescued Iggy.’ Padgham was treated to a long yarn depicting Iggy’s craziness, as David described how Iggy’s tour of Australia and New Zealand was cancelled because of legal threats from a woman in the audience whom Iggy had accidentally injured, kicking her in the chin and in the process making her bite off a chunk of her tongue. (The story, says then road manager Henry McGroggan, was apocryphal.) The implication seemed to be that Iggy was every bit as unreliable as his public image suggested, although it’s possible that this was behaviour as much to be admired as sniggered over. Certainly, if Bowie thought of this period as one characterised by his own largesse, rather than a partnership of equals, there was some truth in it: despite its generally insipid quality,
Tonight
became Bowie’s fastest-selling album to date, reaching platinum status in just six weeks and promising Jim a substantial income over the following year. In the mid-1980s, mechanical royalties on a full-price album were approximately 5 cents per track, per copy sold, which would mean earnings of over $100,000 from those six weeks alone; that sum would probably have been equalled by air-play royalties over the same period.

That autumn, Iggy’s new-found celebrity as collaborator with Bowie on the latter’s glossiest, blandest album to date led to him being featured in
People
magazine, with colour photos that depicted the Godfather of Punk shopping for fabrics with Suchi in Manhattan, or vacuuming in his new, top-floor Greenwich Village apartment. There was something touching about seeing Iggy and Suchi as a celebrity couple, as well as the notion of this alien, who’d fallen to earth from Planet Rock, becoming gradually familiar with everyday traditions. ‘My hand still shakes when I make out a cheque,’ he told writer David Fricke, ‘or my eyes get fussy and I can’t see. It’s because a cheque always was something that was used by people I didn’t like.’

In most respects, the image of Jim and Suchi at home in Manhattan was one of an innocent domesticity. Jim would get up 5 or 6am and potter around, enjoying his thoughts in the stillness of the early morning. As had become his habit since moving to Brooklyn, he’d type perhaps a couple of pages of poetry, prose or odd ideas; often he’d read through the papers and clip out stories, underlining resonant or quirky phrases which he’d work up into random collages. Usually he’d tidy up some of the debris from the previous night and clear up the papers and magazines; then he’d fetch a take-out breakfast for the two of them when Suchi woke up, vacuum the apartment and sometimes make hamburgers for lunch. ‘I’m basically garbage, vacuuming and bits and pieces patrol and she’s got the washing, cooking’s half and half and I help with shopping,’ was how he described the allocation of domestic chores. In the afternoons he might take long walks on the way home with his shopping; Suchi might get to work on either of the two sewing machines she’d set up in the apartment, using fabric chosen on their jaunts around the city. The days of jumping in a cab to see friends, as he’d done in Brooklyn, were over; instead he and Suchi would take the subway around Manhattan, careful lest their out-goings exceed their income.

Many hours, in late 1984, were occupied in filling out the interminable immigration forms for Suchi; it was to clarify her residency status, Jim would explain later, that the two would get married the following year - one senses that Midwest embarrassment at expressing personal feelings in the practical, businesslike rationale Jim espoused for his second marriage. They made a sweet, almost childlike couple, those around them thought; charming, not particularly lovey-dovey - but attentive to each other, in a caring, innocent kind of way.

At other times there would be odd little conversations with other residents in the same block, including photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, or visits to a local health club, followed by TV in the evenings, or perhaps relaxing with a novel by V.S. Naipaul or Paul Theroux. On quiet afternoons or mornings Jim would take his tiny Brother EP20 typewriter to the park and work on more ideas, sometimes for three or four hours a day. Around the end of 1984, he enrolled in an acting class. Such was the routine, typical of perhaps thousands of New Yorkers lucky enough to have a small private income, that defined Jim Osterberg’s peaceful new life, which was punctuated only by the occasional vacation in Mexico.

