Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  “But Speedy was a nutter as well,” continues Clarke, back to the band’s improbable first knob-twiddler. “After Thunderclap Newman, he was a pretty rock ’n’ roll guy himself, underneath the veil of ‘Something in the Air.’ After that he was really a rocker. But Johnny Burns . . . he did a lot of Genesis production, engineering. So they knew what they were doing, but once again I think it was the fact that we were doing it all so quickly and partly because nobody had really recorded Motörhead before. It would be one of those things where they would say, ‘Okay, boys, play me something’ and they probably looked at each other and said, ‘What the fuckin’ ’ell’s that?!’ You see what I mean? There’d be a lot of confusion. And with the short amount of time that we had, they had to just do what they could. But in a way it’s kind of nice because it does show the reality of it all. It’s a real record, you know?”

  “Well, we wanted it to sound better than it did,” laughs Phil. “I mean, that album was recorded in a haze of speed down in Jeff Beck’s studio in the countryside, and I don’t think any of us got any sleep. And it was just a little mill house that had been built by this guy, and we literally recorded it all live. And instead of being overdubbed, if somebody made a mistake we just stopped and started again. And Speedy was doing as much speed as everybody else was, so at the time, when everybody is in the same space, it sounds great. And unfortunately there were no outside influences dropping by and saying, ‘Oh, it sounds a bit like this or a bit like that.’ But we thought it sounded great, and at the time, it seemed to fit in with what a lot of other bands were sounding like, punk bands anyway. It certainly wasn’t as sophisticated as, say, Deep Purple or anything like that, but it was the best we could do at the time, I think. We all liked it, and of course, when it eventually came out, it did sound a bit . . . ‘Oh, could we remix it?’ ‘No.’ I mean, I would love to go back and remix some of those early albums myself. Because I’m sure they could sound a lot better.”

  One could argue that it barely mattered what the band was playing. With production nastiness like that, Motörhead were destined to be called heavy metal. Just don’t say that to Lemmy. “I’ve never called ourselves a heavy metal band,” spits Kilmister. “In every interview I’ve done I’ve just said we were a rock ’n’ roll band. I don’t have a relationship to heavy metal. I have a relationship to Motörhead. It’s the only one I’m interested in. I don’t give a fuck about the others. If we had short hair in 1976 we would have been called a punk band. And a lot of stuff we play is very closely related to the blues, electric blues. They’re blues tunes, just played very loud and very fast. They’ve certainly got nothing to do with heavy metal as far as I understand it. Heavy metal to me is Judas Priest.

  “I suppose I have a problem with it because I come from way before metal,” continues Lemmy. “I’m playing rock ’n’ roll and I think rock ’n’ roll should be sacred—it is to me. I don’t see why it should not be for everybody else. I would guess metal came in with Deep Purple. They were the first one with the wall of sound. Deep Purple did it when they played songs like ‘Speed King.’ Sabbath came along and slowed it down a lot. I used to call it dirge. It was their thing but I never liked Sabbath. I would much rather have Ozzy on his own. I mean, some of the songs are okay, like ‘Iron Man,’ but I never liked the slow ones like ‘Black Sabbath,’ the song. We kind of bridged the gap with the punk crowd. Let’s face it, the only reason we were called heavy metal is because we had long hair. If it wasn’t for the long hair, we would be in the punk rack. It was a punk audience. I mean, it’s because they heard us before they saw us, you see? So they liked the music, and then they saw we had long hair, but it was too late, because they like the music. We sounded more like a punk band than a metal band, didn’t we? We were always too fast for heavy metal. I always thought we had more in common with the Damned than we did with Black Sabbath or Judas Priest. I always thought metal was Sabbath’s first album and Judas Priest’s first couple of albums. Sort of slower, you know? And we were never very slow.”

  The Count Bishops were top representatives of the rocker movement—an army of traditionalists after Lemmy’s own heart.

  And so, there it was, Motörhead, opening with its title track, first a rumble from Lemmy’s bass, then a bunch of cardboard drums, and eventually that voice. Lem’s surely correct about this one—it’s total punk rock, if you didn’t know the goodly brand it was issued under. In fact, it was almost outsider music, which is a term equally applicable to many of the shockingly casual songs and albums generated by Hawkwind, original thumpers of this very title track.

