12. Iggy & The StoogesRaw Power
He’s the best frontman of all time. Iggy Pop and Nick Cave are up there for me in different ways, but Nick Cave didn’t invent the stage dive. I could have picked any Stooges, but Raw Power has everything. I picked this mainly because of my love for Iggy Pop. When Post Pop Depression came out last year I fell in love with it, a collaboration between two of my favourite artists [Pop and Josh Homme], and to see this man play the Royal Albert Hall and stage diving is pretty fucking next level. It was a monumental moment.
I was quite young when I first heard The Stooges. I had a couple of weird mixtapes my uncle had made. He was into stuff like The Specials but there were a few random tracks on there and the Stooges were one of them. Now, any time I have to DJ I mainly just play Iggy. He’s got so many classic songs that you don’t have to think about it, you can just turn to him first, a decent 40 minutes of Iggy Pop, then fill it out with whatever else you need to put in.
Iggy’s hits are a bit stretched out over his entire career, but Raw Power‘s got my favourite lyrics he’s ever written. It’s got the song ‘Raw Power’ which is just next fucking level and it’s got ‘Search and Destroy’. "I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm". If you want to sum up how a man feels walking down a Hollywood street feeling like a badass, it doesn’t get any better than that. The name of the album says everything you need to, it’s where I took inspiration from when I was trying to come up with Modern Ruin.