Some time in 1984, Jim and David had discussed making an album together; indeed, in September, Bowie told the
NME
that recording an album with Iggy was his main ambition for the following year, alongside writing something ‘extraordinary and adventurous’ for himself. But apparently he was in no particular hurry: the creative blitz of 1976 and 1977 seemed a thing of the past, and for most of 1985 Bowie busied himself with two movie projects,
Absolute Beginners
and
Labyrinth
. Bowie’s musical efforts were mainly confined to recording the B-side of Band Aid’s charity single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, together with a magisterial, grandstanding performance at Live Aid that July.

By the spring of 1985, however, Jim had pieced together eight or nine songs, and intent on getting things going on his own called up Steve Jones, who was at a loose end now that Chequered Past had splintered in the wake of their poorly received debut album. The last time Jim and Steve worked together, eighteen months before, they’d both been struggling with going straight. This time around, once Jim flew to LA where they rented a house and worked on songs throughout June, they revelled in the new-found experience of being sober, organised and professional. Each time the inspiration faltered, rather than ‘taking some drug or getting drunk’ they would head for the beach. Within the month they worked up twenty songs, and went on to record nine of them in September and early October at a home studio in Hancock Park owned by fashion and glamour photographer Olivier Ferrand. The songs were simple and strong; Jones’s sparkly, multilayered guitars and the simple drum-machine rhythm tracks left plenty of room for Iggy’s voice, which sounded warm, clear and almost affable. Jim started shopping the tapes around New York and they were already generating interest, he says, when he got a call from David early in November, saying, ‘I want to play you some demos.’ Jim’s reply was, ‘Great, I’ll play you some of mine, too.’

David loved the songs, which included ‘Cry For Love’, ‘Winners And Losers’ and ‘Fire Girl’, but eminently practical as ever, told Jim, ‘They’re all mid-tempo, so you’ll need some fast ones and some slow ones,’ and volunteered to fill the gaps. In December, David, Jim, Suchi (and, probably, Coco) decamped to Bowie’s holiday home in Mustique, taking along David’s custom-built portable studio, then moved on to another of his houses in Gstaad. In between skiing, enjoying dinner parties and relaxing, David and Jim worked intermittently on writing more songs at a gentle, civilised pace, taking three months to build up enough material for an album. After a short break in March and April, David booked recording time at Mountain Studios in Montreux, an upscale, high-tech studio owned by the rock band Queen, which David had first used to record
Lodger
early in 1979; it was handy for David’s Lausanne home, and he’d started to use it more often for soundtrack and demo work. The plan was that Steve Jones would play on the album, but according to Jim there was a last-minute glitch: ‘He didn’t understand about visas, and couldn’t get out of America.’ David, he says, ‘wasn’t too upset, as they didn’t have a huge common vocabulary’, and instead called up Kevin Armstrong - who’d been musical director for both Bowie’s Live Aid appearance and his ‘Dancing In The Street’ duet with Mick Jagger - and Erdal Kizilcay, a classically trained multi-instrumentalist who’d worked with Bowie on demos for
Let’s Dance
and co-written ‘When The Wind Blows’.

It was a peaceful, civilised time, and together David and Jim crafted a peaceful, civilised album. Erdal Kizilcay and his wife had met Jim and Suchi a couple of months before at a dinner with David and Coco, where David had mentioned that he wanted Erdal to oversee most of the music. Erdal liked Jim and his jokes: for instance, his wacky boasts about how many bags of potatoes he could carry. Kevin Armstrong got to know Jim during a rowing excursion on Lake Geneva; Jim was wearing glasses, had a short, college-boy haircut, said ‘cool’ a lot, and pointed out the Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron had entertained Percy and Mary Shelley, and where Mary had written
Frankenstein
in a storytelling competition. The air of European, jet-set sophistication was not what Armstrong, who’d bought most of Iggy’s albums as a teenager, expected; his slight disorientation was increased by Jim’s manner: obviously cultured and intelligent, with an elegant, almost military bearing. It was a big change from Alien Sex Fiend, the last act that Armstrong had worked with, but it was somehow refreshing to watch Jim and David in the process of growing up, sorting their lives out and relishing their status as survivors.

