Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  Eddie explains, “Nobody wanted to sign us. But what happened with Bronze was, they’d heard the band and they’d see the audience. They thought, fuckin’ ’ell, we’ve got to sign this band. The crowds are going mad. And then they said, well, we’ll put a single out and see how it goes. And then we’ll decide whether we will sign you or not. So we had been mucking about with ‘Louie Louie’ before for this other manager guy, and we said, well, let’s do ‘Louie Louie’ again. It’s easy, straightforward, and it will seem not too extreme. Because otherwise if we wrote a song for it, we’d be getting into the realms of the extreme. We were trying to get some fucking . . . some sort of normality to our lives, so we did ‘Louie Louie.’ Fortunately it got in the charts at No. 75. And then we did Top of the Pops. Because the guy, the record company, he had a friend. And the record company decided to give us a three-album deal or something.”

  “Louie Louie” is a charming, laid-back rendition of an old rock chestnut that the band would record and issue. The mere fact that between albums, Motörhead was constantly giving their fans a cheap purchase in the form of a street-ready 7” further endeared the original band to their base. All the better when the song was non-LP, like “Louie Louie.”

  Lemmy was always one to celebrate original rock ’n’ roll.

  “It’s just an old classic and Lemmy liked it,” notes Eddie, even as Lemmy, preferring “Bye Bye Johnny,” says “Louie Louie” was Phil’s idea. “And plus it was a simple tune. And we did it originally, when we had this manager, Tony Secunda, and we did it as a possible demo. What we were trying to do was place ourselves a little bit—or the manager was trying to place us a little bit—not so over the top, you know? So that maybe we could get a record deal.”

  “So when Bronze Records said, ‘We might sign you if your single does well,’—which was ‘Louie Louie’—we were actually on the verge of breaking up. Because we just couldn’t get any further. Nobody would touch us. The promoters were scared of us, the record company didn’t like leather jackets—that was Hells Angels, you know what I mean? General attitude was we were not liked. They tried to fucking kill us off. It was only our determination that kept us going so long. And then fortunately, Bronze Records came along and gave us the opportunity. And that’s why we grabbed it with both hands and did Overkill. We didn’t question anything. They say they wanna use Jimmy Miller? We said fine; we weren’t gonna argue. And we got in, did our job the best as we could, got out again, delivered our album, and said thank you very much.”

  Gerry Bron of Bronze Records actually hated the band’s incendiary, almost sullen rendition of “Louie, Louie,” but was pleasantly surprised when it charted. The B-side, a new song called “Tear Ya Down,” showed much promise, and off to the side, Chiswick, witnessing the band essentially touring in support of the single, issued a version of the first album in white vinyl, pretty much the last color fit for that dark and murky tangle of distorted sounds.

  Laughs Doug Smith on helping the band get their Bronze deal, “My contribution was, after being sacked four and a half times, they ambushed me at a friend of mine’s flat, Karen, who Lemmy was staying with. Lem wanted to play me the track that they had recorded during Tony’s tenure, produced by Leo Lyons, and that was ‘Louie Louie.’ After listening to the track, the bedroom door burst open and Phil and Eddie appeared. After a short chat they asked if I would manage them again! I said okay, and I got them the Bronze deal and that was it. I finally went back and said, okay, let’s have a go. And from that point on, they got Bronze Records, and they got Lilian and Gerry’s support, 100 percent. Dave Betteridge and Howard Thompson actually signed them, but the reality was that it was short-lived with those two and we ended up with Gerry and Lilian. And Bronze created Motörhead. You know, between me and Bronze, we worked on it, and people like Roger Lemmon and dozens of people in the record company, very specifically, in fact, worked very closely with the band. Bronze Records was the only record company in the United Kingdom that was connected computer-wise throughout the whole of their building. And one floor of their building was rented out at night time to banks to do their computing. No, Gerry Bron was quite an ingenious guy. Apart from an airline, he also had a studio, Roundhouse Studio, that was amazingly successful. And he was also the manager in a record company and the publisher of Uriah Heep and a few others.”

