Iggy Pop (33 page)

Keyboard player Barry Andrews, a founder member of quirky Swindon popsters XTC, was another new recruit brought in to add some New Wave credibility. Since leaving XTC, Andrews had dropped out, living in a squat and, he says, practising ‘extreme sex’. For a while he’d worked part-time at London Zoo, so it soon became a standing joke with the musicians that Andrews was there to add a certain English weirdness. ‘Whaddya expect, he came from a zoo!’ At his first lunch with Jim and James, Andrews thought Williamson seemed exceptionally straight - almost excessively concerned with being the efficient, radio-friendly producer. Jim was charming and bizarrely flirty, ‘as he seemed to be with all the young boys,’ says Andrews. But once he joined the rehearsals at a studio near Borough Market, he was bemused to discover how casual it all seemed. Glen Matlock was the closest thing to a bandleader, the one who told everyone the chord changes, but overall there seemed more interest in the large bins stocked with cold beers than in honing the material. It all seemed thin, ill-prepared and worst of all, says Andrews, ‘No one was flying the plane.’

At this point, although it had been a struggle casting around for inspiration for lyrics, Jim seemed unconcerned. So far, all of his albums had come together at the last moment, and there seemed no reason why this time should be different. But as the tapes rolled at Rockfield Studios, and the band and Peter Davies settled into their quarters, scattered round the farmhouse just outside Monmouth in the rolling hills of the Wye valley, the atmosphere started to become increasingly tense.

James Williamson was proud of his recording prowess, and chatted proudly to Klaus Kruger about the subtleties of microphone placement that he’d learned at Paramount, but as far as the musicians were concerned, his idea of being professional was to order retake after pointless retake. ‘James would go, Let’s do it again and do it again as though this was some test of his production rigour,’ remembers Barry Andrews. ‘Which it wasn’t, of course; instead everyone was getting tireder and tireder and it was sounding worse and worse.’ As the musicians became increasingly fatigued, Matlock’s bass and Kruger’s drumming became more and more leaden. Williamson, who had never wanted to record out in Wales, realised the project was spinning out of control, and, according to Glen and Klaus, who called him ‘Straight James’, he started to brandish a bottle of vodka and a revolver around the studio. ‘The word was it was loaded - but I didn’t ask,’ says Matlock, who unsurprisingly didn’t complain about the repeated requests for one more take. As Williamson started knocking back more and more vodka, he also started to fixate on how to synchronise two tape machines to allow 48-track recording, which caused endless technical delays.

Julie Hooker was the A&R at Arista who was directly overseeing
Soldier
, as well as Simple Minds, who were recording at Rockfield’s other studio. She also had to field Clive Davis’s calls, as he monitored the tiniest details. Julie liked and respected Williamson, with whom she agreed deadlines and budgets. Like Charles Levison, Hooker was optimistic about the project; she’d heard the rehearsal tapes and they sounded great, but as the recordings dragged on, frustratingly slowly, she increasingly found herself walking in on confrontations between singer and producer. On some of those occasions, she’d catch Williamson blinking back tears.

Marooned in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, the participants had little distraction from the tension that was obviously building. Only Barry Andrews, who was essentially a visitor to the mad musical world of Iggy, seemed immune, wandering off into the countryside with the attractive young tape operator whose name was Mariella Frostrup, with Andrews keeping an eye out for magic mushrooms. The others found Andrews enigmatic, but they were amazed, when the tapes rolled, by the way he instantly conjured up a variety of dazzlingly inventive keyboard parts. There were some moments of light relief, notably a drunken party for Julie Hooker’s birthday on 13 September at which each musician performed skits, but Williamson seemed constantly concerned by distractions that threatened to make the recordings overrun. Each evening, the band would play back rough mixes of the day’s work on a ghetto blaster in the dining room; every now and then, Barry or Glen might record something peculiar or ridiculous as an experiment or a laugh. Whenever that happened, or someone was taking too long to work up an idea, Williamson developed the habit of telling them, ‘Save that for the dining room.’ When Iggy attempted to sing anything too out there, he would get the same comment. ‘Dining-room music meant music you play for your own pleasure, which is ultimately wanking,’ says Andrews, who noticed Iggy getting increasingly irritated whenever the phrase was uttered in his direction.

