When Iggy Pop met Mr Whippy
Sunday, 8 February 2026
Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.
OPINION: It was hot as blazes, but everyone was making as good a fist of it as they could.
Summer had been a shocker, everyone agreed: Cold wind, cold nights, rain. Bollocks, really.
But today? Whoa - look at it!
I looked at it. Cloudless, 25 degrees at least, and dry as a desert.
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So, as hundreds and thousands poured in to the outdoor arena for the weekend’s concert, they were caught between bitching at the heat, and celebrating that summer had finally arrived.
They were here to see Iggy Pop, the timeless wonder of rock n roll, the epitome of anarchy, the antithesis of ease.
Seventy-eight and still writhing. Still mouthing off at authority and conformity.
The fans hustled to grab good spots and jostled for scant shade. They set up deck chairs, arranged chilly bins, spread picnic rugs, and settled in for the afternoon.
God it was hot.
Hats came out, hats that came in all shapes and styles. There were bucket hats, straw hats, cowboy hats. There were things Carmen Miranda would have been very happy to be seen in.
Suncream went on. Everyone was frying.
The ones who’d worn jeans realised it was a mistake. Black, the de rigueur friend of gig goers worldwide, suddenly became an enemy.
Concerts are open air galleries of people’s musical tastes, shouted from their T-shirts.
They wear their devotion to their favourite bands on their sleeves, on their front, on the backs of XL cotton/polyester blends.
It’s an unspoken competition: My band’s cooler than yours.
So, there we were, old-timers in Rolling Stones and Bowie T-shirts; metallers in Motorhead and Sepultura and System Of A Down gear; someone rocking the Ramones; another reminiscing about the Buzzcocks.
Here were disciples of Jane’s Addiction and Joy Division.
There was an apostle of AC/DC. Of course, AC/DC.
And what’s this? Fleetwood Mac?
It was a wonderful mix, bogans and the bourgeoisie, shoulder to shoulder.
Not everyone was into band T-shirts though: Jimmy’s Pies. Taimate Angus. PlaceMakers Trade.
Everyone was getting into the music though. The woman delivering a stack of pizzas to the corporate tent sashayed and weaved her way through the ordinary punters, flicking her hips and singing along to Joan Jett.
A woman in vibrant blue returned from dancing at the front and collapsed into her Adventurer Camp Chair. It mightn’t have been camping, but she was having an adventure, for sure.
The sun never seemed to go down, nor did the temperature.
The queues for the water tanker grew.
So did the one for Mr Whippy.
Steve and Linda ran the van and were run off their feet in the heat.
A man gallantly made his way back from the van clutching two cones.
He had one eye on them, one on the slalom course he was threading between groups on picnic blankets. But damned if he could lay eyes on his wife, who was waiting for her ice cream.
He went this way, then that, he glanced up, he looked bemused. In a throng of the seated and sunburnt, he was lost.
His wife could see him, and flapped an arm to catch his attention. He missed it, and wandered off in the wrong direction.
The ice creams were by now under full assault from the sun, and in peril.
The husband knew this, as he again scanned the crowd and retraced his steps, without success.
Eventually, an onlooker realised what was going on, and guided the husband back to his seat and soulmate before catastrophe struck.
Oh the shared relief, of husband and wife reunited with matching soft serves.
But tragedy stalked not far from Mr Whippy.
The boy was about seven. He wore sensible ear muffs to dull the din from the stage.
He was eating a sweet of some sort while carrying his ice cream back up the hill. He was, however, not watching what was in his fist.
Everyone except him could foresee what was coming, and watched it happen, slowly, as the ice cream slumped and toppled, then crashed to the ground like the calving of a small glacier.
It had sprinkles on top.
The boy stared at it. His mother stared at it. They looked at each other.
The boy had a look on his face of pure bewilderment, as if the only explanation could be that evil alien fairies had descended from the skies while he was distracted, and sabotaged his ice cream.
There was a moment of deliberation about whether they could resurrect it, before they decided the blob on the grass was dead.
So off the boy walked, clutching an empty cone, summer having just reached its nadir.
The abandoned ice cream sat in the sun, a sketch of melting misery and utter sadness, amidst a sea of great joy, as the crowd sang lustily to Iggy Pop.
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