  ~

  With Overkill, the key dab of motion potion was that the band was in a room together, writing for the first time. In fact, they were so pumped that they really couldn’t wait for a new album to show off their new fangs. In tandem, singles and EPs started to become part of Motörhead’s fabric, as they did for many pimply participants of the magical New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), and the effect was that the band was gathering an engaged fan base.

  “Oh yeah, by the time we got past doing Motörhead, we’d written about four new songs,” begins Fast Eddie, “between the first and second album, where we only had two on the first one—I think there was a bit of an EP from Chiswick. It’s a bit weird all that; we had a funny relationship, because our management was a bit strange. But we had about a year where nothing was happening. We weren’t actually getting many shows and it was all getting to be difficult even though our first album had done relatively well. But then we wrote four tunes. The first four tunes we had included were ‘I’ll Be Your Sister,’ ‘Damage Case’ and ‘Keep Us on the Road’—you see, we did a live radio show in between—and possibly ‘Pay Your Price.’ But yeah, the writing by then, we would go into rehearsal and we were really flying and champing at the bit because we weren’t playing every night. So when we got to rehearsing we were writing songs and they were coming really easy. We had sort of a gold spell where everything sort of falls into place.”

  Before a gig at the Mayfair Ballroom, in Newcastle, England, on October 30, 1980, during the Ace up Your Sleeve tour.

  © George Bodnar Archive/IconicPix

  And the celebration of the band’s new embarrassment of riches would go off like a bomb, the opening title track on Overkill being the most relentless example within a new genre loosely called speed metal, one that Motörhead were unwittingly inventing without much help from other bands.

  “When ‘Overkill’ was written, it was, ‘Man, try this!’” exclaims Eddie. “I remember Phil got a new double drum kit, and we were sitting in rehearsals, and he would go in early and set it all up and we’d come ’round from the pub. And he said, ‘All right, man,’ and we started playing, and he stops after . . . we played for, I don’t know, half an hour or something. And he says, ‘Hey man, why can’t we do a song like this?’ and that’s when he decided to do the double bass drums of ‘Overkill.’ So he’s sitting there going da-da-da-da-da-da, thundering away with the double bass drums. Because he was always speeding; he was kind of a bit like that. So he’s thumping away at this beat and we’re sitting there looking at him, so Lemmy starts playing that high bass part, ‘grrrrr,’ and then I started making a bit of noise, ‘grrrrr,’ and then we all crashed in on E, and that was the making of ‘Overkill.’ Once again, we did our usual thing. We rocked on with it for a while and then we started to give it a bit of shape. I said, ‘Here, let’s do that there, and let’s do that here.’ And then Lemmy stuck the lyrics on it. Lemmy always did the lyrics—it was his department. He was a very good songwriter. And I always believed the singer’s got to write his own lyrics because he’s got to sing them. But yeah, to me, ‘Overkill’ is one of our finest tracks.”

  “It’s funny,” adds the drum tornado himself, Phil Taylor, “because it’s only in the last few years that I’ve met a lot of younger musicians who were coming up, and one guy in particular said to me, ‘Man, you realize, you are the first drummer ever in history to play two bass drums all the way through a song, and like with the song, not as a solo?’ And I just looked at him and said, ‘No. What? What are you talking about?’ ‘Man, you’re the only perso
n; you’re the first person who did it. You should be in the Guinness Book of Records.’ And I thought, is that right, really?! And I’m sure it was, come to think of it. A lot of drummers play double bass drums, but it’s always during solos. And so I guess I got that, and maybe I should get into the Guinness Book of Records.

  “I mean, I always liked the look of double bass drum set ups. The double bass drum setup always looks very impressive on stage, but being the sort of person I am, I couldn’t be that pretentious, because Lemmy and Eddie were always, ‘Aw man, when ya gonna get a double kit?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be an asshole; there’s not going to be any drums or cymbals on my stage that I don’t actually use.’ It’s just so pretentious. And there are just so many drummers who do that. I think it’s stupid. But I was just at rehearsal at the time, doing a few gigs here and there, not making any money. Well, not making any money at all, really. But our manager at the time had a share in this rehearsal place, so I was just rehearsing. And so every time, I would get there a few hours early, and I was just practicing basically with the basics, just a mommy/daddy, one-two-three-four, with each foot, and that’s all I was doing one day, and Eddie and Lemmy came and happened to stop and listen outside the door, and when they came in, they went, ‘Hey, don’t stop! Don’t stop!’ And we kept going, and that’s how ‘Overkill’ was born. And it was like the backbone of the song.”

