Iggy Pop – ‘Post Pop Depression: Live At The Royal Albert Hall’ [DVD Review]
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Iggy Pop is pretty good at picking out quality collaborators. In 1977 – almost forty years ago – Pop and David Bowie produced a pair of legendary albums in The Idiot and Lust For Life. Both were billed as Iggy Pop solo albums – as was this year’s Post Pop Depression, produced by Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age and featuring the additional talents of Queens’ Dean Fertita and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders.
Post Pop Depression: Live At The Royal Albert Hall is a full-scale onslaught of art-rock songs cherry-picked from the aforementioned albums. It also showcases one of the music world’s most famed and infamous characters in full flight, backed up by his Post Pop Depression band and additional personnel Troy Van Leeuwen and Matt Sweeney.
From the moment set opener Lust For Life kicks in and lives up to its name, any young rock musician watching is going to want to be Iggy Pop when they grow up. Amid a musical landscape in which young musicians so often choose to slot themselves into pre-prepared boxes in the hope of maximising their profitability, Iggy Pop still represents total, uninhibited freedom. Whether performing unfazed despite busting his head open or allowing the front row to get as close to the stage as possible, the star of the show shows over and over again that he hasn’t abandoned the personality traits that got him through a long and eventful career.
One of the most recent and tragic events Iggy Pop has had to deal with is the loss of the unseen second star of this show: David Bowie, who died of liver cancer in January this year. Post Pop Depression is a fitting tribute to one of pop and rock music’s brightest black stars, seeing a slew of Pop / Bowie co-writes endowed with bottomless grooves, sinful melodies, attitude-laden solos, and idiosyncratic introductions from Iggy Pop himself.
Above all else, Post Pop Depression: Live At The Royal Albert Hall represents a salute aimed somewhere beyond the sky, the near-mystical performances contained within rendering this DVD endlessly rewatchable.
TMMP RATING: 97% (Essential Viewing!)
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