![]() ![]() However, our initial reaction was far from positive. I dropped the needle onto side one and Search and Destroy burst out of the speakers. My brother had it in his collection and had not taken his records with him when he first left home, so a friend and I thought we should investigate, see if we could spot the connecting dots between this and the new music that was taking over our lives. My own relationship with this album came in 1977, five years after its release, when it was being held up as an influence on the burgeoning punk scene. It also serves as a warning that what the sleeve contains is outside the realm of the ordinary. ![]() It has become an iconic image and has lost none of its power over the decades. While we are still trying to recover from this, Iggy kicks in with “ I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb.” Nothing in the build-up to this album had prepared us for this!Įven the cover of Raw Power still has some shock value, showing a shirtless, emaciated Iggy with metallic silver hair, matching trousers and full make up, clutching a microphone and gazing out at an audience who must have been wondering just what the hell they were seeing. First track Search and Destroy starts up with some high-paced rock guitar and then SUDDENLY OUT OF NOWHERE a searing, screeching guitar lick tears out of the speakers and attacks your face. The impact of Raw Power can be summed up by listening to the album’s first 30 seconds. Yet, dodgy production values aside, Raw Power still sounds like a record that could be recorded today, if there were any bands out there capable of matching its levels of vitality. To throw things into even sharper contrast, imagine yourself in 1977 listening to music made in 1927 – that’s the timespan we are talking about. It seems incredible that an album so full of life and energy could be hitting its 50 th birthday, but here we are. ![]() Unbelievably, Raw Power turns 50 this year. We are talking about Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges, a record that is still lodged firmly in my list of the top 5 albums ever made. In 1972, David Bowie brought colour into our lives by releasing his Ziggy Stardust album, heavy metal was thriving with Deep Purple and Black Sabbath releasing classic albums (Machine Head and Vol 4 respectively) and The Rolling Stones reached their peak with Exile on Main Street.Īdd into this heady mix Lou Reed’s Transformer, Roxy Music’s debut album, Alice Cooper’s School’s Out and landmark records from Pink Floyd, Big Star and Can and it becomes abundantly clear that 1972 was a year full of classic albums.īut there is one record that towers above all of the records listed. I don’t know about you, but if I were to try to conjure up pictures of 50 years ago, my mind would default to a jumble of black-and-white images, mental flashes of crank-handled cars, flappers or demob suits.īut fifty years ago it was 1972, and in 1972 things were not in black and white. ![]()
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