We’ve just come back from The Stooges at the JJB/Puma Arena, sweaty, exhausted and exhilarated. Rarely have we ever seen a performance so elementally powerful, and rarely have we had the urge to get right down the front and go mad like we did tonight.
“We are the fucking Stooges,” says Iggy. Kicking off with ‘Loose’ and ‘Down On The Street’ is quite a beginning, but following it up with ‘1969’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ is something else. Then you get ‘TV Eye’, then ‘No Fun’, then ‘1970’. This is some show – these are more like nihilistic hymns than songs, more like forces of nature than constructed tunes.
Iggy scales the speaker stack, undoing his trousers. He jumps down to meet the crowd, and the bouncers stand up on the rails, telling each other to push us down if we try to invade the stage. This isn’t Snow Patrol, that’s for sure.
The Stooges are mostly over 60, but it’s hard to believe how hard they rock. We might be sweaty, we might be exhausted, but we’ve just seen one of the best gigs we’re ever likely to see. Long live The Stooges.
Words: Tom Pinnock