Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  “And then I helped him on tours and so on, because Frank wasn’t that knowledgeable about touring. So I made sure they always did tours. I always remember, they’d hand the accounts in—because Frank didn’t do the accounts; we did them for him—and there would be something called plumbing in the accounts. And I’ll leave that to your imagination, okay? And so eventually Frank and they parted company and they came back and asked us for more help.”

  “And then there was a Belgian promoter who wanted to be in the music business. And in fact, he was running away from National Service in Belgium, and hanging out in England. He was a promoter in Belgium; that’s how I met him. So I rented one of my floors in my office to him and nothing happened, and Motörhead suddenly reappeared and said they wanted some help, and I said, ‘Well you know, there’s Ludo downstairs who’s got some money; why don’t you go and talk to him. Maybe he can help?’ I got pissed off. I’d been sacked a couple of times and didn’t really need it again. So they went downstairs, they did a bit of a short time with Ludo. And that didn’t go anywhere, and back upstairs they came.”

  “But with respect to the actual record, it fell apart with Dave Edmunds’s production and their complete abuse of whatever substances they were taking at the time. And what happened from that would be the sort of bolting-on of Eddie and Phil, one after another. Because one knew the other and needed a lift down to the studio to get Lemmy out of the shit, the other joined. It was a very organic moment, to the point of becoming what I consider, and always will consider, the original Motörhead.”

  Nonetheless, the roots of Motörhead are there within the On Parole album. But the band’s ragtag first lineup was to implode, in a sense, like Altamont, with the outlaw spirit trouncing and denouncing the values of the hippie generation for something more cynical and biting. Ironically, the shedding of Lucas Fox in particular would evoke reverberations of Lemmy’s bouncing out of Hawkwind: in that band, Lemmy’s speed-taking was out of sync with what Lemmy called the “drug snobbery” of the other guys with their organic drugs. In Motörhead, Lucas tried to keep up with Lemmy on the ol’ amphetamines with embarrassing results; he was trying to take the right drugs but he couldn’t. And so Lemmy, now running Larry, Lucas and even himself around the bend, would have to take his sour worldview elsewhere and with new bodies along for the wild ride.

  Doug Smith sheds further light on the exits of both Lucas and Larry from the ranks. “I think Lucas left himself. Larry on the other hand, I don’t know, Larry had a lot of issues anyway. He had a marriage that was going strangely wrong, and in actual fact, the girl that he was married to, she became Sire Records’ Seymour Stein’s personal assistant, until she died of cancer about 15 years ago. I mean, it’s a bizarre story of connections. So I think Larry was the first to leave—he had had enough. And I suppose he just wanted a band that was already successful. And Lucas, well, he didn’t really have a background of anything. He hadn’t played, really, majorly for anything. He was just Lemmy’s and Larry’s friend. And now Lucas is a rather successful entertainment organizer, which is quite surprising. He used to work at Midem on a regular basis, although I don’t think he does anymore.”

  ~

  Phil Taylor first met Lemmy in a pub on Portobello Road. The relationship developed, says Lemmy, when Phil came ’round the house to buy some drugs and wound up arrested after OD’ing on Tuinal. Later, with Phil convincing Lemmy that he played the drums, the partnership was solidified when Phil also said he had a car—crucial because Lemmy didn’t own one, nor did he drive—which came in handy at that very moment because now it was Lemmy that was trying to buy some drugs, and he was in need of chauffeuring, which would become a theme throughout his life.

  Phil Taylor rose to the challenge of replacing Fox’s drums on On Parole, an admirable feat in Lemmy’s estimation, although Lem was less impressed with Phil’s horrid attempts at singing “City Kids.” Phil came in partway through and performed this exacting task on all tracks but “Lost Johnny,” which retains Fox’s parts (Phil was otherwise predisposed, briefly in custody for drunk and disorderly). Ergo, Lucas holds the distinction of being Motörhead’s drummer for roughly the first six months of the band’s existence, after which he moved on to punk act Warsaw Pakt, in business about London for one year and one record.

