Iggy Pop has released today an official music video for “The Passenger”, a song allegedly written aboard the S-Bahn during his time living in Berlin, and also during his frequent traveling in the passenger seat with David Bowie while the pair were on tour, as he told The Guardian in recent years:
“…I’d been riding around North America and Europe in David’s car ad infinitum. I didn’t have a driver’s license or a vehicle.”
Despite being considered by Bowie biographer David Buckley as being “possessed with one of the greatest riffs of all time”, The Passenger was not initially released as a single, and instead was included as the B-side of the album’s only single, “Success”.
The song would finally get a single release 21 years later in 1998.
This new video, arriving 43 years after the song made its debut, was directed by Simon Taylor, Watch below:
“The Passenger” is off of Iggy Pop’s 1977 album Lust For Life, a record released quickly follow The Idiot earlier that year, and produced and co-written by his Berlin partner in crime David Bowie.
Unlike most of the tracks on Lust for Life, Bowie is not credited on “The Passenger”, and instead, the music writing credits go to Berlin trilogy guitarist Ricky Gardiner.