Art Rocks

Art Rocks kicks off with the infamous rock and roll hell raiser Iggy Pop who reveals his love for Haitian art. After a career of excess, drugs and financial problems, Iggy has turned to painting as a meticulous and therapeutic past time. His Haitian-inspired paintings reflect his constantly frenzied state of mind and allow him to connect to his past.

Voiced by Jerry Hall, the series provides a rare insight into how some of music's most successful showmen have found relief from the industry in the world of art, fusing their boisterous musical talents in the silence of an image.


Photograph: Jamie-James Medina

MixTape: A few words with Iggy Pop
By Larry Ryan

Iggy Pop has been knocking the hell out of rock and roll with raw power for decades, but now, as he displays his more artful side with a documentary about his painting exploits, we had a quick chat with the great man...

Iggy Pop, wild man of punk and famous for his stage-diving antics, answers the door to his ramshackle 1920's clapboard house in the Little Haiti district of Miami dressed the part. He's wearing tight jeans, black suede shoes and a waistcoat over his sinewy torso. His dirty-blond hair frames his hang-dog face and his surprisingly piercing blue eyes hit me immediately as he shakes my hand and welcomes me in.

'I don't like to feel uncomfortable,' he tells me later, after we've toured the house. And in the sticky, tropical heat I can understand why. I feel overdressed in his presence – it's hard not to, he is, after all, famous for having a truly laissez-faire attitude to clothing.

I'm here to interview the great man about his interest in painting. He is the star turn of a forthcoming Sky Arts series Art Rocks, which profiles famous musicians with artistic flair. His little house is a treasure trove of high-art and junkshop finds. Throughout, the lighting is subdued with most fittings sporting a green or red bulb, which lends the dark interiors a voodoo feel in keeping with the neighbourhood. On the sofa sits a giant, pregnant woman carved in foam – a giant voodoo doll of sorts – and the mantelpiece and shelves are cluttered with found objects, painted bowls created by local Haitian artists and skulls. Dotted among the art are pieces of memorabilia – tour photographs, portraits of the artist as a young man, and bright sketches on canvas in red, yellow and black acrylic, which turn out to be Pop's own works.

The day before, I'd explored South Beach, the art déco facades glittering in rare snatches of sunshine between downpours – it's tropical storm season. Each year, this area hosts Art Basel Miami Beach and the whole place feels a little like a work by Jeff Koons. The promenades had been full of poodle-walking beefcakes and surgically-assisted pneumatic women and the restaurants had been packed with tourists looking for the famous Miami good time. I'd hated it.

Out in Little Haiti, the kitsch Americana of downtown fades into a very real sense of place. Here the roads are potholed, the houses wear a worn and weary air of experience and the shops all sport naïve illustrations of their stock – a chicken, a fish, some fruit all colourfully rendered. As the area's name suggests, the population here is largely Haitian and amongst the bodegas and markets are hidden witch-doctors's shops where your tarot can be read, chickens sacrificed and amulets purchased – if you have the courage to go looking for Baron Samedi, that is.

I can see why Pop loves it here. He too has a worn and slightly weary air of experience too. Although, as he puts it, he has a 'real rockstar house with all mod-cons' elsewhere in the city where he lives with his girlfriend and their pets, he clearly revels in the louche, anything goes nature of Little Haiti. At the back of his lot, the lawn of rough, thick-bladed grass slopes down to a small backwater – one of the last stretches of natural riverbank left in the area he tells me proudly. We scan the far bank for lizards basking in the sun and then side-by-side squint against the reflecting light to search out manatees, those large, bulbous, otherworldly creatures that still inhabit these waterways.

Pop uses the house as a sort of bachelor pad. There's a bedroom with crisp Versace linen and fully stocked bookshelves with classics sitting next to more modern works like Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, but the fridge is clearly only used for day visitors – it's well stocked with water, Orangina, Coke and so on, but no food. Pop uses the house as a base in which to read, ruminate and, when the mood takes him, paint. His interest in art began in the Seventies when he was holed up in Berlin with David Bowie. The pair worked on Pop's now legendary album The Idiot – the cover of which features a photograph of Pop pulling a pose he'd seen in an Erich Heckel painting Bowie had introduced him to during one of their frequent afternoon gallery expeditions in the city.

The afternoon slides on – Pop talking passionately and knowledgably about art, enthusing about the solid wooden Norman-era throne he bought at auction and the Haitian painting he got for a song from the wife of the American Ambassador to Haiti – and then it's time to leave. A proponent of punk, a challenger of authority and social norms, Pop is clearly still questing after something dark, curious and unknowable even now, in his sixties. But as we're heading out he spots the child's toy grand piano he bought on a whim and hunches down to hammer out a beat on its tiny keys. He's still got an appetite to entertain.

You reunited with the founding members of the Stooges when recording Skull Ring, do you think you will ever reunite with David Bowie to make any new music?

You never know. The way etiquette in the rock world works is that the larger giant approaches the smaller giant so that would be entirely out of my curfew.

What visual artists are you into at the moment?

Well I was watching Tracy Emin on the TV the other day, and I thought she was a hoot! Jeff Koons is a friend and I'm happy to see him do well as some people didn't get it for a while. There is a guy called Chris Ofili who did an elephant shit painting that so upset the mayor in NY; well, I think he has made some beautiful things.

There is supposed to be a film of your early career being made - have you had any input? Would you be in it?

Would you be in it? No, I don't have any input, I don't want to be in it and I don't know anything about it.

Will you release any new material/albums free online a la Radiohead?

That's not something I'm legally empowered to do at the moment, but if and when, then that's definitely my kind of thing.

What do you think of the US presidential elections? Are you an Obama booster?

I do like Barack, but the election is strange, particularly for someone of my generation to see television advertising used as the most dynamic component in the election. It's very strange because you know that advertising is at the end of the day bullshit, so in effect, we are just giving up. His adman is not as good as McCain's which is a shame. I don't know who is going to win, it's a very delicate time right now.

Art Rocks starts 25 October, 7:00pm on Sky Arts 1. Iggy Pop also features in the next Observer Music Monthly out on 9 November.

Hey, any excuse to post this one.