  “Why did I take up the drums?” reflects Taylor, in conversation with Sam Dunn. “It was less of an inspiration than a command by my dad, because I was getting in trouble with the law, being like a skinhead. I was fighting at that rebellious age, so my dad had to come and get me at the Leeds police station one too many times, and gave me a good hiding. And about a couple days later, he turned up with a battered old snare drum and said, ‘Here, here you bastard, and if you’ve got to hit something, you can hit this.’ And he booked me like two whole weeks of lessons, one a week, at Leeds Music College, and so I dutifully went along, being really pissed-off, because I always banged on my mom’s pots and pans when I was a kid. So I went along, and the teacher that I had was an incredible guy—that’s another story. But he was 90 years old, and he was a World War I drummer, and after the second lesson he said, ‘Well, Philip, I think you’ve got a natural talent for playing the drums. You should really take more lessons.’ And I thought all right. And so I decided to go to him. So really it was my dad that got me into it. But I thought, yeah, I’ve got him to thank. But not, in a way, because it wasn’t done out of love or anything like that. But I realized I had a natural aptitude for the drums and I enjoyed playing them.

  Recent hire Phil Taylor circa 1976.

  © Paul Apperly

  “Angst—that’s a good word, yeah?” continues Taylor. “I guess there was lots of angst, because that’s how I started to play the drums. Because I was getting into too many fights. I was getting to be really violent, so that’s why I started playing the drums. I mean, that was another great thing that my drum teacher taught. Because at the time, I wanted to be a boxer more than I wanted to be a drummer. And I was training at a gym, and in my first fight, I got knocked out and I had two black eyes. And I went to the drum lesson, and my drum teacher said to me, ‘Bloody ’ell, look at the state of your face! You know what, Philip? Do yourself a favor. Stick to playing drums. It’s better than boxing.’ ‘Why’s that?’ ‘Drums don’t hit you back, lad. You can hit them as hard as you like, and they don’t hit you back.’ And suddenly a light bulb went on. Oh yeah. That’s just a little side thing, but I suppose great angst was involved. Mucho angst. And yes, a great deal of ardent fervour. And lots of angriness within me. I felt this strange desire to grab myself and rip myself into small tiny pieces, or any small animals that crossed my path.”

  And so it wasn’t a sort of predictable pop or even fully musical inspiration that guided Phil to his future as a musician, versus the somewhat predictable rock ’n’ roll influences impressed upon say Lemmy or Eddie. If Lemmy was his own force of nature, a beacon to independence, making music nothing like that of his influences, and Eddie was much the same, Phil Taylor was your virtual tabula rasa, arriving at a similar place with very few influences whatsoever.

  “I’ve never been like a fan of any particular one person, whether they be a drummer or movie star or anything like that. But I’ve always listened to music as a whole, the whole song. And if there happened to be a fine drummer in the band, it usually stood out. But maybe not. Some of the best drumming I used to like was the Motown stuff, from the ’60s, late ’60s, ’70s, and there was a session drummer called Bernard Purdie, who played on, I believe, a lot of those sessions, and he was really great. That’s where I picked up the high-hat thing from. Oh yeah, ol’ Bernard was the master of the ‘bad-atz, bad-atz’; there are a couple of those, and a couple of those, holding high hats. I learned that from Bernard Purdie. That was great, because he’s very good, with good punctuation marks. And some people say it doesn’t really fit in metal, but I think it does. Or doesn’t fit in rock. It fits in my
cupboard at home, I know that. Very nicely.”

  “But yeah, I listened to a lot of drummers, really. I mean, my dad was a big jazz fan, and so what jazz records he had, I listened to, not out of choice, but I played them. But since I started taking up the drums, and just a snare drum for about a year or 18 months, and then he bought me a bass drum and stuff like that, and so I listened to my dad’s old jazz records. And my sister was five years older than me and she was listening to the Beatles and stuff from America, so I listened to her records. So I was getting an extra. Nothing off the radio, of course. There was nothing on English radio, unless you listened to Radio Caroline or Radio Luxembourg, which I did occasionally, upon pain of death from my dad. ‘Turn that bloody radio off!’ ‘Yes Dad.’”

