Friday, 19 November, 1999, 21:57 GMT
CD Review: Iggy Pop

Iggy Pop: Avenue B (Virgin)

By the BBC's Chris Summers

Bleak. There is no other word for Iggy Pop's latest offering, Avenue B, which finds the high priest of punk facing up to the fact he is now 50.

While his old buddy David Bowie is happily married to the model Iman and prospering with a variety of Internet businesses, Mr Pop has just come out of the other side of a painful divorce from his Japanese wife Suchi.

Mortality and loneliness are therefore the lifeblood of this rather anaemic album.

Iggy, born James Newell Osterberg in 1949 in a small Michigan town, burst onto the music scene in the late 1960s when his band, The Stooges, produced the most iconoclastic music since Bill Haley.

It was punk, years before punk had been invented.

Rollercoaster life

Thirty years down the line, punk rock is long dead and classic Iggy Pop tracks such as Lust for Life, The Passenger and I'm Bored are reduced to backing tracks on beer and car adverts.

Iggy has survived one of the craziest rock 'n' rollercoasters (drugs, self-mutilation, drugs, numerous relationships, drugs and more drugs) and on the eve of the millennium finds himself once again down on his luck.

Iggy Pop is known as one of the most vibrant live performers in the business

Having moved from sunny Los Angeles to chilly New York, he is in manic depressive mode.

That is not to say the great Iguana is short of female admirers.

Avenue B is full of ballads cataloguing some of his recent conquests - Nazi Girlfriend, Miss Argentina, I Felt the Luxury.

Honest lyrics

But they are empty conquests, bereft of love or real passion.

For Iggy, this is his most self-revealing album yet, his most honest lyrics.

In She Called Me Daddy he appears to hold his hands up to wrecking his marriage.

At times during the two-minute monologue you half expect to hear the suicidal slash of razor blades or the recoil of a Colt .45.

The Guardian's Tom Cox claimed the grand old man of punk had become a "tedious, self-pitying bore". I disagree.

Return to form

Surely a man who produced albums of the quality of 1973's Raw Power and 1977's The Idiot deserves the right to say what is on his mind, rather than acting like a bubbly, fake teenager.

Avenue B fits neatly into the Iggy Pop pantheon, and is certainly an improvement on its predecessor, Naughty Little Doggie, and his 1993 album American Caesar.

Of course, there are some poor tracks: Long Distance, Motorcycle and Facade, but producer Don Was (whose CV includes work with Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison) makes lively use of eclectic instruments such as Hammond organs and tabla.

Overall, this is not an album which is going to have new recruits flocking to join Iggy Pop's fan club but it is an interesting offering by one of rock's true legends.