  With respect to direct double bass influence, Phil figures, “To be honest, there wasn’t really any, apart from Keith Moon. You know, Keith Moon was probably the only one who played double bass drums during a song, but even then it was just more or less like when he did a fill, his foot would go from the high hat to his left kick and he would just keep time just for the duration of the drum fill, and then he would go back. I think it was more of a nervous twitch than anything else. And the only other person I would really have to say that I listened to, but not intentionally to learn anything from him, was Louie Bellson, but I didn’t even know he had two bass drums. It’s just that my dad was into jazz and he had one record by this big band where it featured a Louie Belson drum solo and I thought it was great. But I didn’t know it was two bass drums. But I’ve always admired, actually, Brian Downey. Basically drummers only use two kick drums during solos, but I was always impressed with Brian Downey for double kick drums, but the master of them all without two kick drums is, by far and beyond, Ian Paice—he’s the man. He can play one kick drum like some people can’t even play two. So there wasn’t really anybody that I particularly copied. I mean, put it this way, I’m not the sort of person . . . I’ve never been a fan of anybody. I like music, but when I listen to something I listen to the whole thing. I don’t just dissect it, you know what I mean? And I’ve never been particularly focused on any one person or any one band. I’m like, if it pleases my ear, then I like it. I don’t care what genre it falls into, no matter what it might be. If they’re playing two forks and a spoon, then I like it.

  “But that’s how it turned out,” continues Phil. “I was really just practicing. I didn’t really know how to use two bass drums. I had ideas in my head, but I wanted to be proficient onstage. But that’s okay; even if I used it only in one number, that was good. Two bass drums going sounds kind of like an engine, or a Harley Davidson kicking over, something like that. But it just sounded . . . I mean, especially through the PA, at the volume we had. But of course, new numbers came about, and I brought in the bass drum during rolls in other numbers like ‘Bomber’ and ‘Shoot You in the Back,’ quite a few numbers, actually.”

  Moving on and settling in with a kerrang and a clang, “Stay Clean” is all gristle and yet groove, while “(I Won’t) Pay Your Price” is even more primal, stomping about the place on any rodents that might skitter into range.

  “Stay Clean” is Lemmy’s warning to the world about the evils of heroin. “I hate that shit,” begins Lem. “It killed off a lot of my generation. It killed off a lot of my friends. Now this generation is getting killed off again. I can’t believe it. How many dead bodies do we need to have piled up? You have to remember that before rock ’n’ roll, there were a bunch of jazz musicians all doing heroin. That shit has been around a long time. Every generation thinks they are stronger than the generation before. They think, it can’t happen to me. In the past people have died making that same mistake. Maybe you should take note. People lose their lives in the drug wars and you don’t have to prove it to yourself because others have proved it for you.”

  Asked if there was a positive to drugs vis-a-vis the creative process, Lemmy figures, “It was both, you know. Eric Clapton wrote ‘Layla’ when he was coked out of his mind. Later on, it nearly killed him. You’ve got to try to figure out which is the bigger benefit and which is the bigger loser. It nearly killed him; he was in a very, very bad way for a long time, but he came through it. Most people don’t come through it because they don’t have the money to buy the people to look after them. Most people die miserable and lonely deaths because they don’t have the people to nurse them and get them through it all. The ’60s was probably the best era because there were hardly any rules and heroin hadn’t shown up. So people hadn’t started dying. It was incredibly upbeat and we almost did change the world.”

  “‘Stay Clean’ was written about an old girlfriend of Lemmy’s he was very much into, and she couldn’t stay off the heroin,” explains Philthy, who goes on to provide an assessment of Lemmy as lyricist. “That’s what that was about. Just songs about life. ‘City Kids’ and stuff like that . . . not necessarily all about fucking war. But he is a great lyricist, because he could come up with anything. And he just seems to write songs on the spot. Maybe he would have an idea, like we’re actually in the studio, but then it will come to fruition and he’ll finish the actual lyrics while we’re in the studio. So he’s very good, and he’s a very prolific writer. He writes them usually on an old brown paper bag or any scrap of paper he finds lying around the studio. And whatever comes into his head.”

