News

Iggy and the Stooges will be performing at the VOLT Festival in Sopron, Hungary on June 30th! Get your tickets at the VOLT website.

Iggy and the Stooges will play at the OFF Festival in Katowice, Poland on August 4th, one day earlier than originally planned. Tickets are available now!

Iggy Pop gets excessive in a new campaign for Paco Rabanne’s Black XS L’Excès. Check it out!

Making The Video:

Commercial:

Record Store Day is proud to announce the appointment of IGGY POP to the post of Record Store Day 2012 Ambassador.

A person should have a personality. You won’t get one dicking around on a computer. It helps to go somewhere where there are other persons. Persons who are interested in something you are. That’s how a record store or any shop that’s got some life to it should work. It’s not about selling shit. I got my name, my musical education and my personality all from working at a record store during my tender years. Small indie shops have always been a mix of theater and laboratory. In the 50’s and 60’s the teen kids used to gather after school at these places to listen free to the latest singles and see if they liked the beat. You could buy the disc you liked for 79 cents and if you were lucky meet a chick. Clerks in these places became managers, (like Brian Epstein), label heads, (Jack Holzman) and Faces on album covers (like me).

Personally I feel best in a store that, while staying small and socially relaxed, still keeps a complete variety of music types and non musical recordings on offer. I’m aware though that a lot of great places are genre-specific, like dance hall shops in Jamaica or Compas here in Little Haiti. In Europe and on the West coast the same goes on for Punk and Goth. All of this is cool and has a much bigger future than most people realize today. When the record and record store businesses began to die at the turn of the new century, they deserved it because they got too big too boring and too plastic.

As Record Store Day Ambassador for 2012 I feel like a representative from some exotic jungle full of life and death and sex and anger, called upon to wear a leopard skin and translate joy to the world of the dead. –IGGY POP

The godfather of punk and his band, Iggy and the Stooges, and cult bands Suicide and Death in Vegas open the long list of performers who will play at the OFF Festival from August 3 to August 5 at the Three Ponds Valley in Katowice. Tickets for the 2012 OFF Festival are available now!

Iggy And The Stooges
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re proud to announce that Iggy and The Stooges will perform at the OFF Festival! Pleas of their loyal fans have not gone unheard. They’re coming so that we can try to outscream Iggy during “Raw Power,” “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and “Search and Destroy.” They’re coming to show the youngsters playing the OFF Festival stages how it’s done. Iggy and The Stooges – pioneers and punk-rock legends, synonymous with on-stage antics and the sheer vital force of rock and roll. Oh, how we want to be dogs right now – announcements like these truly deserve a howl of joy!

Iggy and the Stooges’ first show for 2012 has been confirmed! The band will perform at Gröna Lund next summer in Stockholm, Sweden on August 10th. Rock on!

A chance to see Iggy Pop — the Heavyweight Champion of rock and roll — causes three things to happen to me every time. First, the excitement I feel before Iggy hits stage is unlike any I have for any other band. Second, the amount of adrenaline coursing through me when the band is ripping through their set makes me feel like I am plugged into life’s main circuit. Third, it takes days for me to come down. I have to listen to Stooges and Iggy records constantly until I finally level out.

A Stooges show is unlike any other. It’s like the chase scene in an action film. It’s like watching a boxing match that goes the distance. It is not just another night out — it is a chapter of your life.

The other night at the Palladium was one of those nights. …Song after song erupted from the stage and it was like I had never heard them before, never marveled at how damn good and solid songs like “Search and Destroy,” “I Need Somebody,” “Open Up And Bleed” and “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” are. This happens every time I see them.

Read more at LAWeekly.com.

Watch James Williamson in this interview below from NBC Bay Area News. In a related article, the interviewer wrote: “Sunday’s Warfield performance showed the band in full gain. Iggy still takes the stage like a twenty-year-old trapeze artist.”

SF Weekly has published additional bits from its interview with Iggy Pop earlier this year. Here is an excerpt:

Q: So I hear there’s possibly a Jim Jarmusch documentary coming out about the Stooges?

A: …Jim’s a fine artist and a completely independent and unpredictable character. And he’s also musically knowledgeable, and he knows and loves the group, so that was the idea. I asked him, “Listen, please, I need you to do some coverage of the group,” so he’s done some coverage. I’ll probably talk to him this fall to see what he wants to do with it, whether it might be like a box of DVDs, or whether it might be — I’d love to give him some music for it. It’s sort of in the sense that when you work with somebody really good, you expect that you’re not necessarily gonna like or really agree either with whatever it is they make. That’s important.

Read more at SF Weekly.

If there was something to be learned from Thursday night’s sold out Iggy Pop and The Stooges show, it’s that dynamism knows no age. …Shirtless and as abnormally ripped as ever, he launched into “Raw Power” without hesitation, jumping and noodling his torso like a tanned fish out of water. It wasn’t more than two songs before he was sailing into the crowd. By the fifth he had fans scaling barricades and dodging security guards to join him onstage. And by the time “I Wanna Be Your Dog” hit, the floor’s multigenerational circle pit had grown to engulf nearly half the crowd.

Read more at LA Weekly.com.

Photo by Timothy Norris

It’s a real Renaissance period for veteran punk rocker Iggy Pop. At 64, he is surfing a tsunami-sized wave of diverse projects that began with the recent rerelease of “Raw Power,” his 1973 classic with his old outfit The Stooges. Reunited, they play a two-night stand in The City starting Sunday (rescheduled after an August foot injury forced the tour’s postponement).

“I got into a position where I could do a few things I wanted to — that was part of it,” he says of this sudden resurgence. “But mainly, it was that other people started thinking of me, and all these invitations — and opportunities that really were opportunities — came up.”

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner.