Iggy Pop
In the Meadows, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin
★★★★☆
Shirtless and heedless of the passage of time, a 78-year-old Iggy Pop brings Dublin’s In the Meadows festival to a blistering close on Saturday night with a performance that doesn’t so much roll back the years as carpet-bomb them with aplomb.
Iggy rocks into Ireland the same age as Donald Trump, but there is no sense of cobwebs needing to be knocked off as he begins with TV Eye, The Stooges’ molten classic. His energy is extraordinary, as is his ability to recycle the same sinew-stretching dance moves throughout the evening without your ever feeling that’s he’s repeating himself.
Iggy is part of classic rock’s golden generation, yet he never stands on ceremony or comes across as overawed by his own mythology throughout a thrilling show. He is instead powered by the same punk fervour that drove his notorious early, riotous tours with The Stooges, when he would emerge from mosh pits bloodied and bruised. He doesn’t go so far in Dublin – though he does rush the barrier during another Stooges milestone, I Wanna Be Your Dog.
The set leans heavily on Iggy’s golden years – which included a spell sharing a flat with David Bowie in cold-war Berlin. Yet there is never even a hint of nostalgia throughout a turn that feels powerfully rooted in the here and now.
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Banter is kept to a minimum, though he does attempt a Conor McGregor-style “Hello, f***ing Dooblin” accent at one point. Otherwise, the night is a story of literally charging the barricades – while he also plunges into the mid-1970s hit The Passenger and Lust for Life, the Bowie tune that made him a mainstream star.
For a 90-minute set, Iggy doesn’t have quite enough bangers to avoid a few misses. The pace slackens halfway through, by which point the singer and his band are reaching for the Stooges B-cuts 1970 and I’m Sick of You.
The cold that has descended over Kilmainham gets to Iggy, too, and he twice requests a jacket – leading the unsettling sight of pop’s most famous bared torso being zipped up.
Yet these are mere speed bumps. He brings down the curtain on a breakneck performance – and a winning second serving of In the Meadows – with the hectic one-two of The Dee Jays’s Real Wild Child (Wild One) and the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin banger Funtime. Old-school rock has rarely felt so timeless and incendiary.
