Drugs?!

Iggy Pop says, "Literature's like coke, music's like heroin." His latest album is inspired by a French novel about what he says is "death and sex", Michel Houellebecq's "The Possibility of an Island". An excerpt:

"Literature's like coke and music's like heroin! Literature sharpens the mind, music stupidifies," laughs punk legend Iggy Pop, whose new album is inspired by a French novel about "death and sex".

Released late last month, this latest offering from the long-haired, blue-eyed 62-year-old godfather of punk not only takes its inspiration from Michel Houellebecq's novel "The Possibility of an Island" but also carries a French title, "Preliminaires" (Preliminaries).

Why? "I felt that the whole plot of the novel is a preliminary to death," he said in an interview.

"And at my age everything you do is a preliminary to death: whether you're gonna fuck or not, work or play, chase money or freedom, ideas or cynicism. You've got the clock."

Iggy Pop -- real name James Newell Osterberg -- was lead singer of The Stooges, the 1960s-1970s garage rock band that influenced heavy metal and punk rock and whose live acts included Pop taking drugs, self-mutilating, verbally abusing the audience and leaping off stage.

His best-known solo numbers include "Lust for Life," "I'm Bored" and "Real Wild Child".

The idea behind this somewhat melancholy album came after he was asked to write music for a documentary about Houllebecq's novel which Pop sees as being about "death, sex and the end of the human race".

A resident of Florida, he first read it in a French seaside resort during a typically cool European summer and enjoyed it's "mid-life sci-fi crisis".

Literature, he said, had always been important to him, citing the early works of William S. Burroughs along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

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