Berlin, 1977: Hunt Sales opens the Lust For Life room
Four snare hits and the room jumps. Lust For Life, the title track of Iggy Pop’s 1977 album with David Bowie, starts on Hunt Sales’s drums before guitars and call-and-response vocals pile in. The album landed in late August / early September 1977, cut in Berlin after The Idiot. Bowie co-writes and co-produces; Tony Sales holds the bass; Ricky Gardiner colours the guitars. The groove sits closer to a Bo Diddley / motorik hybrid than to Stooges feedback.
The Berlin stretch was rehab by work: cold studios, disciplined takes, Pop writing with Bowie after mid-70s chaos. The lyric keeps the junkie carnival in view (Johnny Yen, looking like a man from Mars) without drowning the bounce. That mix is the thrill: danger named, beat unstoppable.
Decades later the riff still recruits in two bars, from ads to film cues, because the drum intro does the selling before Ignatius even sings. Put it on and you hear why this Berlin chapter outlived the myth of collapse: Pop found a pocket that wanted to move bodies, not only shock them.
Here comes Johnny Yen again / Looking like a man from Mars.
(Iggy Pop / David Bowie, opening lines of Lust For Life (1977))
As an album flagship, Lust For Life fixed the Sales brothers and Gardiner as the engine under Pop’s growl. Live versions stretch the chant; the studio cut stays tight. It remains the friendliest door into the Bowie-Berlin Iggy records without sanding off the edge.
Start with those snares. Everything after is invitation, not apology.
