I ask Iggy Pop, willy-waver, self-mutilator, stage-diver, car-wrecker, ex-dope fiend, ex-thief, punk progenitor and Stooges singer, why Swiftcover, online seller of car insurance, wanted to use him to front their recent UK advertising campaign.

He squirms and grins sheepishly. There’s a distinct blush beneath the coppery leather, newly scarred skin of his face. “This is so embarrassing. I was afraid you’d ask me that. This is so f***ing embarrassing.”

He bangs the table and breaks into a high-pitched giggle. “They said they wanted this series of ads to be performed by somebody…” long pause, “…somebody you can’t help but like!”

We stare at each other in silence, eyebrows raised, jaws dropped.

“You mean,” I — shocked, disbelieving — say, “that almost 45 years of offensive, obnoxious, downright nasty rock’n’roll, of systematic debauchery and subversion — your life’s work — has come to nothing? People can’t help but like you!”

“Exactly!”

“You did it, Iggy, you failed upwards!”

Now we’re both giggling “That’s a very nervous position to be in,” he gasps, “to be liked!”

And so there he is — on buses, on the radio, on TV, flogging car insurance and being just so damned likable. It could all have been so different…

Long ago, in the buttoned-down, buttoned-up world of mid-1950s America, James Newell Osterberg Sr made a grab for the dial on the radio in his Michigan trailer home. He wasn’t quite quick enough and, as a result little James Newell Osterberg Jr heard something he wasn’t supposed to:

“You ain’t nuthin’ but a houn’ dawg…”

It was Elvis or, in the imagination of Osterberg Sr, Big Trouble. He wanted his son to be somebody respectable, and Elvis, still raw, still insolently boyish, then represented something very unrespectable indeed. Big Jim had high hopes for Little Jim and wanted to keep him straight and clean. He made him have a quarter-inch military haircut every two weeks and he scorned his desire to wear white socks to school.

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