  “Motörhead,” backed with “City Kids,” would become the band’s first single, issued in early June 1977, ahead of the launch of the album proper. Admits Doug Smith on the “success” of the single, “I would hate to say it, because behind the scenes, we bought it in. Well, we didn’t exactly buy it in. We had hundreds of fans go buy records all over London, and we knew that . . . it’s before they sussed out that you can do that. Anyway, we charted it. But it was very low, in the ’60s, right? So that charted, and the situation was that we all got very excited about it, and then the next day they walked into my office and said their current roadie ‘Bobs needs some new shoes. Fucking buy them for him.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not buying Bobs’s shoes.’ And they said, ‘Tony Secunda offered us a deal, so we’re going, bye.’ And they did, but of course they were soon back again.”

  Clarifying the stratagem on the single, Doug adds, “No, we didn’t have fans buy the single into the charts. Having said that, there were a few fans that did help our staff. In those days most labels had a list of chart-reporting shops. We got hold of that list and focused on those shops around the London area. You had to be careful because if the charts spotted an unusual buying pattern, the single would be weighted. However, it would have been difficult for the charts to spot that for the Motörhead single, as the band had never released anything previously. We were able to get a chart position in the 60s; however, I am sure that was also helped by enthusiastic fans around the country, who bought the single anyway. It hung around in the charts at that level for a couple weeks or so.”

  The second song on the album is “Vibrator,” and this one proves Lemmy’s above assertion on two counts—it’s both punk and sped-up blues, or more accurately, the boogie-woogie end of the blues made famous by Status Quo.

  Motörhead was, in fact, notes Eddie, bringing forward and knocking around songs from the shelved United Artists On Parole sessions to make Motörhead a viable chunk of full-length product. “Yes, they weren’t my songs, but of course, I hadn’t had a very prolific career at that stage, and I loved playing, so I was really just happy to play. So I didn’t really mind what we played. I realized we had to play something, so the fact you could sort of learn 10 songs that were already just there, and they were already Motörhead songs . . . it was the best thing to do to get us going as soon as possible. Because with Curtis Knight, I had written a couple riffs—on the album we did I was only credited with two songs—and they were just two riffs that I came up with. ‘Hey man, why don’t we do this?’ It was a similar sort of situation, but the other eight or nine songs on the album, they came from other people. So in those days it was kind of more the norm. Everybody wasn’t running around writing their own tunes. It was more, you kind of played whatever you could get your hands on.”

  That’s what happened, so to speak, with “Lost Johnny,” Motörhead pulling forward the old Hawkwind chestnut most associated with Lemmy. Given the bash and crash of the album, one could still say we were still squarely within spitting—or splitting headache—distance of punk, but there was a palpable biker rock and heavy metal to the album by the time we get to this track.

  “Punk was fine with us,” Clarke admits, the band proving as much by gigging with the likes of the Adverts and the Damned in 1977. “Yeah, we loved it all. But we were independent. We just did our own thing. And the punks,
I mean, God bless them, I always admired them for having a go and getting up there. But I was never that taken with punk music. I liked the attitude and everything, but me and Lemmy had been playing since, I don’t know, me since I was 11 or 12, so playing was a bit of an art form to me. Whereas the punk guys they were just picking up and thrashing around. The singers were singing out of tune, guitars weren’t in tune. I admit, we had our spells of that, but I never felt like a punk band. I always felt that we were Motörhead, know what I mean? We felt we were something different. Even in the early years when we were establishing our identity as a three-piece, I didn’t feel particularly related to the punks. Because we had fucking long hair, and we were kind of different. They had the spiky hair and all of that and we were coming from a different angle. But it was a good time for us, and it was nice to be involved at that time. In a way, punk made it possible for us to get a foot in the door. Because without that going, if it had all still been fucking Black Sabbath and Caravan and Pink Floyd and Deep Purple, all of that stuff from the early ’70s, we never would’ve gotten a foot in the fucking door playing what we were playing. So if it hadn’t been for punk, we definitely would have struggled. So God bless them all. I still see a few of the boys here and again. It was just a good time, you know?

