the Holy Show And the Devil's Music

Although I was actually present in the Point Depot on the night - wedged rather uncomfortably somewhere between the VIP's, the wannabe VIP's, the professional sycophants and the people who'd actually paid for their tickets (gasp!) - I mostly saw the 1999 Empty-V Europe Music Awards exactly the same way you probably did: on television! Sure, if I'd wanted to strain my neck I could've watched the ceremony as it happened in real time, all the way over there in the distance on the main stage, but somehow it was easier to just watch it on one of the many screens dotted around the venue - to monitor by monitor, so to speak. The only problem was, you couldn't change the channel!
It all started promisingly enough. In fact, watching gnarly old Iggy Pop blast his way energetically through show-opener 'Lust For Life', I briefly entertained the notion that the whole event might actually live up to its hype, that somehow it might turn out to be a really exciting show. Alas, as you probably saw yourselves, it didn't happen that way . . .
But then, how could it? Anything that had been pushed, plugged and promoted to the extent that this would-be extravaganza had, couldn't possibly hope to deliver. Expectations were just too high. Certainly, there was a major buzz around the city over the couple of days preceding the Awards, as at least some of the local population - and most all of the media - went into a frenzy of the kind of excitement only the collective aura of 150 household names gathered together in the one place at the one time can muster. The rumour mill began to spin so quickly it probably could've powered the entire event if you'd wired it up.
For two or three days, Dublin became the playing field for a spirited game of 'Spot The Celeb'. Of course, the celebrity prey weren't all that hard to hunt - the Sunday Independent had helpfully printed a list of the hotels where all the major stars were staying, thereby causing rock ... roll to stop the traffic more than once around the city centre on Thursday night.
And certainly, there were some major stars around - a celeb to cater for just about every taste. You wanted sexy - there was Andrea, Britney, Whitney and Carmen. You wanted loud, nasty and gimmicky - meet Marilyn Manson and The Offspring. You wanted indie cred - step forward Brett, Damon, Huey and Karl. Lightweight pop - meet . . . (actually, you don't really want to meet any of that lot). And as for major stars? Hi Bono! Alright there Mick? Puffy! We're over here homes!!!!
Naturally enough, the tabloids had a field-week reporting on who had been seen where, who had been spotted with whom and so on. Meanwhile - along with the glitzy gossip and celebrity tittle-tattle - a series of far less useful facts and figures were being excitedly relayed from MTV Central to the world media. Twenty-three hotels around Dublin were fully booked for staff, celebrities and journalists - a total of over 3,000 hotel rooms! An amazing 30km of cables were wired into The Point to power the 40 tons of electrical equipment being utilised! The after-show bar was stocked with a cool 10,000 litres of Carlsberg and Guinness, 400 litres of Finlandic vodka and 350 litres of Jameson whiskey! The backstage make-up artists would be using over 50 different shades of eye shadow, 150 make-up sponges and at least 50 different shades of lipstick on the night (and that was just for Marilyn Manson!). Rather embarrassingly, a fleet of limos had to be imported into the country to transport the acts around the place (couldn't they just have ridden on the backs of Celtic Tigers?). And so on . . .
With hype like that, perhaps it was inevitable that it would be a disappointment. At this stage, the MTV Awards are to the music business what the Oscars are to the movies (well, sort of) and, naturally enough, they carry an equal amount of bullshit with them. So much bullshit, in fact, that when Nick Cave received a nomination for 'Best Song' several years ago, he promptly asked for it to be withdrawn out of respect for his muse. Like Werner Herzog, Cave probably subscribed to the "prizes are for horses!" philosophy. But then, Cave's a serious guy, not one for flippancy and frivolity when it comes to his art. No such qualms with this bunch though. The likes of Ronan Keating, Geri Halliwell and Puff Daddy wouldn't recognise the A-word if it got up and bit them on their designer clad bottoms.
I'm going to presume you've
already seen it and save you the blow-by-blow account. After all, if MTV can be believed, over a billion people worldwide tuned in (presumably all of those music fans in Turkey, East Timor, Istanbul and so on took time out from their busy lives to marvel at Geri's see-through dress and Whitney's bottom). Chances are that you - like me and everybody sitting around me - choked on your Carlsberg when you heard that Boyzone had won 'Best Album', Backstreet Boys had won 'Best Group' and Britney Spears had won, well, anything at all . . .
Still, it's a bit of a pointless exercise bitching about it. Moaning about award ceremonies is a little like moaning about the rain - no matter what you say, they'll still be there. The late great Bill Hicks - never a man afraid to call things as he saw them - had a great expression to describe the kind of phoney shenanigans that are the norm at these kind of affairs. He described all acts of corporate sycophancy as "sucking Satan's cock", and watching the on-stage antics at the Point - the fake back-slapping, the corny one-liners, the fixed grins, the mock surprise - you couldn't help but realise he was right. Still, I was there and I didn't have to be, so I guess that makes me also guilty of at least licking Beelzebub's balls, if not engaging in full-on fellatio.