The recordings were running well behind schedule when three guests showed up at the studio. One of them came to play guitar. Two arrived for moral support. Ivan Kral had received a phone call from a friend at Arista who told him that Iggy was looking for a guitarist. David Bowie and Coco Schwab had simply come to help their friend.

According to Jim Osterberg’s account, David Bowie breezed into the isolated studio looking like the Scarlet Pimpernel, complete with cape. Not everyone else remembers the theatrical garb, but all of them remember a drama in which, when the curtain whisked away for the final denouement, several of the key actors had met their end.

It seems that David’s original plan was simply to dispel the air of gloom surrounding the recording. To do so, he seemed to take as a model Iggy’s hilarious monologues that had so captivated the musicians working on
Low
. After a few scattered conversations, which charmed most of those present - Steve New was particularly starstruck, gazing at David like an adoring puppy, while a couple of members of Simple Minds had also dropped by to share the excitement - he gathered a small audience round him in the control room after dinner. Everyone listened in rapt attention as David chatted and joked, sipping from a glass of red wine, before embarking on a long, enthralling yarn about a character named Johnny Bindon.

Bindon was a one-time gangster who’d made his living as an actor and at one point worked as a bodyguard for Led Zeppelin. David recounted event after event of his shocking, bizarre life, such as the time he worked as an enforcer for the Kray Twins and cut a gangster’s head off in a pub, or the story of how he won a police bravery medal for rescuing a drowning man when it was he who’d thrown the victim into the Thames in the first place. The best part was how Bindon had the biggest cock in London - an attribute that was particularly appreciated by Princess Margaret, who’d invite him to stay over with her on the island of Mustique, or call him over for ‘love trysts’ at Kensington Palace.

All of the musicians sat around laughing at the incredible tale - all of them, that is, apart from James Williamson, who sat there glowering. They started chatting about how being a criminal could be cool, better than being a musician, particularly if you had royal connections. Soon ideas were being scattered around as Iggy picked up the story, improvising a rap about Bindon and Princess Margaret. Fired up with enthusiasm, they trooped into the studio.

Suddenly, the sessions were coming alive. James Williamson had kept invoking all these rules about how you make a hit record, but now Bowie was showing how it really should be done: throwing out the rule book and creating a stimulating environment. He was a creative playmaster, taking charge in an unassuming ‘Mind if I have a go?’ manner. It was touching to watch; David and Jim had obviously been through a lot together, and here David was, revelling in Iggy’s creativity ‘in that way that properly creative people do - where somebody’s talent isn’t a threat to you, it’s something to be delighted in,’ says Andrews. James Williamson, meanwhile, seethed at what he saw as the intruder’s pretentious posturing, and retaliated for having his session hijacked by flicking a switch on the control board that sent piercing howls of feedback through David’s headphones. Despite Williamson’s efforts, they soon crafted a song, with a stripped-down synthesiser backing, chugging drums, an ‘I wanna be a criminal’ chorus and lyrics based on a hilarious spiel from Iggy, along the lines of ‘I wish I was Johnny Bindon with the biggest fuckin’ dick in London and a private income . . .’ Sadly, that line never made it into the final version of ‘Play It Safe’.

For the first time, thought Andrews, it felt like they were making a record to be proud of, and he was privately speculating about how cool it would be to have Bowie stay on and produce the album, when a loud argument broke out between Iggy and James. James was trying to explain how his job was to produce an album that would get on the radio, and that rude lyrics about Princess Margaret were guaranteed to get the record banned. And at some point, he uttered the phrase, ‘Save it for the dining room, Jim!’

‘Fuck you about the dining room, James,’ was the reply. ‘And I don’t think you belong on this project.’

Bowie, meanwhile, looked into the distance in a ‘This is all nothing to do with me’ manner, before everyone shuffled away, embarrassed, and then went to bed. By lunchtime the next day, James Williamson, David Bowie and the enigmatic Coco Schwab were all gone. ‘It was like a stage play where all the lights go dark,’ says Andrews, ‘and when the lights come up again there are three fewer people left around the table. And the feeling is, what’s gonna happen now?’

