Recorded in London 37 years ago, Iggy and The Stooges' Raw Power has become a benchmark for rock at its primal best. Fast forward to 2010 and the original punks return to play the album on British soil for the first time. Music Week talks to Iggy Pop about his career, Raw Power... and Swiftcover

"AN EXHAUSTING IMMERSION INTO A SULLEN SEA OF SEETHING RESENTMENT," is how Iggy Pop describes being involved with The Stooges.

In this exclusive interview, Music Week caught up with the legendary wild man of rock, as he emerged from a swim in his Miami pool, to discuss everything from having fish thrown at him in Norway to his reaction to being inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame last month.

MW: I hear you are drying yourself off?

IP: Yeah, I just stepped out of the pool. I spent a very pleasant hour and a half listening to discs two and three from the Raw Power reissue and a very unpleasant hour replying to various hassles from every old manager and agent I have ever had, who are all very keen to be included in the fun. So I had to jump in the pool to brighten my mood before we spoke.

Are you looking forward to coming back to London and playing Raw Power?

Yeah. We recorded it there and never played it [there]. It took us a while to get this bit of it done. You are supposed to write some songs, record them, release them, talk some rubbish and then do a tour. But we just got to the recording part and got hustled out of the country. We got suspended for moral turpitude and that was that.

How did you adjust to London life?

I was very curious and interested in all kinds of details of life in England. At the time I was curious about who brings these milk bottles in the morning and what's the difference between the gold cap and silver cap; all those little things really interested me, that's just the way I am.

I would wander around Harrods all day. I had three outfits that I wore in London: blue jeans that I brought over from the States with a T. Rex T-shirt, my leather 'let's dress up and go play hard' outfit and a third outfit, which I bought at Harrods. I bought a pair of carpet slippers, I had never seen a pair of carpet slippers before, I was like, 'Wow, those are the coolest shoes I have ever seen.' I didn't realise at the time that you are not supposed to wear them outside of the house. I brought those and a pair of nice black silk PJs and wore that on my off time walking down the street around Fulham and Knightsbridge. It looked good.

Both of your parents were of European descent. Were you attracted to European culture?

I became very enthusiastic on my first exposures to every different national culture in and around Europe.

I had a good time being there. It was three years later that I first set foot on the continent. I was interested in the clothing, some of the philosophy, the science, and, later in life, the film. It finally led to two or three years in which I toured all over Europe while creating a financial deficit. I was going from capital city to capital city playing to 50 people. I would go to Stockholm and 40 people would show up, but to me it was like, 'Wow, wow, here I am, in the Capital of Sweden! What are these people like? What happened here? OK, let's travel for three days over land to Norway and get fish thrown at us.'

I was terribly, terribly enthusiastic. Finally, many, many years later, Europe supported my career, disproportionately to the US.

When you were recording Raw Power, you have been quoted as saying you came up with the opening lines of Search And Destroy when you were on Chinese heroin sitting in Kensington Gardens.

I believe so. I know I was working on the song. But I had help from the US in the form of, I remember pretty distinctly, certainly for Raw Power but I think Search And Destroy as well, a copy of Time magazine. I got a copy from a newsagent on Ken High Street to see what the big boys were up to, so it was both. My ass was in London but it still belonged to America. There was a little of both.

How did you decide what songs would end up on Raw Power?

I can't stress enough how much it helped our group to be in one place with proper food and lodging and a place to rehearse, without playing shows for a few months, to really create some work and consider it and better it. We went through three bodies of work to come up with Raw Power. There was one body of work that came over on the plane with us that is mostly stuff that is out on the Easy Action box called You Don't Want My Name, that had been work in progress that had been rejected in horror by Elektra records. Then the second phase was the stuff that's been coming out on all sorts of bootlegs and is now going to be on the new Raw Power boxed set, and that was too young, too dangerous, too shocking so the manager refused to put me in a studio to record any of that stuff.

