Iggy Pop has recalled Elton John playing a prank on him in a gorilla suit back in the 1970s.
The former Stooges frontman explained that the timing for the prank couldn’t have been worse – it happened while he was addicted to heroin, and on a day where he’d taken too much the night before.
“I was really out of it. I’d done too much on the downside the night before, so I had to be injected madly to get to the point where I could just barely stand up straight and hold the mike,” the singer told Mojo. “And then I saw this gorilla. I realised it wasn’t a real gorilla, but anyone who puts on a gorilla suit looks huge.”
At first, he had no clue John was inside the suit. “You don’t know who’s in there. It could be Billy Bob and he’s going to kill me.” He did, however, find it funny. “He just picked me up for a little bit and gave me a little carry around. It was very funny.”
Elsewhere in the interview, he said that his career has become “physically harder” as he’s grown older but has become “easier” in other aspects as time has gone on.
“It’s physically harder but, mentally and emotionally, which is the bigger part of life, it’s gotten much, much easier. Because the big problem before was the size of career, size of audience. How many units are you generating? How many people are listening? When your size isn’t big enough, you get all sorts of pushback from the world in general, and from the inner layers of the industry.”
“But everything kind of added up and I have a lot of records out there. They all sell.”
Pop’s 19th solo album, ‘Every Loser’, is set to arrive on January 6. Earlier this week, he released the second single from the album, ‘Strung Out Johnny’.