Iggy Pop and Josh Homme: A meeting of musical minds

March 18 will see the release of ‘Post Pop Depression, the 17th Iggy album, and a worthy addition to the musical legacy spawned with the immortal trilogy of The Stooges, Fun House and Raw Power.

“I wanted to be free,” recalls Iggy. “To be free, I needed to forget. And to do that, I needed music and Josh had that in him. So I set out to provoke an encounter. He got revved up and we had a great big rumble in the US desert.”

The idea of the album began with a simple text that Iggy sent to Josh saying “it would be great if we got together and maybe write something sometime”. It was three months before Homme got back to him. Once they started working though, the album quickly came together.

“It was all a little hard to get your head around,” Josh said, picking up the story. “He sent me this package. He knew that the ‘Lust For Life’ album was very big for me, and he said: ‘I’ll send you stuff, some lyrics and things that are important for me, and I’ll send you a breakdown of ‘Lust For Life’, song by song.’ I was like, ‘wow’, that willingness to give an insight into something that I love meant a lot. The agreement we had was that this was to go where neither of us had gone before – we had to go all the way.”

The duo financed the album themselves, and began writing and recording together last January, with Homme enlisting his Queens Of The Stone Age bandmate Dean Fertita and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders (pictured above with Josh and Iggy).

“We paid for it ourselves,” Iggy said. “But of course it was made to be heard, not to be some quirky thing we did just for kicks.”

Homme said the album was an attempt to pick up where Iggy’s 1977 albums ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Lust for Life’ left off.

“We didn’t want to copy them, but take the same direction that they were heading,” he continued.

“That direction actually goes for miles. And when you keep going for miles, you can’t see these two records any more.”

Iggy, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has long been hailed as the godfather of punk for the music he made with the Stooges in the late 1960s and early 1970s; raw and chaotic songs that he performed with reckless abandonment.

He followed those years with a solo career littered with Stooges reunions and collaborations with musicians from Green Day to Guns N’ Roses and others – Josh included – eager to fall under his influence.

Homme is also a part-time member of Eagles of Death Metal, the band led by his friend Jesse Hughes that was performing at the Bataclan in Paris when terrorists attacked in November last year.

He had planned to be onstage but changed his plans. “I guess it was my fate to be home.” he said.

“Bad things are like a sunset; they dissipate over time. But this is a very long sunset. How will they unsee all that they saw?”

Preparing ‘Post Pop Depression’ was one thing that helped him cope with the aftermath of the attacks. “The fact that I had this to work on saved me,” he said.

It’s a record that wouldn’t exist without either Iggy or Josh, and rock n roll is all the better for it.

‘Post Pop Depression’ hits the shelves on March 18.

The pair are set to go on tour later this year. For dates, visit iggy pop