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Steve Mackay - saxophonist for Iggy & the Stooges, Snakefinger's Blues Band, Commander Cody and Violent Femmes, among others - is critiically ill in hospital in San Francisco following complications from surgery.

Friends say he went into Seton Medical Centre in Daly City a few days ago with sepsis, a life threatening condition that can lead to inflammation and organ shutdown.

Close friends and family are understood to be at his bedside.

Mackay is best known for his contribution to the second Stooges album, “Fun House”, and was recruited by the band from Ann Arbor avant garde band Carnal Kitchen. 

Mackay toured with the group throughout 1970 but parted company late that year.

He came back into the fold for both lives of the reformed band and continued to tour heavily with them until their recent hiatus. He played on both “The Weirdness” and “Ready To Die” and toured with his own band in the 2000s.

Heather Harris photo

Revisionism is a wonderful thing. If you’d suggested listening to an album of cover songs by UK Subs as a useful way to spend some time 30 years ago, I’d have told you to check yourself into a psych ward.

I never “got” the UK Subs, despite their membership of the first wave of English punk…probably because I’d never bothered to try. There was just too much other stuff on the same block. Time marches on and you can't ignore band leader Charlie Harper’s indefatigable nature (he’s 73) or the 26 original studio albums (one for each letter of the alphabet) as testament to their durability.

“Subversion” is good. Better than good. It’s capital ‘F’ for Fun, underlined by great playing and a collective “we don’t give a fuck” attitude. Which should be what punk rock was - and is - all about. Fuck the fashion.

These bloody phone interviews. If you’ve never done one, this is how it goes: 

First, you notice unfamiliar terms in the email from the publicist like AEDT and CST that refer to time zones. And that excremental daylight saving kicked in two days ago. Cue frantic fiddling on the computer to make sure you’ve got the right time. 

You’ve been given a choice of times - if you’re lucky. Bit awkward if you get stuck with a time when you’re at work and you have to excuse yourself to go to the bog and do an interview. Trust me, you get looks. 

“Who were you cackling away to in the toilet, Robert? New … chum?”

Cue: furious blushing.

This interview was with James Williamson, the guitarist for Iggy and The Stooges, who has a new solo album, "Re-Licked" in the racks. And I got lucky on another front this time, and the nearly-threenager grandchild didn’t arrive until after I’d finished, so assorted boing noises, yowls and her squeaky voice didn’t float up into the recording. 

With most "phoners"you do have a strict 20 minutes to adhere to, a weird time (in this case it’s from 8.55am to 9.15 am). But you do worry that it’s 4.30 am where the interviewee is, and he’ll be off his head on Tequila and mushies. As rock stars do.

Just 20 minutes to gain rapport and probe the poor bugger’s most intimate self?  Poor bugger? He’s on the receiving end of a long line of assorted gits like me for several hours.

One minute before the appointed time, you dial a local number - with the area code prefix. A recorded message asks you to select your language. I am always very tempted to fuck with this but have so far refrained. One day I’ll select Croat or Bulgarian or Tig or something.

A new album and this should send more than a ripple of excitement through the worldwide ranks of Stoogeaholics. It’s not the expected studio effort - have patience ‘cos the word is that’s still happening - but a presumably legitimate release of a 2004 show in Tokyo, courtesy of French label Skydog.

In the liner notes to Rhino’s souped-up reissue/remaster of the Stooges’ wide-eyed, dribbling debut, Detroit native Alice Cooper (whose albums with the original Alice Cooper band are in dire need of a sonic upgrade) confesses that the Stooges were the only band he never wanted to follow largely in part to Iggy Pop’s wild streak of unpredictability.

I'm going to tell you about a little quest of mine; a search for the (not so) Holy Grail. It's a mountain size molehill of my own making and I admit it. But in these dire days of corporate mediocrity - where the alternative has been bought up by the same guys who brought you the thing you were supposed to be the alternative to – a man is defined by his obsessions.

Tributes are pouring in for Stooges drummer Scott Asheton who passed away over the weekend, aged 64.

This could alternately be known as “Touch Me, I’m Sick.” And I do mean sick.

Let's not understate the awesomeness of this package, which is a leap forward from its predecessor in both desirability and sonic quality of the shows therein. While the first volume gathered some higher quality versions of existing bootlegs as well as material from an offbeat period (the time of the "Party" album), this one goes for the throat.

Well, at least now I know why I didn't buy all those Euroboots of Stoogestuff.

If someone had told you six years ago that a treasure trove of unreleased Stooges recordings had been unearthed and was being carefully restored to listenable quality with the intention of it being legitimately unleashed and wrapped in high-quality packaging, you'd have told them to remove their hand from their pants or switch medication. Not to condemn all of what had gone before under the guise of "semi-official" but most Stoogeaholics had fallen for one sub-par sounding, misleadingly re-named disc too many. Then UK label Easy Action came along and (again) turned perceived wisdom on its head.