Photo: Strauss/WireImage

Iggy Pop is the coolest motherfucker ever. Yesterday, he released a killer album called Preliminaires, and we rang him up at his pad down in the Cayman Islands.  

"Did you ever spend time in the real life smoking section in the airplane?" was the first thing he said to us. "It was cool, right? Whenever I see your little logo, I always remember how the ashtrays used to look."

We're flattered!

After melting faces on 2007's Stooges reunion album and tour, Iggy is heading in a completely different direction with Preliminaires, a collection of moody ballads. The disc is inspired by French writer Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of Island. "I would describe it as a 'fucking good read,'" Iggy told us of the post-apocalyptic story of a man and his dog. "It was thought-provoking, it had soul, and it spoke to me."

In 2007, Pop was commissioned to write a few mellower songs for a documentary about Houellebecq. Working in solitude -- "I have a basic hatred of producers, products and being produced," he says -- Pop ended up with enough material for an entire record.

Iggy's a national hero in France, and he croons en francais on the standard "Les Feuilles Mortes" ("Autumn Leaves"). Says Iggy, "Finally, I can say, 'Thank God for that junior-high French class.'"

In other Pop news, Iggy has said the Stooges are talking about playing shows to celebrate the 1973 masterpiece, Raw Power. Founding guitarist Ron Asheton died in January, so the idea is contingent on the return of ex-strummer James Williamson. "We've been talking," Iggy says. "It would have to involve James."

Check out "King of the Dogs," off Preliminaires, below, and click the jump for our full interview with Pop.

Iggy Pop - "King of the Dogs"

How did the book end up in your hands?

The author was coming up on my radar, and the things I can remember were that there was one particular interviewer, a female, I want to say she was English, and for some reason, I want to say she published her encounter with him in England, Ireland and maybe Time magazine. “He’s a drunk, he tried to proposition me! His hair’s falling out, he slobbers, he’s ugly!” I thought, “Wow, sounds good, tell me more about this guy.” That was part of it. I was hearing review section phrases: “Repugnant,” “unlikable.” I was curious, basically, and I got a friend in France to give me…it was a bootleg poetry translation. You never really think of poetry as something that’s bootlegged, but in this case, it was somebody who had taken it upon themselves to translate some of his poetry into English, and it rang my bell a little bit, it reminded me of a guy named Baudelair.

Nothing happened for a while, because I’m a musician and I move about as fast as a lizard when it comes to actually…periodic cultural upgrades. At one point, I told my assistant, “Get his new novel,” I’d heard he had a new book, and it took me a year, I got the book, and read it, coincidentally or not, in France. It just so happened that it came in when I was on my way for a tour that started there, and I had a few days off. I spent those few days with the book, all I did was read that book in a dirty little French seaside town, and other than that, I’d run into Ron Asheton at the bar, and that was my life for four or five days. I had what I would describe as a ‘fucking good read,’ it was a page-turner, it was thought-provoking, it interested me on a skill level, but it had soul and it spoke to me, and it was basically midlife crisis sci-fi, and I understood. On top of all that, I knew the airports, I knew the media offices, I knew the people, the places, the restaurants, all the references.

So that was about it, a year went by, and nothing happened. During that time, I had this little song which is on this record now, it’s number two, called, “I Want To Go To the Beach,” and I’d written that while I was doing different things with the Stooges, and just wrote it on a little acoustic, alone, and thought to myself, one eyebrow raised, “Hey, this is pretty well done, well constructed, the point is there, the resonance, it’s what you feel,” and the rest of me was going, “Shit, nobody’s ever going to hear this, because it has no place in the band I’m in or in the sorts of things people generally ask me to do,” it could be depressive. So that was just sitting there, creating sort of a problem for me. “Gee, I feel closer to this than other things I’m doing.”