Did life in London inspire your writing?

Zeppelin and The Stones had done some pretty raw albums around that time, Exile On Main Street was out and we had that in the house on Seymour Walk when we were coming up with that stuff. It may have pushed us in a slightly more roots-focused direction between the thrashier stuff and the stuff that's on Raw Power - there is a little more Chuck Berry in there and in some ways a little more folk. Communication Breakdown I always thought was a daringly basic piece of writing, really well played. It illustrated that it was unnecessary to guild the lily.
It was a creative time and we were in a town where there were good people doing challenging work. Let's get real, though; a lot of the work consisted of hairdos, clothing choices and the all important 'where did you get those shoes?' - that was vital work every day for your aspiring English dandy. There was all that and then there was some good writing going down.

With the Ashetons initially in America you tried out a number of English musicians but none of them made the grade. Why not?

We considered some people but never went through the audition process, James [Williamson] just finally balked. I would have done it but would have done it as a matter of form; I would have then announced that I wasn't going to work with them. But we listened and checked out a few people that had been suggested and in every instance I thought what they did wasn't compatible with what we were doing.

The album sounds ferocious. Was there any angst in the studio caused by James taking over on guitar and Ron [Asheton] moving to bass?

Ron was cool. We always were and still are a group that keeps our verbiage, as in garbage, to ourselves. Our relationship is to play music to, with, and at each other, with not a lot of talk. There is a lot of rock star attitude in The Stooges.

From day one, years before we ever had a gig, just an hour in the company of The Stooges is what I would call an exhausting immersion into a sullen sea of seething resentment. Because that is just the way they are and then there is me - I am the bridge between them and the real world. That's true when it comes to music and that's kinda how we operate. I can speak their language.

A good description of James' guitar style that I read recently was 'distinctly unfriendly' and that is pretty much how they all were: distinctly unfriendly.

We just all kinda did our thing and it was not a happy atmosphere, but neither was it unhappy. We would have fun as miscreants do. You unite around something that everyone can get together on like we would all agree we should go out and score some chicks or we all agree we should have some drinks or go to a party - that sort of thing.

How did David Bowie come to mix Raw Power?

[Management company] MainMan, of whom I was an employee, decreed that it had to be remixed and that David would do it with me. I was fine with that because he is good and I would be there anyway. I had to be there because I knew the ins and outs of the performances. We did it in a day or two in a studio called Western that had been important in the rockabilly days. The outboard equipment there did not exist, so it was already a big step down in technology from the state-of-the-art CBS Studios on Whitfield in London where we had recorded it.

What was your reaction to Bowie's mix and what are your feelings now in retrospect?

I became unsound at the end of the record through a combination of mental imbalance, my extreme musical tastes and the fact that I didn't know jack shit about mixing a record.

One of the things I didn't know was that there was a step called mastering. I didn't understand that during the mastering process the sound could or should be suppressed, boosted or EQ'ed all over again. I thought once you had a mix the tape went somewhere and magically went to record.

[Bowie's] ideas were good and there was nothing about it that I disagreed with. Sitting there in the studio with David during the mix it sounded good to me.

It's a story that goes on throughout my life - the nearest I get to suicide is the way I feel when I have to listen to one of these things back once they are done. I invest so much in it that I am in a hysterical state once I get one done.

We got the disc back and it seemed extremely quiet and lacking in body. You had to turn it way up to make it sound like what we felt rock'n'roll should sound like. A bit of it was me, the way the bottom is recorded on the album, a little bit of it was David's taste and a lot of it was the fact that everyone was too busy. MainMan was about to dump us and I think it was just sent off unannounced to a mastering lab where an engineer who didn't know or like rock'n'roll probably mastered it between an Elvis Live In Hawaii album and a Perry Como album.

The guys hated it. But honestly the guys hated the whole experience, outside the country of England, they hated being MainMan artists.

Around the time of recording Raw Power you made your UK live debut at The Scala in Kings Cross...

