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Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite on Iggy Pop: ‘It was hard to believe the music was made by humans’

Seeing my first gig, the Jesus and Mary Chain, had a catalytic effect. My gig obsession was snowballing. As I perused the listings, there was one that I could not miss under any circumstance. The king of punk, Iggy Pop, in January 1991.

Hearing Iggy’s first band, the Stooges, had been a life-changing moment for me. Their self-titled album was pretty much my bible. It was druggy, dumb and completely primal. I’d never heard anything quite like it and even though that band had pretty much fallen apart by the time I was born, I grew to love the three Stooges albums as much as any music I’d heard. It was my guitar teacher, Harry, who played them to me first. He played Raw Power and it floored me: “Raw Power has a healing hand / Raw Power can destroy a man!” I hadn’t the faintest idea what this Raw Power was (and still don’t) but I loved the sound of it and knew I required as much of it as possible in my life. Iggy was the living embodiment of that complete don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. The wailing guitars and primal rhythms made so much sense to me. I was enraptured by its intensity and ferocity. It was perfect.

I had a VHS video of Iggy playing live and I watched it over and over. His performance was unlike anything or anyone I’d seen before. He was like a man possessed, doing the weirdest dancing imaginable, getting naked and scratching himself until he bled. The spectacle was great but it was his voice and songs that really captured me. Songs like China Girl were gloriously romantic and railed against the injustices of the world. Iggy was so clearly lost in the performance.

I had another video that featured Iggy, a compilation of performances from Factory Records boss Tony Wilson’s So It Goes show. The performance from Iggy on this was even more mesmerising. It was live footage from the Manchester Apollo where he played The Passenger. It was completely visceral.

One moment that really caught me was when he broke it down halfway through a semi-confessional speech, almost a sermon, and spoke about a girl he met who’d explained that possessions were immaterial and that everything belonged to everyone. I was starting to form a view of how I saw the world and hearing this message struck a chord with my burgeoning anti-authoritarianism. It was perfect – a pristine mix of the absurd and the profound. I adored the music so much that it was hard to believe it had been made by humans, never mind humans that were still alive.

As 1990 bled into 1991, there were a few changes in the world, and for me. Firstly, my mate Neale Smith and I had taken our hedonistic tendencies to another level. I can’t recall which one of us realised that Tipp-Ex Thinner, used to eke out the famous white correction liquid, had another, far less wholesome application. If you dropped some on your sleeve (or a sock) and inhaled it, you got a bit high. If you did it a few times, you got extremely high. The music we were listening to was very druggy, and this new activity went hand in hand with it, creating an undulating, throbbing sense of psychedelia. Music such as Loop, Spacemen 3 and the 13th Floor Elevators had transported me to a spiritual place that felt like a high. Now I really was. It brought me back to a childhood experience in hospital, seeing fractal patterns while my mind blasted the acid-squelched Doctor Who theme into my brain. The short-term downside was that it gave you a bastard of a headache. There was also the small fact that you were pretty much an apprentice glue sniffer and well on your way to being a total degenerate, but that didn’t concern us. We had our little tribe and weren’t paying any mind to what the rest of the world thought.

As little as we considered what the rest of the world might be thinking of us, the outside world itself was getting weirder and a lot darker. In early August 1990 Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, causing disquiet among neighbouring countries and their allies in the west. US president George Bush was making noises about intervening and the UK, as ever, was close behind. I wasn’t overly interested in the news but I’d got a portable TV in my bedroom for Christmas and the BBC had started showing news all night. There was a sense of impending doom emanating from unfolding events. I’d stay up late and, when the normal TV shows or whatever weird film on Channel 4 ended, watch the now endless rolling news, feeling that something dark and unspeakably ominous was around the corner.

Having let his parents know that I’d been to a gig at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow and returned home alive, Neale got their permission to go to the Iggy concert. This was a big deal: the first time Neale had been to a show, and what a debut. In the months leading up to it, we were immersed in all things Iggy. The Stooges’ records soundtracked our weekends and we couldn’t wait to see the man himself. We had got increasingly into the wave of rock bands coming out of Seattle, mainly on the Sub Pop label. Bands such as Mudhoney, Hole and most significantly, Nirvana. Neale had the debut Nirvana record, Bleach, and we’d played it to death. Iggy seemed like an elder statesman to those bands. The Stooges were year zero for the music we loved. Getting to see such a legend was a massive fucking deal.

We studiously prepared for the big night by making sure we had funds for our standard bottle of red label Thunderbird wine each. A Real Cool Time indeed. After school, Neale came to mine and we got a lift from my ever-patient dad to Hamilton for the train with my sister Victoria, who I’m sure was delighted at having now doubled her quota of daft 15-year-old boys to look after.