  “But sure, we used to hang out with them,” reminisces Clarke. “We were all kind of in it together at the time. We were kind of accepted because of Lemmy; there was just this acceptance of Motörhead. But then of course, we did look pretty mean and nasty. And the punks, well, they looked mean and nasty, but we looked meaner and more nasty, you know what I mean? And I think they just accepted us as on the same page as them. But as I say, we had history. I started playing when I was 12 and all that. And punks would’ve just been born. But in the ’70s, there was nothing. Nobody had a pot to piss in; it was a very poor time. So you all ended up involved, and you knew you were all there scratching around for a pint, a bottle of beer or something. You just all got on.”

  And the Damned—a hard lot to please—they’ve definitely said they liked Motörhead.

  “Well, they never told me they liked us,” laughs Eddie, which says something about Dave, Rat, Brian and the good Captain (i.e., their stinginess with compliments), but also about Motörhead’s exiled place within the industry, where it just wasn’t okay to like this band. “But we were good friends. We used to play together a bit and we made a couple of records with them and we always got on like a house on fire. So we were just really good friends. It was more about the personal stuff; we didn’t go into the music. You know, you can like someone, but you don’t have to like the music, particularly. I didn’t dislike their music, but we were friends. So you don’t say, ‘Oh, we’re good friends, but I hate your music. So fuck off.’ You don’t say that, do you? You’re my mate. And it’s like, if the guy’s got a girlfriend, you don’t comment on it, you know what I mean?”

  Adds Lemmy, more in response to the band’s association with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal—in other words, the first post-punk uprising of metal in the U.K.—“We saw ourselves as the fucking . . . the guys. I mean, Motörhead was it, really. Not us particularly, but the whole Motörhead thing. We were kind of like the front-runner. That’s how I see it. I saw Motörhead as the front-runners and everybody else, sure, [there were] some good bands, but nobody sounded like Motörhead. Because I tell you what, you have to earn that. And you earn that by fucking freaking out because of the weird sounds you got. So tensions were high.”

  Fast Eddie looking somewhat unscarred, 1978.

  © George Bodnar Archive/IconicPix

  Start talking about the band in terms of punk or heavy metal, and Phil Taylor quickly gets exasperated as well. “It wasn’t us that gave it that name,” says Phil, in response to the idea of Motörhead as a metal band. “It was the media, that comes up with these names. I mean, Lemmy came up with the name Motörhead, and that was the name of the band, and the title that one is given, or the pigeonhole that you’re put into, that has always been created by the media. So it was a heavy metal band we were, and a heavy metal band we remained. And of course then it became just metal, and then after all, who thought of names like thrash metal, death metal, wooden metal, trouser metal, tripod metal, door metal? I’ve got a good idea that it was probably the press. So I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I’m a drummer.”

  As for his role in uniting the worlds of punk and metal: “I think it was because I didn’t really want to be a hippie, like a long-haired hippie, because I was still quite violent. I’d been a skinhead, and I had kind of a Rod Stewart/Ron Wood kind of hairstyle, and I had a leather jacket, but it was like a biker jacket. It was like a punk rocker jacket. And then so kids, the fans, if it was a punk looking at record sleeves, and they saw maybe me with these other two guys, they would think, ‘Oh, that’s strange—he looks like a punk.’ And then maybe the punk would buy that. And then maybe some long-hair would look, ‘Hey, two long-haired guys playing with this punk; that might be interesting.’ But I think the punks kind of latched onto us because we were playing fast, and that’s what most punk rock bands were. That’s all they were about really, ‘One, two, three, four, dah-dah-dah, the end.’ In a way Motörhead was like that, but a bit longer. And I think the punks just got off on the energy, and the fact that from a fan’s point of view, it was kind of weird to like a band that had two sort of hippies in it and one punk on the drums.”

  “Iron Horse”/“Born to Lose,” appearing fourth on the album and co-written with roadie Dez Brown, cemented the band’s image as “kind of different,” as a band for the bikers, an image enforced by the patch/colors/rocker look of the front cover, Motörhead spelled out in gothic, war-mongering font, and the band’s skull mascot, later called Snaggletooth, baring its fangs at all those who denigrate the grating in the den.

