Story of the song: The Passenger by Iggy Pop

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on how a morning’s idle strumming sparked a classic

Here comes success? Iggy Pop and David Bowie in Germany, 1977 (Getty)

One might assume “The Passenger” was inspired by nocturnal car-rides through some concrete grey metropolis. In fact, its origin was one sunny May in the mid-Seventies when Ricky Gardiner, a former member of the prog ensemble Beggars Opera, was sauntering, guitar in hand, under the apple blossom near his rural home. He began idly strumming – Am-F-C-G, Am-F-C-E/E7. “It was a case of the chord sequence 'slipping through' while I was lost in the glory of a beautiful spring morning,” he recalls, 30 years on.

Gardiner first met Iggy Pop while contributing guitar parts to David Bowie's album, Low, and was retained for the pair's next collaboration, Lust for Life. “When I was invited to join David and Iggy in Berlin, I did not realise that they needed material, so I was unprepared when they asked me if I had anything,” he says.

As a fall-back, Gardiner played them his chord sequence on an unplugged Stratocaster. Pop completed the lyrics, inspired, he said, by a Jim Morrison poem. The song was recorded at Hansa studios in Berlin. It was lifted from Lust for Life, as the flipside to Pop's 1977 flop, “Success”. In 1998, on the back of a TV car advertisement, it was eventually a hit. Gardiner also released a CD, The Passenger, which contains two versions of the title track, sung by his wife, Virginia A Scott.