  Pressed by Sam about the influence of those jazz records, Phil agrees that, “Guess it must’ve done, really, subconsciously. I can’t see how it didn’t. There was a guy that my dad really liked called Lionel Hampton who played xylophone and drums, and I remember he had a record of his drum solo, and I was listening back to it many, many years later, and I wasn’t that impressed by it. But I was impressed at the time. And he had the Gene Krupa big band record, and actually, when I first thought to myself, ‘Well, I’d really like to do that,’ it was one Sunday afternoon when I was watching a movie on British television, an old black-and-white, The Gene Krupa Story, Sal Mineo as Gene Krupa. It was really good, because I think actually Sal played drums, because he was really good, and so after seeing that, I never thought that a drummer would be like a big fuss like that, like a big star. But I thought oh, like a lot of things, I thought they can only be like that in America. But I really enjoyed that movie, and that made me want to be a drummer. I just wanted to be the best drummer that I could be. But I never thought I would be.”

  As for Gene Krupa, “I think it was the intensity of his drumming, like when he played drums, that was the whole thing. I know that a lot of the movie was based on his life, and he was a heroin addict, but I didn’t understand any of that at the time. I just liked the fact that he was a great drummer. I just really liked the feel of the movie. It was the first movie I’ve ever seen where the drummer was the hero, so to speak. Not that I hadn’t seen any other movies, apart from the Glenn Miller story, great, playing a purple clarinet. But what movies were there around then, what, when I was 14? That would be 1968, a long time ago. The only other heroes I had were like gunfighters I suppose, John Wayne, ‘Get on your horse and drink your milk, pilgrim,’ all that shit. After seeing that, yeah, he was quite a hero. He was to me, anyway.”

  So to recap, for Phil, drumming was a punishment enforced by his dad, and then made glamourous through drummers being depicted in film . . . like John Wayne. And where might we see the link to pop music, let alone rock, let alone nasty, brutish heavy metal?

  “Well, I can say, I would say, you would call it inspired, but at the time I couldn’t afford to buy my own records, and I was just getting into playing the drums. And I didn’t really know anything about music, because I hadn’t been a music fan at all, until I was forced into playing these drums. And my drum teacher, the old guy I told you about, he was a total military man, and being a First World War drummer boy, he didn’t want to—‘I hope you’re not listening to that bloody rock music that they play. It’s all rubbish. Stick to your military beats.’ So that’s all I did. The only reason I listened to jazz is because that’s what my dad listened to at home, and as I said, on the radio, there wasn’t much . . . there was a lot of pop, but the stuff they played on the radio back then certainly wasn’t inspiring to a drummer anyway, or to a guitar player, I don’t think, for that matter. It was all like Radio One. It would be the Top 20 hits, the Beatles, blah blah blah. That was easy, as far as I was concerned.”

  “I mean, I liked all the stuff that the Beatles did, and actually at the time, I went out and bought a Chicago album, because they had a hit, ‘25 or 6 to 4.’ Do you remember that song? No, you probably don’t. Good song. So I went out and spent all my hard-earned money on this album—it was fucking shit. The whole album was fucking shit. Back then the price of an album was about a week’s pocket money, so I just used to listen to my sister’s records. And I never really thought of becoming a drummer professionally, not at all, not for one instant. I mean, I didn’t even let any of my friends know that I played drums for about two and a half years or three years that I was playing. Because I didn’t want anybody saying, ‘Well, come on,’ because I knew my friends at school had little bands going. Anyway, blah blah.”

  ~

  Soon to be Lemmy’s new best mate, Fast Eddie Clarke picks up the story of the great meeting of grind minds. “I knew Lemmy a little bit before. He’s one of those characters you would bump into every now and again, because he was always everywhere. He didn’t sleep at all and he was always around. I was doing my solo project after I had left Curtis Knight, and then I did this thing called Blue Goose, which was on this label called Anchor Records, and finally, nothing came of that either. And to make a living, I started to do some regular work; I was a laborer on a building site sort of thing, and that’s where I met Phil Taylor. Phil was working alongside me, so we got chatting, one thing and another, and after about two months, we parted. I didn’t see him much. We had a little jam once, and then he disappeared. As Phil does.”

  “And then I got a phone call,” continues Eddie, “out of the blue, and he said, ‘Hey man, I’m in Motörhead now and we’re looking for another guitarist.’ And because the then-guitarist, Larry Wallis, had done so many overdubs in the studio, they felt they needed a rhythm player. Someone to sort of fill in all the gaps. So Phil said I would be a good choice.”

