100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Search and Destroy

02 Gimme Danger

03 Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell (originally titled ‘Hard to Beat’)

04 Penetration

05 Raw Power

06 I Need Somebody

07 Shake Appeal

08 Death Trip

Writer Clinton Walker noted that the common factor among the first wave of punk rock bands was that they shared ‘the secret knowledge of the Stooges’. However, in 1972 no-one much cared for them. Two albums of the most elemental rock & roll ever made (The Stooges and Fun House) had zero commercial success. The band had broken up. Pretty much their only fan was David Bowie. Iggy Pop was part of the inspiration for the character Ziggy Stardust and Bowie returned the favour. ‘I had no money, no prospects,’ guitarist James Williamson recalled. ‘Then Iggy calls and says David Bowie wants him to come to London. Iggy brought me over, and then we brought the Ashetons over, and so now it’s the Stooges, who nobody in their right minds would want as pop stars. Then Bowie got big and they forgot about us. We were left with no adult supervision.’

Between 10 September and 6 October 1972 the Stooges let fly in a London studio. Few bands in the history of music had been as misanthropic as the Stooges – working class kids who, when together, channelled decades of bad drugs, bad homes and evil into transcendentally beautiful, brutal art. Williamson had joined the band and relegated Ron Asheton to bass, further deteriorating the mood. Iggy Pop, who had no idea how to use a studio, was the producer. ‘We didn’t really understand multi-tracking or any of those concepts,’ said Pop.

Nonetheless the songs were magnificent. The opening line on the album is genius: ‘I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm’. Only Iggy Pop could deliver the line and only James Williamson could back it up. His power chords established a massive wall of sound and then his riffs cut through it like a hot knife through butter. Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr describes Iggy as ‘both demonic and intellectual, almost how you would imagine Darth Vader to sound if he was in a band’. ‘Search and Destroy’ is the most violent and magnificent rock & roll. As the guitar rips through to a climax and Iggy sings ‘I am the world’s forgotten boy’ it doesn’t get any more rock & roll than that. ‘The drugs we were taking heightened what was already a sense of acute disrespect for the music industry and the phony shitty music it was churning out at the time,’ said Iggy.

Iggy’s songwriting was on a roll. You can tell from the titles – ‘Gimme Danger’, ‘Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell’, ‘Raw Power’, ‘Death Trip’ – that these are not campfire songs, they’re Molotov cocktails. In 1972 when the talk was all about James Taylor, this wasn’t the prevailing taste. ‘Gimme Danger’ featured some nice acoustic guitar but the mood was malevolent and alienated. ‘Shake Appeal’ has some nice riffing but it is delivered at breakneck speed and Iggy’s vocal sounds more than half crazed.

When once asked to describe the sound of the Stooges, Iggy Pop smashed a glass. Lots of groups can make a big, ugly noise but the Stooges never sounded like that. They captured the emotions of fear and nihilism and expressed them convincingly.

Iggy Pop delivered the album and Columbia records declined to release it. Bowie stepped in and remixed the record in one day. ‘David was interested in the primitive aspect of the Stooges,’ said Iggy. ‘I think to him we were a bunch of Neanderthals. I see his point.’

Raw Power was the right record at the wrong time and Iggy was soon the forgotten boy at least until the Ramones and the Sex Pistols brought the sound of the Stooges roaring back.