We did, but that was an entire body of material that preceded Raw Power and I can't remember everything we played there. But it included I Got A Right and Give Me Some Skin; it was thrash before there was thrash.

What made you want to pick up again with The Stooges and perform Raw Power after all these years?

After Ron passed away I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea or worth my while to do this, especially because, as I had told James, I had become convinced he was basically Satan on Earth. 'I'm gonna get involved with him again, fuck!' But I just listened to the stuff and it was compelling and we had never done this part of it and I think it needs to be done.

How does it feel to be back in action with James and Scott?

The energies are similar but not the same because you are older and don't have some of the animal prongs you had at a certain point. But by using your intellect and considering things and working hard you can gain points in other areas. In many ways we play this stuff a lot better than many of the gigs we did in the mid-Seventies. We have overcome a lot of the problems.

You are also writing together again. How is that developing?

James has an inordinate amount of energy for someone of his vintage - it's some sort of weird thyroid condition I think. There's something wrong with him.

It's a different flavour, but he still has music in him. I don't think he could write another album like Raw Power because the energy has changed. But it is close and related so we can portray these songs very well. Some of the writing we are doing, he came up with some really fast numbers and I had to sing them like Alvin The Chipmunk, so I hinted at him - how about some ballads?

Will there be a new Iggy and The Stooges album?

I am looking for an occasion. I'm not sure I would want to make another album in light of the non-event that the album format has become. Everyone is rethinking, from selling it themselves to giving it away. One thing that is in the works is that we are in talks with a very high-quality music company out of Germany to record all our shows live and make them available.

On the subject of live shows, is it true that you are reconsidering stage-diving after a painful dive at Carnegie Hall recently?

I was a fish out of water in Carnegie Hall. It was the Tibet House Benefit curated by Philip Glass with a really different sort of crowd. Sometimes the Devil gets in to me; there was a particular bunch in front and they looked like they needed to be jumped. It was an attacking stage dive as opposed to a release. Usually there is a bunch of people who are really into it and you just throw yourself onto their largesse and it's a soft and beautiful moment but sometimes there are people who just need a good arse whooping and I decided I was the guy to give it to them. I bumped into one of the seats and bitched about it, and that's about it.

Being so physical on stage has been a major element of your career. How have you managed to stay so fit for so long?

I do something physical for an hour a day when I can. By about the late Eighties I was already ready to die from my life of crime, but I looked at some people doing Tai Chi in a park in China and I thought, 'That is the thing for me.' I basically had a benefactor, I learned some really good esoteric shit from a Tai Chi master in New York city and that definitely added 20-25 years to my career and has been good for me all the way around.

You have been nominated numerous times for the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. How did it feel to finally be inducted?

Have you ever tried to wipe your dog's arse when he didn't want you to? You know that face that they pull? They growl, they try and run, they try and bite you, but sooner or later they know that they are gonna get what's coming to them. It felt kinda like that.

It is a really insidious thing because to begin with you don't place yourself in the nomination - I never called or wrote to anyone or responded to a letter asking me if I would be available to be nominated. Somebody just nominates you and you find out about that one day and all of a sudden you are in this competition, you are in Miss Teen America or something, you are in a beauty pageant that you didn't ask to be in. Then there is all the psychological gymnastics of whether you will then be the chosen one. It was a pain in the arse from which I have found relief.

Your brand association with Swiftcover in the UK has drawn both support and criticism while doubtless heightening your profile. What made you sign up?

The one good thing about being me is that I have nothing to live down that I have not already lived down.
It came along nicely. Initially they offered me a huge shit pile of money and that just put me in a good mood to begin with. That brightened my outlook. They didn't come on too quick or too strong, it was step-by-step and very clear what the script would be.

I had a good time doing it. I loved the idea of an inanimate object being brought to life to portray me, this is where I have been heading for quite a while; eventually I would like to have a whole team out there doing all the work for me.