Iggy Pop to reform with the Stooges and play Raw Power for first time in 36 years

Yowza...this is a biggie and the news comes all the way from Australia! Thanks to Lindsay & the Barman for the tip!

AMERICAN rock 'n' roll legend Iggy Pop is planning to reform Iggy and the Stooges to perform their seminal album Raw Power, 36 years after it was released.

The news will please Pop and Stooges fans around the world, who, for a variety of reasons, have not seen the group play some of its most famous songs, such as Search and Destroy, Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell and Shake Appeal.

Three of the four original members of the Michigan band re-formed as the Stooges in 2003 and toured regularly for five years, including in Australia, but they played nothing from Raw Power because the band's line-up changed after its first two albums, the Stooges and Funhouse.

When the band became Iggy and the Stooges to make their third album in 1973, guitarist Ron Asheton was replaced by James Williamson and Asheton played bass.

Also, Pop was a heroin addict at the time, one of the contributing factors in the Michigan group's split soon after the album came out and flopped.

Asheton, whose brother Scott is the Stooges drummer, died of a heart attack in January this year.

Pop, 62, told The Australian on Tuesday that he had plans to re-unite with the remaining Iggy and the Stooges line-up, with noughties Stooges addition Mike Watt on bass.

Pop said that while the original Stooges ended with Asheton's death, “there is always Iggy and the Stooges, the second growth of the band''.

“I had a meeting in LA last week with James (Williamson),'' Pop said. “It was the first time we had seen each other in 30 years. So we talked about doing something together. Raw Power would be the repertoire.''

The landmark album, mixed by Pop's friend David Bowie, has been cited by Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and many other rock stars as their favourite album and is considered one of the most influential in rock history, despite the fact that it sold so poorly on release.

Pop also revealed that Asheton had left six or seven “hard-driving rhythm tracks'' that could also be used in a future project.

Pop, who has had a largely successful solo career for the past 30 years, has just released a left-field, jazz-influenced album, Preliminaires, inspired by French writer Michel Houellebecq's novel, The Possibility of an Island.