  “I’ll Be Your Sister” was always the personal favorite of this writer, for its bright upswing smashes and above average note densities in the riff compared to the rest of the album. “I don’t know what Lemmy was doing with that,” says Clarke, when asked about the strange title—in fact Lemmy later dreamed about Tina Turner performing this song, part of a wider penchant for wishing to write songs for women. “A lot of times he would pass me lyrics and say, ‘What do you think?’ I don’t recall ever seeing that one. That’s one we had before we started the album. It’s one we had early on.”

  The album switches gears for the hazy desert daze of “Capricorn”—reclined, yes, but still a heavy partner on a shockingly heavy side of music for a record circa 1979. Mused Lemmy over whether being a Capricorn says anything about his psyche, “Take a look; the characteristics are many and varied, dark and shrouded, cynical. I’m on the cusp of Sagittarius, but I couldn’t think of how to fit that into the lyrics. Not many words faze me, but Sagittarius is a tough one.”

  “I must admit, I’m very fond of that album,” muses Eddie, mulling over the track list and sequence. “‘Stay Clean,’ ‘Pay Your Price,’ ‘Damage Case.’ ‘Metropolis,’ you know what? I did a solo for ‘Metropolis’ for Girlschool in 2008. And Motörhead still do ‘Metropolis’ in their set, so whenever I see Lemmy and the boys . . . yeah, and ‘Capricorn,’ fuckin’ ’ell.

  “In fact, all the tracks are fucking brilliant,” continues Clarke. “‘Tear Ya Down’ was the one we did with ‘I’ll Be Your Sister’ and ‘Damage Case’—those ones we did on the John Peel radio show, BBC Radio One. It might have been ‘Limb from Limb’ as well. ‘Capricorn,’ when I was doing the solo, I had done it as a run-through, and our producer, Jimmy Miller at the time, he put all this echo on it. So I’m out in the studio playing, and I just got carried away. And he put this repeat on it, and of course, when we went to listen to it, it was fucking brilliant. And then it was like, well, let’s do it again. B
ecause it wasn’t, you know . . . nobody was really that ready for it. But we couldn’t fucking top it. So we had to use the original take of that, because it was just so good. And ‘Metropolis,’ I remember ‘Metropolis,’ this is a funny one, because when we were doing it, I think it was a Friday night and they were having a party. Because it was over Christmas, this. And they were having a party at Bronze Records and it was also the Bronze studio, and we were doing the album. And I know that Phil was sick all over the fucking ceiling. They had this corridor, where this beam must’ve come across, and they had these little two stairs going down and they went up the other side. And he was of course sick all over this fucking beam; it was ever so funny. And that was the night I did this solo on ‘Metropolis,’ and I have to admit I was fucking crusted. We were completely all fucking gone that night. And yet I often listen to it and think, ‘Ooh.’ And over the years, when I listened to it I wasn’t sure. And then I kept listening to it and I still wasn’t sure, but around the mid-’90s I listened to it and I fucking loved it. I’m glad I didn’t change that. Because it had a certain something.”

  “I think I definitely like Overkill as a favorite because it was the first one, the first album that we did proper, under real conditions, with a real producer,” says Phil, summing up the qualities of the band’s ambitious and bold second record. “And we had some time to do it as opposed to the first album, that didn’t come out until much later, you know, the black-and-white one, On Parole, the very first one that was supposed to come out on United Artists, and actually did, in fact. But Overkill always sticks in my mind because it was the first one we did for Bronze with a proper record deal, and we had time to do it how we wanted to do it, and it was the first album that was all original material, and nothing by anyone else. The other one had like ‘Train Kept a-Rollin’’ and a couple of songs written by Mick Farren and people from the Pink Fairies. But ‘Overkill’ also, you see, I like because of the double bass drum, and my other favorite song which was ‘Stay Clean.’ I like it for that. But yeah, by then of course, we really got rolling. It was everything everybody was expecting, and more than what we were expecting.”