Iggy Pop, Brixton Academy, London

A lust for self-destruction

There are stars and stripes illuminated on the drum riser, a three-piece band with curly perms and satin shirts churns out a nondescript sonic jihad. Suddenly, there is Iggy Pop, the all-American freak show and 57-year-old force of nature, naked to just below the waist, arms akimbo, lank hair flying. He is a whirlwind in a padded cell, a dancing dervish only visible for a short time before the strobe light obliterates his frenzied movement and the words for the opening song "Mask" hit home.

The title track from his last album Beat 'Em Up, "Mask" is a typically excoriating Pop lyric – a diatribe at the falsity and emptiness of modern life, castigating "critics, college graduates, everybody in LA". But, it soon becomes obvious that, with his low-rent band and intensified theatrics, Iggy, too, is wearing a mask – of his own devising.

On one level you can't blame him: hailed as the greatest rock'n'roll poet and most extreme performer of his era, the one-time Stooges frontman and self-proclaimed "runaway son of a nuclear ape" was washed up, down, and almost out, in mid-Seventies LA. His recovery was evidence of steely resolve, while latter-day albums such as American Caesar and Avenue B revealed a thoughtful tormentor and savage inquisitor of the American psyche.

But the Iggy mystique rests on self-destruction, foolhardy displays of audience baiting, indecent exposure, blood and gore. Tonight, playing the part of the obedient entertainer he gives the crowd most of what they want. He dives into the audience and four bouncers go on a fearless rescue mission. Glasses land on stage and he spits at the crowd. He has a weird, centaur-like physique, made for spectacle, and he delights in contorting it. He hurls insults at the lighting man, exhorts us to drink new blood and howls songs of despair and disdain, boredom and revenge in a tortured vibrato.

It might work but for a band stubbornly tuned to a lowest common denominator: all the scowling magnificence of "Death Trip" and "Search and Destroy" funnelled into a narrow squall of sound. He challenges the audience to be wilder than he is and, during "The Passenger", stage invaders lose no time in losing all their clothes. As they cavort towards him, Iggy's body swerves to the side of the stage and he sticks his tongue out, waggling his hands donkey-ears style at the crowd.

When he sings how "corruption rules my soul and chills my bones" perhaps he's explaining the infantile performance. Irony and sarcasm have long been part of the Iggy survival manual, but on this evidence only the blindly besotted will appreciate the punch line.