  In fact it was Phil who would give Clarke the name Fast Eddie, as Eddie told Classic Rock Revisited: “Yes, later we were playing a gig at the Electric Ballroom in Manchester and much to my surprise Lemmy introduced Philthy Animal, and I guess for something to say, Phil introduced me as Fast Eddie. I was not too keen at first, but from then on it stuck like glue. I think it made life easier for Lem when he introduced the band.”

  The first session took place at the Furniture Cave, which Eddie describes to Jeb Wright in 2014 as “a rehearsal room in New Kings Road, Chelsea, that I first used with Curtis Knight. In fact, we rehearsed down there a lot. It was in the basement of a big warehouse-type building and had three rooms, small, medium and medium. I also used it for odd jam sessions using my wages from the boat, and yes, my first session with Lemmy and Phil was down there in the small room. I am surprised we are not all deaf; it was the sort of place we could not do without.”

  “But I was the only one who had any money—funny, really—so after that session, I said, ‘Book the rehearsal room,’ and I’d go pick Phil and Lemmy up in my old Mercedes. So I set up a rehearsal for my audition—that’s the way it was with Motörhead. Phil had taken me over to meet Larry a couple of weeks before so I thought it would be fine. Lemmy, Phil and I started jamming about 3 p.m. but Larry had not showed up. Lemmy called every half hour and Larry kept saying he was on his way. The three of us were having a really good time playing together but at 6:30 the room was booked out to someone else. Fortunately, there was another rehearsal place upstairs, so we moved up there and Larry promised he was on his way. Around 7:30 p.m. Larry showed up. He had a roadie who set up his Fender Twin amp. I only had an AC30 so I couldn’t hear shit. He said hardly anything to anyone, plugged in and started playing a tune off their album, which I fortunately had learned.”

  “The vibe in the room was awful and it got worse but, no lie, we must have played the same song for 30 minutes. Lemmy was getting pissed. Lemmy suggested we do something else and the same thing happened. I am thinking, ‘I haven’t got this job.’ Lemmy then took Larry outside and they were gone awhile. I packed up my stuff. Phil was totally bemused by all this, so we talked about other things. When Larry and Lem returned, I said my farewells, paid for the rehearsal room on my way out and that was that.
I am thinking, ‘That didn’t go very well.’

  “They obviously weren’t getting on,” continues Eddie, “and I felt a little bit in the way. But we had been jamming for three or four hours and we had actually made quite a bit of headway, the three of us. So I left them to it and I went home. I had no idea what was happening. I heard nothing over the next few days. Phil and Lemmy didn’t have phones, so I figured no gig. And then 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning, three days later, there’s this banging on my door, and I drag myself out of bed in my underpants, open the door, and there’s Lemmy. He had been up all night, because of the speed and everything. He knocked on my door at eight in the morning, and I said, ‘Who the fuckin’ ’ell is this?!’ And there’s Lemmy standing there. He’s got a bullet belt in one hand and a leather jacket in the other, and he hands them to me and says, ‘You’ve got the gig’ and then he turned around and off he went. I didn’t know what to think but I was over the moon. It’s always nice to be wanted. Fucking brilliant, eh? How fucking great, man? Only Lemmy can pull one of those out.”

  Lemmy’s now combat-ready new guitarist Edward Allan Clarke was five years Lemmy’s junior, born in London, and had not got serious about guitar until he was 15. Having moved on from early band the Bitter End, Clarke indeed wrote and recorded with Curtis Knight and his band Zeus, on The Second Coming (1974) and Sea of Time (1974), the latter experience leading to the deal for the Knight side-band, Blue Goose, which issued an album in 1974, sans Eddie.

  “I had already left Curtis and gone to Blue Goose,” explained Eddie, filling in the backstory with Jeb Wright. “It was a loose arrangement. Nick and Chris then wanted to come to Blue Goose and it was them who were threatened by Curtis. After Blue Goose, who I never recorded with, I was jamming with Charlie Tumahai from Be-Bop Deluxe. He was a Maori from New Zealand and a great guy and bass player. We had an Aussie called Jim on drums and the singer was an American girl called Annie. I nearly secured a deal with Anchor Records but they said they were not sure about the girl singer. Charlie had an offer from Be-Bop Deluxe, which he could not turn down, and things just dissolved sadly. I do have a few old recordings somewhere.