Besides, I didn't actually vote - did you? - so I can't really begrudge the likes of Will Smith or Eminem their awards (Best Male and Best Hip Hop, respectively). Another of the statistics floated out by the MTV press office was the fact that if all the time spent by people voting for the Awards on the web was added up it would total more than 15 years! The mind boggles. The story is that over two million votes were cast, thereby making the Awards the most-voted-for show ever. Maybe that's why Britney Spears won four awards and Boyzone beat Lauryn Hill and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the 'Best Album' stakes. I mean, call me old fashioned but isn't By Request a Greatest Hits album?
But there I go bitching again. And some of the awards were well deserved - The Offspring's 'Best Rock' and Bono's special 'Free Your Mind' trophies are two that automatically spring to mind (though The Cardigans' 'Best Nordic Act' gong should surely have been renamed 'The Biggest Fish In Small Pond Award').
Still though, as an event that was being primarily staged for television, The Point gig never really managed to generate any real atmosphere. As a crowd, we were mostly there for show - a fact highlighted by the hired "fillers" waiting in the wings to jump into your seat every time you went to the bar - and even spirited performances from Iggy, Underworld and Marilyn Manson failed to really get the crowd going (that's the real crowd, mind, not the paid "screamers" up front). In fact, the only time the crowd really came into its own was when it booed Britney Spears every time she thanked Jesus Christ for her success.
But then, it's hardly surprising that Spears played it so clean. The sad truth is that she probably meant it. You see, they don't really make rock stars like they used to. Earlier in the week, the papers had reported that a major cocaine haul in the city had been destined for the stars of the MTV Awards. However, the word from backstage was that the vast majority of the visiting celebs were the cleanest-living people encountered in Dublin in a long while - and that debauched sex, drug and rock ... roll incidents were notable only by their absence.
In fact the biggest controversies were probably logistical. Ms. Maria Carey, for example, was dissatisfied with her dressing room (which had been stuffed to the brim with fresh flowers and bottles of champagne, as instructed on her rider). "I wanna different room," the star whined. "This one smells of gasoline."
"It's funny that," one of the backstage operatives (almost) answered, "because Diesel are one of the sponsors." But he didn't, and the histrionics thereby were kept to a minimum.
All of which really made Boyzone's Shane "Fucking Shite" Lynch the man of the match, really! Bandmate Ronan Keating may have done a grand job as presenter (and hopefully he got several hundred grand to do it!), but Lynch's threat to keep Boyzone up and humming for yet another year was priceless. While his drunken outburst may have been embarrassing to some, it was probably the most rock ... roll moment of the whole show. Which, when you think about it, is more than a little sad.
Oh well, the Empty-V Awards - they happened in Dublin. Next year they're happening in Stockholm. They'll happen somewhere else the year after that. Life goes on. Same as it ever was.
* Olaf Tyaransen
"Did y'see his eyes/Did y'see his crazy eyes?" - 'Neighbourhood Threat', Lust For Life, 1977

2am, November 12, 1999. The pallid cadaver of white trash rock'n'roll just got an IV drip stuck up its sagging jacksey, and the reanimation has begun.
Look! The beast's eyes are opening! It's alive!
Up in the gallery, all-star witnesses gawp: Mick Jagger, John Hurt, Jim Sheridan, The Corrs, Damon and Alex from Blur, scraps of Suede, Sinéad, The Offspring, Alicia Silverstone, MTV bigwig Brett Hansen. Yet despite the high celebrity count, all eyes are locked on the stage. Doctor Jim Osterberg commands that kind of attention, especially when he's ritually disemboweling The Kingsmen's 'Louie Louie' with the gusto of a starved veloceraptor.
But there's another reason why jaws are hitting the floor: Bono - still covered in the glory of his MTV Free Your Mind award - decides to test his Free Man Of Dublin privileges by leaving his seat, clambering over the balcony (with a little help from The Edge), mounting the stage and joining Iggy in a duel. Here are two contrasting versions of rock 'n' roll's Napoleon complex: one stripped to the waist, his very torso a slab of performance art; the other in a suit and shades, sparring and ad-libbing like some Italian mobster doing karaoke Elvis in front of a chickenwire metal band.
Then, just as you're de-fogging your contact lenses, Brian Warner (aka Marilyn Manson) materialises Lugosi-like over Bono's shoulder to add his raw bawl to the deceptively primitive din. Minus the greasepaint and satanic regalia, in a fedora and leather coat, the guy looks just like one of the lanky dweebs who buy his records in the millions. Sweet dreams are made of disease.