These Euros popped up, some Euro documentary creators, out of the blue, by email, over the holidays of ’07, and they contacted me and said, “Look, we’re doing a documentary film on the writer and his attempts to direct his own film of his book, The Possibility of an Island.” So I thought, “Ah ha, wow! Great!” They were juts looking for, at that time, they told me they were trying to get a couple of Neil Young songs, a little bit here, a little bit there. I got the feeling a few months later that they probably asked Houellebecq what musicians he liked, so he knew the Stooges, he told me later when we met that he’d had a gas in a listening booth when he was about 10, and he put on “1969,” and it was a mind-blower for him.

So nobody made the connection that you’d read the book and you loved it?

No, not at all, they just had no idea. I kind of jumped on the thing, and originally, I really thought it was going to be a couple of acoustic songs, and I’d probably record them cheaply and alone and get my rocks off and that would be that. Then this guy, the guy that produced it, Hal, who had been the bassist in my touring bands and on a couple of my records up through the late Nineties, he popped up after 10 years, we hadn’t been working together. Just during the same week that I met with these guys, I played them this one song that I had sitting around, “I Want To Go To the Beach,” and they thought, “Yeah, that’s the kind of thing,” they encouraged me. I could see they were not going to fuck with me, so I felt good about the whole thing, I felt like I could create and nobody was going to stick their finger up my ass while I tried to do it.

They left me some footage of Houellebecq trying to make his movie, which is pretty hilarious, since the guy doesn’t know anything about how to make a movie that anybody wants to see, and he also doesn’t give a flying fuck. Basically, he’s a super-eccentric, talented, spoiled literary l’enfant terrible.

So right that week, Hal sent me an email and streamed me some music that I’d done over at his apartment on Avenue A about 10 years ago, and it was me singing “Autumn Leaves” and “How Insensitive” and a couple of other things like that, trying to do standards and bossa nova and torch singing, for want of a better word. He wrote a little note, “I’ve gone into production since we worked together,” he’d been doing documentaries about ants, regional McDonald’s jingles, that sort of stuff. He said that maybe these were better than he realized at the time, and I started playing them with the footage that I had, and they kind of fit. At the same time, this guy had married a French woman and had three little bilingual kids, and he had read the book, the same book, and so had his old lady, so I thought it would be nice. “Autumn Leaves” feels like Houellebecq. In this footage, he looks very vulnerable and very willful at the same time, and I thought, “That fits,” and we sort of started from there, and at the same time, I thought at first I would maybe use a bit of an old track that he had, because I have a basic hatred of producers, products and being produced, I don’t like any of it. It doesn’t really ring my bell.

I was listening to Louis Armstrong around the time that I got this commission, and there was a scene in the footage where Houellebecq is auditioning dogs, it’s pretty funny. There’s this hyper-intellectual French literary auditioning people with their mongrel dogs in a French regency drawing room with all the crap, the weird curtains and the gold dripping off everything, and these little dogs are rolling over and playing dead, all that shit. So I thought, “I’d like to write a Louis Armstrong style song, Jelly Roll Morton style song,” and I did, but then the way I write them, just on a little acoustic, clunking out the chords, and I record on a businessman’s voice recorder, that’s as much as I want to do, after that, the whole thing is a bore to me.

So it didn’t really sound very New Orleans, since there were no horns and no clarinets, no nothing. I have a guy, Spencer, who is a wiz with computers, I’m not. He streamed it for Hal, and I said, “If you’re a producer and want to produce something, how much would it cost me to get a Dixieland style track of this?” and he gave me a great deal. So I was in the record business. He sent it back to me, and I loved it, it was a beautiful track. I took it into a little demo studio in Miami, and I liked the vocal and I liked not seeing Hal, and I liked not meeting the musicians, too, it was great. I was on my own with my imagination. That began a year-long, very slow correspondence, and that’s how this thing was done, basically. I would write little things and send them out, like take out food, I’d get a track.

Then you’d go lay down another vocal, and that was it?

That was about it, except that it got a little more complex. There was a lot of me…he kept nudging me, “Hey, what about that other song of yours, you want a track for that?” “No, I don’t want a track, you’re a producer, fuck off, I hate you,” and then he started sending me tracks on spec, “I did this anyway,” and I would sort of grump for a couple of weeks, and I realized, “Gee, it’s actually better than mine.” So it’s a lot of give and take, and a couple of things, he wrote things, music with no words, sent them to me, and I thought, “That feels like…” What happened that wasn’t supposed to happen was that I was meant to write music for their film, which is basically a bunch of people talking, it was kind of boring. So I began writing music to scenes I remembered from the book, so I wrote my own alternative sort of score. It kind of went like that.

