Lust For Life

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Lust For Life is the second solo album by American musician Iggy Pop, released on August 29, 1977 by RCA Record. It was his second collaboration with David Bowie after The Idiot, released earlier in the year. The album achieved critical acclaim and became Pop's most commercially successful album to date; it also remains his only gold-certified release in the United Kingdom. The Lust For Life sessions took place soon after the completion of a concert tour in support of The Idiot, the tour ending on 16 April 1977. Pop has stated, "David and I had determined that we would record that album very quickly, which we wrote, recorded, and mixed in eight day, and because we had done it so quickly, we had a lot of money left over from the advance, which we split." The singer slept little during its making, commenting "See, Bowie's a hell of a fast guy ... I realized I had to be quicker than him, otherwise whose album was it gonna be?" Pop prepared only fragments of lyrics before singing, and essentially improvised at the microphone. This spontaneous lyrical method inspired Bowie to improvise his own words on his next project, "Heroes". Bowie, Pop and engineer Colin Thurston produced Lust for Life under the pseudonym "Bewlay Bro.", named after the final track on Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory. The recording was made at Hansa Studio by the Wall in Berlin and featured Ricky Gardiner and Carlos Alomar on guitars with Hunt and Tony Sales on drums and ba, respectively. With Bowie on keyboards and backing vocal, the team included three-quarters of the future Tin Machine line-up; the Sales brothers' "gale-force" contribution to this album led Bowie to invite them to join his new band twelve years later ("Check out Lust for Life," he told guitarist Reeves Gabrel, "I've found the rhythm section!"). The sleeve photo was taken by Andy Kent, who also shot the cover for The Idiot. Lust For Life is generally considered to be more of an Iggy Pop record than the Bowie-dominated The Idiot, being less experimental and having more of a rock and roll flavor. However, some of its themes were similarly dark, as in "The Passenger", cited by NME editors Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray as one of Pop's "most haunting" track, and "Tonight" and "Turn Blue", both of which dealt with heroin abuse. In contrast were more upbeat songs such as "Success" and "Lust for Life", the latter of which described by Rolling Stone as Pop's "survivor message to the masses". According to Pop, Bowie's celebrated riff on "Lust for Life" was inspired by the morse code opening to the American Forces Network News in Berlin. At various points in the song, the melody is doubled by the entire band; in Carlos Alomar's word, "You can't play a counter-rhythm to that, you just had to follow". Joy Division and New Order drummer Stephen Morris declared, "On Lust for Life the drums sound not huge but massive! The loudest cymbals known to man, that riff! I wanted to sound like that, still do." "The Passenger" was inspired by a Jim Morrison poem that saw "modern life as a journey by car", as well as rides on the Berlin S-Bahn, according to Pop's former girlfriend Esther Friedmann. The lyrics have also been interpreted as "Iggy's knowing commentary on Bowie's cultural vampirism". The music, a "laid-back ... springy groove", was composed by guitarist Ricky Gardiner. It was released as the B-side of the album's first single "Success". Characterized by AllMusic as "a glorious throwaway" and by Rolling Stone as "an infectious throwaway", "Success" was a light-hearted track of the call and response variety. At just under seven minute, "Turn Blue", the longest song on the album, was a sprawling confessional that dated back to an abortive recording session by Bowie and Pop in May 1975, when the latter was in the depths of his drug addiction. Originally titled "Moving On", it was composed by Bowie, Pop, Walter Lacey, and Warren Peace. It was the only set of lyrics that did not appear on the original vinyl record sleeve. The album's remaining tracks included "Sixteen", the only piece written entirely by Iggy Pop, "Some Weird Sin", a hard rock number featuring a "lost-boy lyric", the "neo-punk" "Neighborhood Threat", and "Fall in Love with Me", which grew from an impromptu jam by the band to which Pop composed lyrics apparently evoking his then-girlfriend Esther Friedmann. Lust For Life reached number 28 on the UK Albums Chart, making it Pop's second highest-performing release in that country after 2016's Post Pop Depression. Initially the album sold well in the US but the death of Elvis Presley caused RCA to quickly reissue Presley's catalogue and any promotional focus for Pop's album was lost. It eventually performed well in the United State, although it only reached number 120 on the Billboard charts at the time of release. Rolling Stone's contemporary review considered that "purely on its own term, Lust for Life is a successful album", but complained that Pop's "new stance is so utterly unchallenging and cautious". "Success", backed with "The Passenger", was released as a single from the album on 30 September 1977. .

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