Nobody wants to leave the stage; it'll take 'Johnny B Goode' and 'TV Eye' (incorporating a patriotic interpolation of Them's 'Gloria') before the two guests have scratched the exhibitionist itch that Iggy performances inspire even in the rich and famous.

Rewind an hour. The glitterati have traipsed all the way up to Abbey Street from The Point, in search of strange. The MTV Awards had been a squeaky clean affair, dominated by goody-two-shoes schmoozers who completely failed to take on board the cultural differences between American and Irish audiences - hence Britney Spears and Puff Daddy being greeted with healthy cynicism by a Point audience intolerant of patronising megastars thanking their publicists, record companies, therapists . . . and God. It was up to Shane Lynch to fly the flag for indigenous devilment, cussing live to the planet and allegedly laying into Sean Combs and entourage at an after-show bash in Temple Theatre.
So, by midnight, the rowdier element were looking for some weird sin. They'd attended the Sunday Service, now they wanted the devil's music. While Britney, Whitney and Mariah were getting their beauty sleep before catching early flights out in the morning, the celebrity death cult junkies were desperately seeking Iggy, in the unfeasibly intimate environs of HQ.
But not before Simon Carmody and sidekicks Conor Brady and Fiachna O Braonain, had treated them to a handsome acoustic set built around songs old ('I Never Came Down', 'Friends In Time'), new (the gorgeous 'Stay Free'), borrowed (Johnny Thunders' 'I'd Rather Be With The Boys') and blue ('Dark Girl'). So far, so good.
And on the stroke of one, Iggy Pop doesn't so much walk as ooze onstage, already shirtless, as a snatch of his soundtrack to Johnny Depp's The Brave seeps out of the speaker stacks (which are all but nailed down - no doubt many of the HQ crew remember the last Pop-mart at the Mean Fiddler in '96, when the singer seemed intent on ripping up anything that wasn't firmly secured. In that gig's aftermath, a weary techie proudly regaled this writer with tales of his wrestling match for a monitor mixer that Osterberg seemed hell-bent on pitching into the crowd. Wanton acts of destruction such as these substantially knock the profit margin off an Iggy gig, but it's precisely this mindless abandon, the ability to cancel out his rational voice at all the right wrong moments, that makes him one of the great live acts.)
So, he's here, crouched in front of a knee-high mic like some Cheyenne priest deep in smoke-shack meditation, a face like Mount Rushmore, lank hair, radioactive stare. "It was in the winter of my fiftieth year when it hit me," he begins. "I was really alone, and there wasn't a hell of a lotta time left."
Hardly the peanut butter 'n' blood sandwich opening we've come to expect from The Igster, but these days he's more likely to self-lacerate with paper cuts than broken glass (check out 'She Called Me Daddy' or 'Felt The Luxury' off Avenue B). And he keeps the lid on the pressure cooker for 'Nazi Girlfriend', crooning, "I wanna fuck her on the floor/Among my ancient books of lore," in a voice that sounds simultaneously soothed and pussy-whupped, his mouth twisted into the kind of pout that suggests one of those deep-sea creatures from the National Geographic channel. Then, at the tune's conclusion, when he tosses his acoustic aside and stands upright, it's like watching some freak of evolution emerging from Jurassic murk: the torso ripples, that formidable gob expels a glob of hockspit, 'Espanol' kicks in and . . . heeeere's Iggy!

Remember Bruce Banner deadpanning, "Don't make me angry - you wouldn't like me when I'm angry," as a prelude to his startling metamorphosis into The Incredible Hulk? One wonders what gets Iggy's goat before a show - you can bet Charlie Darwin would've given his eye teeth to observe the altered states which befall Dr. Osterberg as he morphs into Mr. Pop.
And as 'Raw Power' bulldozes into 'Search And Destroy' ("Ah'm the world's forgotten boy!"), it's possible to feel all vestiges of inhibition being shook loose by the shock waves coming from the stage, with the entire assembly becoming gripped by cro-magnon delirium. That'll be that ol' Dionysian impulse, then.
In an era when would-be Irish Iggy acolytes are dazed 'n' confused, cowed by corporations or just plain out of ideas, the man himself offers historical and cultural pointers for native dum dum boys which don't automatically derive from the garish Celtic designs of Horslips or Lizzy, or the myshtick soul of Van (mind you, he does have much in common with the simmering carnality of Al or Isaac or brother James, or the revivalist frothings of Little Richard).
Of Pop as a performer, Lester Bangs wrote in 1977, "he has got a fantastic body; it's so fantastic he's crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some unimaginable freedom. It's as if someone writhing in torment has made that writhing into a kind of poetry, and we watch in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what inspired it in the first place."