And meeting him, what was that experience like?

He wears the same parka all the time, so he had on the parka. He’s an interesting person in that I was gonna meet him in a bar, and he didn’t really enter. All of the sudden, he was just there, is the best way I can say it. He’s a very quiet person, and since I’m occupationally half-deaf, I ended up spending a lot of time with him leaning over with both my hands cupped over my ears. He’s got an accent, too. He’s very easygoing if you don’t poke him. He’s a nice guy, basically a good old standard nice guy, and enjoys a laugh. We did a couple of interviews together, and at one point, as people will, they’ll ask me, “So, what do you think of his social views, what about what he says about romantic love, childhood, blah blah, old age,” and at one point, I was recounting his view about the tyranny and destructiveness of the modern child, and he started laughing, he gets the joke. He thinks it’s funny. Frankly, there’s a lot of truth in his books, I think. So that was about it. He was encouraging. Before I met him, he started emailing me, as I was sending him the tracks to these guys, and you had to read between the lines. I never heard, “This one sucks,” I heard, “Good, better, best,” that sort of thing. He’s got his opinions like anybody else.

How’s your French before this project?

Finally, I can say, “Thank God for that junior high school French!” I finally got something out of it. I wondered what I was doing in there every day. I had it in junior high, and because of what I do and because my old man was an English teacher, I’ve always been real interested in etymology and similarities, root words in different languages, constructions and stuff like that, I get off on that shit, like a stamp collector or something. Between that, and I made an album or two over there, I can order breakfast very, very well. I understand all the road signs.

You know where the library is.

Yes, I know where the library is, right. But I don’t have a conversational capability. I can understand if I had to read a five-paragraph piece in Elle magazine and tell you what it was about, I could pretty well get it, like that.

You have a place in Mexico, right?

I sold it. When the record business kind of shifted east, I didn’t have the occasion to be out west so much. That and the big bang right now.

Where was it? West coast?

Yeah, Baja, California – Los Cabos.

You’re down in the islands?

I’m in the Cayman Islands, yeah.

Are we going to see you perform this stuff in America?

This little voice keeps whispering to me, “Café Carlisle.” So I don’t know. Right now, I’m not planning on it, but I think it will have a way of popping up somewhere, somehow. It’s all New York cats. The reed player plays so beautifully, Mark, he’s a Broadway guy, and all the fellas are either Broadway or session guys from the city and from Woodstock. I’m going to see them again, we were over there a month ago and we did most of these songs, and then we worked out “Minnie the Moocher,” “Put a Spell On You,” and a couple of mine. We even did an Andrews Sisters number, and it was fun, and we’re going to go back and do it as a radio broadcast now, so now I’ve got them learning…I said, “If we can do that, what about ‘Shotgun’ by Junior Walker?” So we might be up to about 12 songs, at which point we could pop up somewhere and do something.

Or you could write some more new ones.

Yeah, this is it, I’m kind of interested.

It doesn’t seem like a foray into jazzier, slower music, it seems like this is where your heart is and where it might be for a while.

Yeah. There’s a sort of parallel strain going on in my musical life, which is the future of the Stooges. Basically, wherever that goes, if it goes anywhere live, that would involve James, at this point, that would be the only valid stone that we haven’t turned yet. So we’re kind of talking, but it’s different. In the Stooges, I’m starting to feel somewhere between an accompanist and animal trainer or ringmaster. At the end of the day, it’s this sort of big gas guzzler, and you turn it on and you can’t really…you can kind of point it, and that’s about it. It’s like, “Whoa!” That’s OK. I do enjoy singing, I like it, I enjoy it, and it’s kind of an interesting challenge, learning where to phrase, where to breathe, what’s the feel for a song, things like that.