What happened now is termed ‘a salvage job’. Charles Levison arrived in Wales to counsel his troubled artist. Tarquin Gotch drove down in his company Ford Granada and also called in to see Simple Minds, whose sessions too had hit problems. Simple Minds insulted him to his face, as was customary etiquette with one’s A&R man in that era, broke into the Granada and splattered farm-fresh eggs and cowpats all over the seats. (Ironically, Gotch would later nursemaid Simple Minds’ first worldwide hit, when he included ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ in the music for John Hughes’ hit movie
The Breakfast Club.
) Meanwhile, Peter Davies rushed around with an ‘I’m the next guy to be sacked’ look on his face. Rockfield engineer Pat Moran helped finish the recording; Iggy seemed to suffer a loss of confidence, repeatedly failing to nail the vocals, even attempting takes in the farmyard in search of the right vibe. Ivan Kral added some searing guitar solos, augmenting Steve New’s effects-laden New Wave guitars. There were odd moments of inspiration, when Iggy threw out existing vocal melodies and reworked the songs from scratch, but the sessions dragged on and on, the tedium relieved only by an argument between Iggy and Steve New, who’d declined the invitation to join his live band. Barry Andrews was so bored that he would drive down to the local girls’ school and stand outside, desperate to see some young, happy faces. Finally, the recordings were deemed complete, although the mix was postponed until later. Julie Hooker was so fraught with worry about the project that she didn’t even consider whether the album was any good. ‘Just the fact it was finished was a relief.’

There were a couple more minor twists in the troubled saga of
Soldier
, an album that, like a classic Hollywood turkey, was crammed with collaborators and co-writers, none of whom would take responsibility for the awful mess. The first twist came in New York a few months later, when Ivan Kral was hanging with Iggy at the Mudd Club. A serious-looking David Bowie came up to him and chatted about how it was all going before saying, ‘Ivan, you know there is great respect among the British people for royalty and the British crown. Even though that was a great take, can you do me a favour and not release “Play It Safe”?’

When the album was mixed by Thom Panunzio over the Christmas holiday, the mentions of Johnny Bindon and Princess Margaret that had provoked the final split between Jim Osterberg and his friend James Williamson were completely excised. Even more bizarrely, the rousing guitar parts played by Steve New disappeared too, making the album sound lumpy and disjointed. Glen Matlock had contributed his favourite recent composition, ‘Ambition’, to the album, and as far as he was concerned the bizarre mix was an act of sabotage by Iggy, performed in revenge for New’s refusal to tour with him. ‘I was really annoyed about “Ambition”,’ declares Matlock: ‘[Iggy] mixed out Steve’s part ’cause he bore a grudge. But he mixed out the hook to my song. And that’s why I didn’t want to bother with him any more.’

It’s hard to know how much difference a better mix could have made, for
Soldier
was Iggy’s first truly uninspired studio album. There were some intriguing, quirky lyrics and a ragbag of interesting ideas, none of which threatened to gel into a coherent whole. Nakedly exposed in the absence of New’s electric guitar, Kruger’s drums and Matlock’s plodding bass seem to be playing different songs; there are tom-tom fills on songs like ‘Ambition’ that sound like an irate child tossing a drum kit down a stairwell. The wit and intelligence of Jim Osterberg is gone, to be replaced by empty manic babbling, in a kind of ‘Don’t like this idea? Here’s another crazy one!’ desperation. Worst of all, the magnificent, proud voice of Iggy Pop seems to have completely disappeared, to be replaced by either a thin yelp, as on ‘Loco Mosquito’ or ‘Dog Food’, or else, as on ‘I’m A Conservative’, an exaggerated warble that sounds like the mooing of a cow. Only Barry Andrews’ cheeky, chirruping keyboards betray any semblance of musical invention, scattered all over the record like chocolate chips on a cowpat.

The reviews were kind, as befitted an artist of Iggy’s status, bandying around words like ‘quirky’ and ‘interesting’. Radio play was, naturally, notable by its absence, while the album struggled to number 62 in the UK charts (in the typically perverse manner of the music business, Clive Davis elected to release
Soldier
immediately in the US, where it briefly appeared at number 125). But the most telling assessment of
Soldier
came from Barry Andrews who, again in typical music-business fashion, had to buy his own copy of the album that spring. ‘I was flattered, there were so many of my keyboards on it,’ he says. ‘Then, quite quickly, I realised it had none of the virtues of a good Iggy Pop record.’ For years afterwards, when friends discovered he’d played on an Iggy album and excitedly asked him which one, he would reply, ‘The one that came
after
the good ones.’