Festivals
Review
Why Iggy Pop Will Never Die
The Godfather of Punk is still outpacing his disciples at Bearded Theory festival – shirtless, snarling, and gloriously unkillable.
For someone who’s been throwing himself into amps, off stages, and occasionally into actual glass for over half a century, Iggy Pop looks suspiciously immortal. At 78, the man’s as sinewy and unpredictable as ever – still barking into microphones like the concept of “legacy” is something for other people to worry about. You could call him a relic, but that’d suggest he’s finished. And if anything, he’s only becoming more punk.
The whole “punk is dead” thing has never really meant anything anyway. It might be a fun thing to scrawl on a toilet wall, but you can’t kill something that never stops moving. Punk’s changed shape so many times that you need a map to track its bloodline, but somewhere at the gnarly root of it all is James Newell Osterberg Jr. – a man who reinvented rebellion before most of today’s working punk bands were born, and who somehow still manages to feel like the most vital guy in the field when he headlined Bearded Theory festival at the weekend.
It’s a friendly place to hang out in for the weekend – Paul Heaton and the Manic Street Preachers bookending the other main stage days – but Iggy didn’t tone anything down for the camping chair set. The shirt came off before he even made it to the microphone.
Maybe it’s because Iggy never tried to clean up his act. He never became the cuddly elder statesman type, content to drift into a book tour or join the BBC panel show circuit. He just stayed Iggy Pop – guttural, twitchy, rude Iggy Pop.
What’s more surprising than Iggy still being around is how essential he still seems. The man could have retired with full honours after Raw Power or even Lust for Life, but 2023’s Every Loser was a straight-up firebomb of an album. It’s messy, loud, funny, and deeply aware of its own mythology. Tracks like ‘Frenzy’ and ‘Modern Day Ripoff’ (both Bearded Theory highlights) aren’t just late-career throwaways; they’re snarling reminders that Iggy still gets what punk was about before it had a name.
That authenticity is exactly what keeps his fingerprints all over today’s punk-adjacent acts. Bands like Shame, Fontaines D.C., and Destroy Boys are dragging punk’s carcass back onto its feet, giving it new bruises and fresh teeth. Fontaines in particular feel like distant, pissed-off relatives of The Stooges – poetic but brutal, artful but unrelentingly raw. Their records are smart, sure, but they also pulse with that same cracked-nail energy that made Iggy a threat in the first place.
What makes Iggy so enduring is his refusal to calcify. There’s something defiant about his existence that feels more powerful than any three-chord rebellion. It’s easy to be shocked that he’s still standing, but maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Maybe Iggy Pop was never supposed to burn out or fade away. Maybe the real punk twist is that he endures. And not in some muted, elder-statesman way – but on fire, every night, like his body forgot to tell his brain.
And in the middle of a musical landscape that often feels too safe, too curated, too algorithmically constructed, we still need that chaos. We need the weird old guy with the cracked grin and no shirt. We need someone to blow a hole in the stage just to see if there’s anything left underneath.
Iggy Pop plays London, Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin over the next few days. Find tickets here
Tickets for Bearded Theory 2026 will be on sale soon
