Festival Hall, 21 April, 2019
OMFG… it doesn’t get much better… The complete show…
– filmed with the full permission of the Iggy and the band… gotta love that.
The night as it happened.
As the lights went down, the anticipation along the front barrier was palpable. The idiosyncratic “Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings Op.40 by Gorecki” was piped through the PA – and in much the same way David Bowie used “Ode to Joy” (from Symphony No. 9 (1824) back in his Ziggy heyday, it built the pre-show tension beautifully… Kevin Armstrong tells me the idea for choosing it as the opening music was all Iggy’s.
<3 with Bruce Butler Adam Robert Jones-Dean Yi Yee Louise Coulter Cass Ruffy Brian Smith Scott Glazbrook Karen Conrad Sarah Tarr
https://www.gettyimages.com.au/photos/iggy-pop-naomi-rahim
The view of the stage with Iggy Pop on his 72nd birthday… before it all got messy… Looks like all those in the front row were having NO FUN! What an amazing show. So thrilled I got to share it with (almost) all my mates… Thank you to the man of the hour, Kevin Armstrong, for your generosity and the blistering riffs…
Photo courtesy John Raptis Photography – Visceral Industry
(shot from the balcony on his trusty iPhone.)
When Iggy got to the end of Real Wild Child, he was already on the verge of going into overtime but the crowd just wasn’t going to let him leave so he came back for just one more… dusting off ‘Down On The Street’… When he’d finished that the applause was deafening so as he stood there soaking it in, he said, “Oh Shit Thank You! This is very nice to do this together so… fuck… we know one song… it’s kinda Melburnian… so here it is… RED RIGHT HAND baby!”
After the gig had finally ended having gone two songs overtime on Iggy’s insistence, and the band had left the stage and we thought it was all over, Iggy reappeared one final time as it seemed he had one more thing he wanted to express. He was handed a microphone but refused it. He came center stage took three bows, took a deep breath and then got down on one knee, eyeballed the crowd solemnly, lowered his head for a moment…
Then, with a twisting bound and a friendly last wave, he was off into the night… a small heartfelt acknowledgment from him to us all just what a fantastic night he reckoned we’d all had. Magnificence personified.
Call it dogged determination… Call it fate… Call it karma… we’ll never really know I guess, but somehow, against all odds Kevin Armstrong‘s setlist found its way into my hands at the end of the night. Thank you Kevin for every little thing you did last night… It truly was a gig for the ages.
Photos below courtesy of John Raptis Photography.