And, if you'll quit sniggering at the back, I'll go so far as to assert that Iggy is one of the few rock 'n' rollers still operating on a shamanistic level, still prepared to psyche himself into a total state of physical and mental frenzy. Every society, no matter how sophisticated, needs its holy fools, some cosmic fall guy to blur the line between boffin and buffoon, endowed with an animalistic magnetism that has less to do with fame, notoriety or power than an understanding of entertainment-as-pagan-rite, a celebration of the most primal human urges. Hendrix and Morrison had that instinct. Jagger and Bowie did too, but found it too taxing to sustain, so they eased into the role of razzle-dazzle showmen. Patti Smith, Bono and Neil Young still have it. Axl has it, but he's hiding it. Henry Rollins and Nick Cave are learning it. Iggy's made it his speciality.
But a word in your ear about the band: The Ig has long been guilty of employing big-hair metal hacks to do his dogwork for him, and given the amount of wickedly inventive American players out there, one wonders why he's carrying these guys. Does he require automatons who are strictly subservient to their kaiser's wishes? Still, at least they have the smarts to keep their playing armour-plated and elemental, leaving the brutal drones of tunes like 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' relatively unsullied by poodle-twaddle.
That's not to say rudiments and repetition alone are the key to finding the lost avant-chord - if it were that simple, Status Quo would be jostling for store-space with Steve Reich. But, as Uncle Lester once put it, "Many (60s avant garde) jazz drummers, like Milford Graves and Sunny Murray, were distending the beat into a whirling flurry that was almost arrhythmic, or even throwing it out altogether. So if you could do that, why couldn't you find some way of fitting some of the new jazz ideas in with a Question Mark And The Mysterians type format?"
The Stooges first two albums answered that question for him. And granted, in 1999 you'd need an improvisational unit on a par with Coltrane's trio or Crazy Horse to fully replicate the kind of psyche-melding telekinesis Iggy and co exhibited circa Fun House. The Stooges were an eight-eyed animal so out-there and in-here, they even had a name for their symbiosis: the 'O' mind, which that other arch-Iggyphile Nick Kent nailed down as referring to "those times when the individuals in the group spread out around the communal 'bong' and got even more righteously stoned than was normally the case. At this stage all conversations would cease, eyes would fall shut, heads would tilt back and minds would feel like they were opening up, like there was a big 'O' shape where their brains had formerly been, this hole looking down through the subconscious and then back through to the dawn of time itself, back to when dinosaurs still roamed the land, when strange birds of prey hung in the skies and where large prehistoric amplifiers vibrated with the horrendous howling of strange tribal madness."
My point being, the want of a band to match Iggy's own fearlessness is the last pesky detail keeping his from being The Greatest Show On Earth. These days he's fronting what amounts to the Australian Stooges, a superior covers act, one capable of mastering the swamp-rock groove of Johnny Kidd and The Pirates' 'Shakin' All Over', the greaser shuffle of 'Wild One' or the spastic funk of 'Corruption', but find the slinky 'Felt The Luxury' off Avenue B (a tune which harks back to Bangs' vision in its splicing of the free jazz aesthetic to gonzo rock confessionals) harder going, and so, must recast it as a narcoleptic blues.
And if sometimes Iggy himself seems like he's worn out the phrasing of classics like 'Lust For Life' and now approaches those vocal lines like perfunctory incantation (notwithstanding ad-libs like, "Hey, I'm just a modern guy/You know I've had it in the ass before!"), well, sometimes these titles are better treated not as reproductions of their recorded versions but as on-the-spot vents for raw expression. And he is a great vocalist (as distinct from singer, although he can do that too, producing a ripped velvet croon when the occasion demands), employing a whole host of guttural noises, nocturnal emissions, grunts, hoots and war whoops, a non-textual vocabulary somewhere between James Brown's foot-stomping 'Hah!' punctuation marks, a young Jagger's feral drawl and Jim Morrison's throaty exhortations.
Apt then, that 'The Passenger' is Iggy's extension of Jim's old voyeur-in-the-cityscape angle, a hoblegged lurch that inspires the friendly fire of plastic tumblers and a dozen or so stage invaders - this is the kind of show where even the musicians crowd surf. And by the time messrs Hewson and Warner have been and gone, and the band are gnawing the marrow out of the closing 'No Fun', the traditional boundaries between audience and performer have become so battered that The Offspring can push their way to the second row almost without remark.
So, rest assured ye unbelievers, while this Iguana still crawls the earth, rock 'n' roll is alive and kicking. The guy's a force of nature, and like the worst twisters, fires, famines and floods, they'll still be talking about this gig in ten years time.
* Peter Murphy