Iggy Pop: the wildest iguana shakes the foundations of the Teatro Real

Iguanas are long-lived reptiles that often exceed 20 years of life on the face of the earth.

But the singular and unrepeatable hominid iguana that appeared this Tuesday night on the stage of the Royal Theater is contemplated for three quarters of a century, and the vigor of its spasmodic movements allows confidence in its status as a protected species.

Because the man who invented punk almost unintentionally retains the pride and hunger for the stage of a pipiolo, a circumstance so inconsistent with biological dictates that it can only be explained by appealing to some diabolical pact.

There was curiosity to know how long Iggy Pop would wait at this Universal Music Fest to show off his hairless and skeletal torso, the one that has made him an icon of non-textile transgression.

The answer was simple: exactly 10 minutes, the time it took for

to play , the first of its wildest classics from the days of The Stooges.

First the jacket was unbuttoned, with nothing underneath.

Two minutes later, James Newell Osterberg was a blatant, wild, bare-chested ferocious.

And the audience in the stalls, who had barely maintained their seats and decorum, gathered around without further protocol at the foot of the stage.

Iggy Pop, at a moment of his concert at the Teatro Real in Madrid on Tuesday, July 26.NABSCAB

Those very young and brutal Stooges harbored at the end of the sixties the insane pretense of inflicting physical damage, literally, on the public.

The plan was simple: raise the volume of the instruments to excruciating extremes, almost unbearable.

Half a century later, Iggy is surrounded by a brutal septet of musicians, including a couple of brass, to address the assault on our eardrums.

It was amusing to contemplate a guy with such a criminal aspect in tables as distinguished as those of the Real, a temple of

whose foundations would perhaps never have supported such an overload of decibels in its illustrious and centennial history.

Having overcome this severe stress test, today we can only congratulate ourselves: if nothing has cracked, the ancient facilities will more than hold up until the times of our great-great-grandchildren.

Effusiveness is a happily expansive attitude, although it is still difficult for us to assign positive values ​​in this semantic field of contagion.

The truth is that Iggy Pop had the ability to concentrate the two biggest hits of his career,

and

, in the first third of the repertoire.

And when the second leads to his euphoric humming, that "La la la la" that his great friend David Bowie bawled in 1977 (and that over the years has ended up immortalizing even the automobile industry), the otherwise circumspect theater becomes an uncontrollable rush of endorphins.

The Royal Theater hosted an Iggy Pop concert this Tuesday.NABSCAB

The wall of sound that Phil Spector was talking about was something else, but what the veteran lizard's septet builds is quite similar to a reinforced concrete dam.

There is no mercy not only with our auditory pavilions, but also with the pit of the stomach, where the physical sensation ends up concentrating that we are being subjected to a colossal rock tornado without palliatives.

Osterberg repeats a lot of "fucking" on the rare occasions he opens his mouth, about once every three or four words, but in a fleeting moment of sentimentality he seems to fall apart before our eyes.

“You have made me lucky, I feel fucking good.

I am a fucking old boy and I know I have to die”, he notes with the seriousness of metaphysical certainties.

But everything turns out to be a clever ruse to impress a greater anger load on

, again by The Stooges, a new finding that no one was as stupid as those four kids from Detroit who seemed nice but behaved like real demons.

Iggy has done a lot more—and maybe even more interesting—since those wild, uncivilized records.

Among the recent pieces,

combines trumpet and synthesizers as in the beautiful soundtracks by Mark Isham, and

could be an almost

's gem on some night more accurate with the tuning.

But it is he himself who seems to enlarge, who knows if in a fit of implicit nostalgia, the myth of his unredeemed youth.

“I was young, poor and dirty.

Even today I'm still dirty”, he laughs before recovering

, a statement of obsessive adhesions that starts from a deceptively slow and confidential tone before going crazy.

And already engaged in work, nothing like

, which dispenses with all musicality to become a scream, sputum and gasp.

In apotheosis of pure animal irrationality.

Iggy Pop, at a moment of his concert in Madrid on Tuesday, July 26.NABSCAB

That ending is so fiery, with the iguana even crawling on the ground, that any encore is doomed to suffer a severe eclipse.

That is why Iggy does well to return to the stage to the beat of

, one of the most moving arguments in the catalog of his latest album, that

(2019) in which at times, and this is one of them, seems to approach to the rhetoric of the most crepuscular Johnny Cash.

But there is more feint than conviction in this austere, transcendental and restrained septuagenarian, because for the last three snapshots of him he relapses into those first godfathers of punk.

Perhaps that Peter Pan that we all carry inside has become strong in Iggy Pop.

Or perhaps the explanation is simpler: having survived everything, even the unbridled excesses and friends who, in comparative terms, seemed Little Sisters of Charity, Iggy intends to go to the last breath with his boots on and screaming.

, he prayed his last sound missile of the night, at the gates of the hour and a half of recital.

And it was true: more than one would return home as if his head had been blown open.

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