We were on a mission. Our pilgrimage to see the living embodiment of punk rock had to be as debauched as possible. Well, as debauched as you can get at 15 years old. We tanned our bottles on the train. Utterly buzzing on the wine and the night ahead, we met our pal Kevin McCrorie in the queue. He was as giddy as us at the prospect of seeing Iggy. The usual anxiety about the bouncers proved unfounded and we breezed in unchallenged. We missed the opening band, too busy in the downstairs bar catching up with pals and getting as “moroculous” (a word I think we’d invented for getting fucked up) as possible. It felt like every weirdo in Glasgow was there that night. Punks and goths as well as a lot of older folk who’d grown up with Iggy’s music. There was a real feeling of community, a summoning of Scotland’s misfits.

In a state of heightened, inebriated excitement we ascended the final set of stairs to the venue. Being five-foot-fuck-all we got as near to the front as possible so that we could see the stage. The lights went down and Iggy came on, spinning like a Tasmanian devil and flailing as if he was suppressing a seizure. He screamed at the audience before ripping into Raw Power. When he sang the line, “Can you feel It?” he had the look and sound of someone expressing something incredibly sincere. It was a blistering start, and it didn’t calm down. Five Foot One from his New Values solo record followed, then Loose and Dirt, two songs from Funhouse. Dirt in particular was incredible: the drums playing at a quarter of the pace of the punchier songs and Iggy wailing, “I been dirt / And I don’t care”, a mantra for everyone who’d ever felt like a loser or felt looked down upon.

Iggy’s band were a bunch of rock dudes who wouldn’t have looked out of place in Guns N’ Roses. The record he was promoting – Brick by Brick – even featured Slash. They were shredding over all the songs but it didn’t matter. We were there to see Iggy. It was on a song from that record, Neon Forest, that he altered a lyric to sing: “SCOTLAND TAKES DRUGS IN PSYCHIC DEFENCE” and the whole place went mental. After a decade of Thatcher’s rule, Scotland definitely felt ignored at best, but was in actuality persecuted. We had Iggy on our side. One of us. A soldier in the fight against the system designed to grind us down. The main set ended with 1969, a proto-slacker anthem from the first Stooges album that I adored. “Last year I was 21 / I didn’t have a lot of fun / And now I’m going to be 22 / I say, oh my and a boo hoo.” As he left the stage the noise from the crowd was intense, rising to cacophonous levels as fans demanded more.

When he came back on to play I Wanna Be Your Dog the place went ballistic. I think it’s the perfect song. Simple, hypnotic, dumb and beautiful. By this point Iggy was practically naked and in a frenzy. He addressed the crowd and dedicated No Fun to Saddam Hussein. The rumbling of impending war had got louder over the weeks and Iggy knew that what was coming down the road would not be fun by any measure.

Iggy saved the best for last. Search and Destroy was incredible. With its blistering riff and war-themed lyrics, it felt like being blasted by a jet engine. Iggy, a whirlwind of chaos energy, and the crowd going apeshit. It was an epic finale. I’d seen some great bands but this felt like my first true rock’n’roll show. A unique frontman laying everything on the stage, performing as if it was his last night on Earth.

As we left the Barrowlands, Iggy’s booming voice still rang in my ears. It felt like a baptism of sorts. Iggy was the oldest performer I’d seen (though the same age then as I am writing this – 45) but he had more energy than anyone I’d seen then, or since. He was the glue that ran from the 60s, when John Cale from the Velvet Underground recorded the first Stooges record, to the present day, when every exciting rock band around has hailed him as an influence.

I got home still buzzing with punk rock spirit and went to my room, by now a shrine to rock’n’roll and teenage rebellion. On the walls I’d painted song lyrics and covered the rest in the most random paraphernalia I could find. The mess was so all-encompassing that the floor was a rare sight. It was a fucking riot. I climbed into my pit of a bed, turned on the portable TV, grabbed a sock and the jar of thinner and got utterly wasted. High from the intensity of the night and the solvents, I felt elevated – outside of my body, as if I was looking down at myself in bed.

In my haze, I heard something that brought me back down to earth with a thump. From the TV, the newswoman said that the forces of the US and their allies had started military action against Iraq. There were live images of the bombing. Night vision-style shots of what looked like fireworks flying through the air, then turning buildings and vehicle convoys to dust. This carnage masquerading as news was all announced in an excitable manner by the BBC anchors sitting safe in their studios. No Fun indeed. No fun at all.