  “No one did it before us that I know of,” says Lem, examining the confluence of text and mascot that has become iconic. “Well, before we did it, the Moody Blues and the Yardbirds did it. It has since kind of faded away. You used to have your name spelled a special way with special lettering. It sticks with people that way. It’s a trademark.”

  Snaggletooth, or War-Pig (or Iron Boar, Bastard or Little Bastard) was designed by Joe Petagno, who had worked for the famed Hipgnosis design company and was responsible also for Led Zeppelin’s rich and elegant Swan Song logo. Designer Phil Smee reversed the black for white, turning it negative, and there we had it, a record jacket that looked like a biker jacket. Staring out from its inky soul was a concoction collaborated on—or armed—by Lemmy and Joe, who were both going for the same thing—mean—which is also Lemmy’s motivation for the iconic umlauts over the logo’s second “o,” namely that it just looked ornery.

  Joe told Steel Mill’s Pete Alander and Kassu Kortelainen that he’d first met Lem in 1975. “I had just finished the Swan Song logo for Led Zep, and I was working on some sketches for their formula car that I was to paint. He had just fallen out with Hawkwind, whom I had worked with earlier that year, and [Lemmy] asked me if I would help him out with cover art for his solo project, Bastard. I genuinely sympathized with him; he was down and out. This was back in another universe, on another planet, in another dimension. I have a lot of good memories from those days. Times change—unfortunately some people do too.”

  “Well, Joe had been chasing for years to do a Hawkwind cover,” explains Doug Smith. “But what he produced I didn’t like, because it looked very much like those fantasy and science fiction books. And Hawkwind wasn’t really science fiction. They were mind-bending, basically; they were acid. Initially they were great dopers, but nothing hard. Never anything of any serious consequence passed their lips. But they certainly played around with acid an awful a lot, and a few downers, Mandies, Mandrax, that sort of stuff, and dope, obviously. So really, his covers were too science fiction for us; he never sort of got it right. But he really wanted to do
something for Hawkwind.

  “At that particular point, Motörhead was starting and we needed to get some sort of logo or image sorted out for them. And Joe came to a gig at Twickenham and met the band. He’s an American, Joe Petagno. He comes from San Francisco. And he lives in Denmark nowadays, married to a Danish lady. Joe had an amazing look about him. He had the most outrageous afro you’d ever seen, and his girlfriend did as well. And he turned up at the gig, and of course Motörhead were a rock band, even a metal band. Metal hadn’t really become a relative term then at that particular point—we didn’t call it heavy metal; we called it rock.

  “And so Joe eventually was asked for something, and he turned up with this character, this sort of science fiction image, but it had this head to it. It wasn’t quite the way it looks now. It was a bit smoother than that. It was more refined in its face and the rest of it. And I didn’t like it. I thought, oh my God, it’s too Hawkwind, it’s not Motörhead, it’s not Lemmy. And I’m going to sound really silly here, but I think the first Star Wars had just happened, and I had been quite impressed with Luke Skywalker’s spaceship. Because it was the beaten-up and battered one, if you remember. So I said to Joe, ‘I like the face; take it back and shoot a machine gun at it.’ And that’s what came back.

  “However, not quite,” continues Smith. “Because then they did a short deal with Ace Records, Ted Carroll, very close friend of mine. And Ted took the image and reversed it in negative, and that’s why it looks like it does. Now the logo, the Motörhead lettering, Petagno had drawn really thinned-out Germanic lettering. And of course, Germanic lettering can be very powerful if it’s in the right form and has the right point to it. And John Curd, when he first promoted them, had fattened the lettering. So the lettering grew organically as well, which is quite the same as the band, really. And I remember when Dave Betteridge and Howard Thompson signed them to Bronze, they turned up at a gig at High Wycombe Town Hall on September 29th, 1978, and 75 percent of the audience were wearing Motörhead T-shirts. Howard and I had been friends when he was at Island Records and originally meeting him during Hawkwind recordings at Trident Studios where Howard had been tape boy. But it was quite a big gig, and so they thought, we’ll sign them. The music at that point, I don’t think was quite as relevant. T-shirts did the deal. Their decision was made right there and then because so many people in the audience were wearing the T-shirt.”