Iggy Pop Considering Retirement
Could Post Pop Depression be the last music we ever hear from Iggy Pop? While appearing on the season finale of the BBC's Graham Norton Show tonight (June 24), he gave another indication that he was planning on keeping his shirt on from here on in.
"I will step back at some point," he said. "Another album would be a big undertaking from an old git like me!"
The words echoed words spoken by the 69-year-old Pop six weeks before Post Pop Depression hit shelves. “I feel like I’m closin’ up after this,” he said. “To really make an album, you really have to put everything into it. The energy’s more limited now.”
He took a slightly more serious tone to the idea of slowing down as he gets older on Wednesday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France. "There's a lot of things I can't do now that I could do when I was 25," he said. "But because I was basically kind of a loony, what's happened with me is that the less I can do, the better off I am! But I can do a music show, and I enjoy that. And I can do an advert, or a part in a film, or a radio show. And I really enjoy those things."
Post Pop Depression, a collaboration with Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, reached No. 17 on the Billboard 200, by far the highest charting album of his career (at No. 72, 1977's The Idiot, which was produced by David Bowie, was previously his best).
But even if he doesn't record another note, we'll still be able to hear more from him in another format soon enough. This winter, Jack White's Third Man Books will be putting out Total Chaos: The Story of the Stooges / As Told by Iggy Pop. The memoir promises "candid, bare-all responses" and "the alternately tragic and triumphant story of a group who rose from youth, fell prey to drugs, alcohol, and music biz realities, collapsed and nearly 30 years later reformed, recording and touring to great acclaim.”
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