The Stooges are playing at Hop Farm and so is Lou Reed. When was the last time you saw Lou and are you going to hang out together at the festival?
Simon, Cambodia
I’ve had my ins and outs with Lou. I’m guessing we hit a low point somewhere around the time I went round to his apartment, bummed three or four Valium off him and ended up running into a door at Madison Square Garden later that night. I made a bigger fool of myself than usual and I later heard a dismissive quote or two from Lou about my intelligence. However, unbeknownst to me Sony Legacy asked him for a comment for The Stooges reissue and he gave us a beautiful quote. He liked the vocals. Who knew? His work was very, very key for James Williamson and myself, particularly the Loaded album. We were listening closely to that. He’s always been someone I’ve looked up to musically.

Since rock’n’roll became your way of life, what moment or experience comes to mind as being so good as to represent why you chose this life?
Richard Hell
That’s very good. [Long pause] Very good. Probably the Stooges performance in the summer of 1970 at the Cincinnati Pop festival on a bill with Traffic, Mountain, Grand Funk Railroad and Alice Cooper. It was telecast nationally, we were not supposed to be on it but we managed to grab some attention. I remember it sounding great, so there’s pride in that, and some comedic stuff. But most of all I remember a genuinely special moment with these open-eyed, early ’70s High School rock kids. To quote Jim Morrison: “American boy, American girl /Most beautiful people in the world”. For a moment it felt like that. I went to Europe and came back a couple of years later and it was gone, the country had changed. By the way, it was also a big experience meeting Richard Hell. He was one cool customer. I remember hanging out with him in [photographer] Roberta Bayley’s apartment right on St Mark’s Place.

Do you ever look back at The Idiot and Lust For Life and think you could have put them together as one ‘super-album’ in 1977?
Sander Varusk, Tallinn
That couldn’t have happened. The Idiot was possible because I was totally uprooted from everything rock-related that I had done up to that point. Johnny Thunders was going to carry on that direction for me, and The Ramones and The Damned and what have you, so I was in a position to try anything. That thing [The Idiot] was really created musically almost in its entirety by David Bowie working as writer, instrumentalist and producer. Bowie had come up with a demo of something vaguely mechanical sounding to be sung in a low register but that still sounded like it fit me. After that we went out on tour together and by the end I think he was really sick of me. Everybody was edgy. We had an album to do and the band was all revved up and we had slightly punkier musicians, the Sales brothers, so Lust For Life was a different equation. Very quick, in and out, another kind of O’Mind! It had all the frictions of different band members trying to place songs: whisper whisper, resent resent, druggy-wuggy. So they’re two very different entities.