David seemed heart-warmingly devoted to the welfare of his friend, and ran the sessions armed with a clipboard, ticking off a to-do list of items to be recorded each day, dedicated to the task in hand and imbued with his customary jittery intensity. In turn, Jim seemed calm, focused, happy to be immersed in this little creative bubble. By now, David too had apparently banished even occasional use of cocaine, but as Kevin Armstrong points out, this didn’t make him any more laid-back, for he was chain-smoking sixty to eighty cigarettes a day and would bring his own espresso machine and supply of Java coffee wherever he happened to be working. ‘He’d be chucking down the coffee and fags, and seriously it would be pretty neurotic and manic around him. Also, being in the orbit of someone who’s so hugely famous, there’s a kind of electrical crackle around them, because those people behave differently, don’t they?’

Kevin Armstrong would go on to work with Iggy for the next eighteen months, and would later play in Tin Machine alongside Bowie and the Sales brothers. He is well aware of the selfish, neurotic, narcissistic nature of the entertainment industry; still, having seen Bowie working with Iggy at close quarters, he believed that he was seeing a real selflessness being played out. ‘I really think it
was
selfless. His association with Iggy always reflected well on him, sure, but I think he was quite simply helping his friend. He was genuinely saying, hang on, Iggy needs a hand here - I’m the guy that can do it, I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.’

That selflessness was epitomised by the song ‘Shades’, which David had written after seeing Jim give Suchi a present. ‘He turned it around,’ says Jim, ‘made it into one of those “reformed guy” kinda songs.’ The lyric unwraps an image of the narrator’s surprise at receiving a present - ‘I never thought I was worth much, or that anyone would treat me this way’ - while the tune itself was based around the same five notes of ‘Cry For Love’, in a kind of tonal empathy. The song seemed the perfect metaphor for David’s sonic rehabilitation of his friend, who for years now had been regarded as a pariah by the record industry. Alongside ‘Absolute Beginners’, ‘Shades’ was the best ballad that Bowie would write during the 1980s, a period in which his fortunes as a singles artist seemed on the wane. Now he simply gave away one of his best efforts to his friend.

Even David’s more workmanlike songs, such as ‘Hideaway’, with its simple three-chord structure and crisp Linn Drum beat, displayed an effervescence and deftness that seemed sorely lacking on Bowie’s own overblown
Tonight
. Iggy, too, seemed to pull something unique out of the bag in the form of ‘Cry For Love’, a conventional, confessional, almost slick ballad that marked a new Bowie-esque craftsmanship in his songwriting. For all its professionalism, the song was nonetheless affecting and sincere - it even featured the LA-bound Steve Jones, whose guitar solo from the September demo was edited into the finished take. Even old friends like Jim McLaughlin from the Iguanas would recognise ‘Cry For Love’ as a new departure, an admission that this ambitious, confident man was vulnerable: ‘He’s saying he’s got a soul and a heart that is easily bruised, and that he lets himself be used because he needs somebody so bad. That’s revealing him in a way I never knew, and I became a complete believer in his music after that.’

The album that would eventually be titled
Blah Blah Blah
was undoubtedly a work characterised by professionalism rather than excess and by order rather than chaos, and for that reason it would be described by Iggy supporters as an ‘Iggy-flavoured Bowie album’. Yet if it’s classified as a Bowie album, it definitely qualifies as Bowie’s finest work of the era, with better songwriting and more energy than Bowie’s own
Tonight
and its successor,
Never Let Me Down
. The only serious questionmark attaching to
Blah Blah Blah
, however, was whether it would succeed in its primary aim: to establish the label-less Iggy Pop as a viable commercial artist.

The answer came in within weeks of tapes being distributed to record companies in New York. Richard Branson, who was planning to set up the Virgin label in the United States, made a personal call to Iggy to get him to sign to his label. Nancy Jeffries, of A&M records, was another enthusiast: ‘I loved the record. It came in pretty much finished, and was almost like a David Bowie record that as a record company you wished you’d had, but never got.’