March 5, 1977 - Melody Maker

IGGY STARDUST

NEXT to Mick Jagger's adroit signing of the Rolling Stones to EMI, after months spent hooking such different fish as Virgin, RSO and Polydor Records, there has been no more interesting subject of speculation in music gossip than the whereabouts and plans of David Bowie.

Rumours of fascist studies in Berlin, of an Hitlerian cult and Howard Hughes-style intrigues, of heart illness and severe depressions depressions may have been on the level of Photo-play and Silver Screen, but then "stars" who cheerfully admit their own manipulation of the media should hardly complain when the media start making their own inferences. "Musicians," after all, usually like to increase public knowledge of their relationship to their work.

The stories were amplified when it was recently announced that Bowie had produced, arranged and co-written all the songs on "The Idiot", the first album for almost four years by his protege (if that's the word), Iggy Pop, once of the Stooges. Not only that, but it was said that Bowie was managing, or at least "directing", Iggy's career. Suddenly he was Sol Hurok!

Harald Inhülsen was soon on the telephone from Braunschweig, a town about 200 kilo-metres outside West Berlin. A young film-maker, Harald is better known as the president of Iggy's European fan club at least, to British music papers. He sends out nude photo-graphs of his girl-friend, Mechthild, the self-styled "Iggy's only true fan". The latest show her lying akimbo on large posters of the former Stooge,

Harald had this story about their assignations with Iggy. He would call them up, and they would meet him at some specified place in Berlin. Sometimes Bowie was with him, though they hadn't seen him for three months. Yet Iggy would never reveal his phone number, nor where he was living. Harald said Iggy was frightened of upsetting Bowie, with whom he lived, and who was near-paranoid about people locating him. The German press, it seemed, were stalking him around Checkpoint Charlie with notebooks, tape recorders and telephoto lenses, even though Bowie's popularity is not great in Germany. All the world loves a recluse, though.

"Iggy is under Bowie's control. I think," said Harald in his best English. "He would like to break away. Get his own apartment."

This was very interesting, since Iggy has always been presented before as the Wild Man of Pop - that sort of thing, a performer whose terrifying self-abuse has, in an intriguing way, made his audience voyeurs. When he first came to England in Spring 1972, with Tony DeFries, then Bowie's manager, he told me how he bashed his front teeth with the microphone, broke bottles on his chest, and once jabbed the splintered end of a mike stand into a young girl's head. He also liked to play golf. It was a little confusing. Such a nice, open chap, despite