Iggy Pop’s 1986 album Blah-Blah-Blah gave him one of his biggest commercial breakthroughs, but the record also marked the final studio collaboration between Pop and David Bowie.
by Paul Cashmere
Iggy Pop’s Blah-Blah-Blah turns 40 this September, marking the anniversary of the album that brought Pop back from a four-year recording hiatus and produced his first major mainstream hit in years, Real Wild Child (Wild One). The 1986 A&M Records release reunited Pop with David Bowie, who produced the album alongside David Richards and co-wrote most of the material. It was the final album collaboration between the two musicians.
Recorded at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, in May 1986, Blah-Blah-Blah represented a significant change in sound for Pop. The abrasive art rock associated with his earlier work with Bowie on The Idiot and Lust for Life in 1977 gave way to synthesizers, programmed percussion, dance-rock textures and a more polished 1980s production style.
The commercial shift was substantial. Blah-Blah-Blah became Pop’s most commercially successful album, reaching No. 75 on the Billboard 200 in the United States and earning gold certification in Canada for sales of more than 50,000 copies.
Its defining moment came with Real Wild Child (Wild One), Pop’s adaptation of Johnny O’Keefe’s Australian rock and roll classic Wild One. The song became Pop’s first UK Top 10 hit and reached No. 27 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart.
The connection to O’Keefe gave the album an unexpected Australian thread. Pop retained the title Wild One in parentheses, while transforming the song into a synth-driven rock track that became closely associated with his 1980s comeback. The recording later featured in the soundtracks of Crocodile Dundee II and Pretty Woman, among other films.
For Australian audiences, Real Wild Child gained another important life through ABC’s rage. Since the music program launched in 1987, snippets of Pop’s recording have been used alongside O’Keefe’s original Wild One as part of the programme’s opening.
Bowie’s role on Blah-Blah-Blah was substantial but different from the partnership heard on The Idiot and Lust for Life. He co-wrote the bulk of the album with Pop, produced and mixed the sessions with David Richards, and supplied backing vocals, but did not play instruments on the record.
The other significant songwriting partnership came from former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones. Jones co-wrote Fire Girl, Cry for Love and Winners & Losers with Pop, with Jones also providing the guitar solo on Cry for Love.
Pop later offered a more positive assessment of Bowie’s involvement than some accounts of the album’s reception suggested. In 1990, he credited Bowie with “setting up a good framework for me to tell my story in a way that people could hear”. He specifically identified Shades, Winners and Losers, Cry for Love and Wild Child as songs that reflected where he was at the time.
That assessment sits alongside a more complicated critical history. Contemporary reviews recognised the album’s directness but questioned its polished production. Retrospective criticism has often focused on the programmed drums, keyboards and distinctly 1980s studio sound, with some writers viewing the record as an overly commercial departure from Pop’s earlier work.
Yet Blah-Blah-Blah has also attracted reassessment. Its songwriting, particularly on tracks such as Cry for Love and Shades, has led some later critics to look beyond the production style and reconsider the album on its own terms.
Cry for Love became another notable single, reaching No. 19 on the Billboard Hot Dance Music chart and No. 34 on the Mainstream Rock chart.
Other singles from the album included Isolation, Shades and Fire Girl, with several receiving different edits, remixes and extended versions.
The album also occupies an unusual position in Pop’s catalogue because it sits between two very different phases of his career. His previous studio album, 1982’s Zombie Birdhouse, was followed by a four-year gap. Two years after Blah-Blah-Blah, Pop moved in a heavier direction with 1988’s Instinct.
That transition makes the 1986 album a snapshot of a specific moment: Pop working with Bowie for the last time, embracing the production vocabulary of the decade and finding an unexpected commercial audience without completely abandoning the personal intensity that had defined his work.
Forty years later, Blah-Blah-Blah remains the record that connected Iggy Pop’s uncompromising past with his mainstream breakthrough, while closing the final studio chapter of one of rock music’s most consequential creative partnerships.
Stay updated with your free Noise11.com daily music news email alert. Subscribe to Noise11 Music News here
Be the first to see NOISE11.com’s newest interviews and special features on YouTube. See things first-Subscribe to Noise11 on YouTube
Follow Noise11.com on social media:
Facebook – Comment on the news of the day
