“Damage Case” combined smoke-choked verse riffing with, come chorus time, reminders of the boogie-woogie that was dear to the hearts of these old warhorses. And then it’s on into the inky night with “Tear Ya Down,” toward a stone-cold epic of the catalog, “Metropolis.” But before we move on, it’s interesting to note that “Tear Ya Down” is from a different session from the rest of the album, laid down by Neil Richmond at Wessex when they recorded “Louie, Louie” before signing to Bronze.
Explains Eddie, “We couldn’t get a deal for love nor money. But [Bronze] had an A&R guy there called Howard Thompson, a lovely man, great bloke, and I’m still in touch with him. He did a lot after that, went to CBS and Elektra, but he said, ‘Well look, I’ve got to try get you on a label,’ so he spoke to Gerry Bron, the owner, and Gerry would only let us do a single. He would pay for a single, and then see how it went. And so that’s when we did ‘Louie Louie.’ So we went up to Wessex Castle Studios. You’ve got to remember, Wessex was a big studio in those days where all the punk bands went to, Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks; Chrissy Hynde worked up there. So Neil Richmond was of that ilk, sort of like a punk producer. He was called in to do the production on it. So he took us up to Wessex, and we did ‘Louie Louie’ on the A-side and stuck ‘Tear Ya Down’ on the B-side, and so instead of re-recording it, we just used the one we had, and remixed it.”
But the rest of the album was caged at Roundhouse Studios, which was (I sense a theme here) “fucking brilliant. Camden Town, right next to the Roundhouse, Camden now is very fancy. Them days it was more of a shithole. It was a lovely brand new building, had all the best desks, two Harrison desks, all the equipment you can think of. Carpets, fucking everything. It was a huge space, the room was fantastic, and it was just brilliant; it really was. It wasn’t the Olympic, don’t get me wrong, but it was a really fine studio. And it was of course our record company’s studio, so we felt like we had a right to be there.
“Because with Bomber, we did a couple of tracks at Olympic. I think we did ‘Step Down’ at Olympic and a couple others there. And Olympic by then, the mid-’70s, was actually getting a bit run down. Because Olympic was where Hendrix worked, Clapton, Stones, it was like the Mecca. In fact, I did a few tracks there with Curtis Knight, back in ’74. All those people running in and out, when you’re starting out like that, it’s like real milestones in your career. Just the studio used, and the people you meet there, those are the things that sort of keep you going, as it were.”
As mentioned, the band was in full collaboration mode. Maybe they were living too fast to focus and write at “home,” wherever that was, but whatever the case, these songs were slammed together on the spot. “All three of us together, yes, for all of them,” says Eddie. “All six albums were done like that. You need to have that realism, you know?”
Still, Phil says his role in the writing was quite limited. “Not in the actual music. Because I don’t play guitar or anything like that. I mean my contribution was I would help with coming up with suggestions for the arrangement, or maybe we should do a stop here or there. Just little things, but like I said, I don’t know an E-flat from an elbow, but occasionally I would have a tune going through my head or whatever, and I would kind of like hum it, but it’s not quite the same. Humming it to somebody . . . but Eddie and I wrote a couple of songs like ‘Chase is Better than the Catch’ from Ace of Spades; we wrote that in Eddie’s flat, with me playing on a cardboard box. When me and Eddie worked together, Eddie was a lot more understanding than Lemmy, and I would make guitar noises, just make a change or this and that, and Eddie interpreted it very well. So that was, from my point of view, how my input was. And in lots of other ways, but not necessarily musically. We started out as a family, and to be honest, that was the way of keeping the band together, by including everybody, because famously, throughout history or whatever, drummers have never been included in the publishing, just because they don’t necessarily play music, but they always have a certain input, and Lemmy and Eddie both insisted that they split the publishing three ways, so that we could stay together as a band. And as I say, I did have input in my own way. I wasn’t just a freeloader, put it that way.”
One theory concerning Motörhead’s lucky streak of fast, fine albums at the turn of the decade is the contact buzz the boys were getting off of the growing crowds at their incendiary live shows. “We did our first Hammersmith Odeon in November ’78,” figures Clarke, getting the timelines straight, upon being reminded that the credits say Overkill was created between December ’78 and January of ’79. “Yeah, we got the deal with Bronze. When we did shows, hundreds of people would show up. But we didn’t have a record deal. Our fans were fucking loyal; they were brilliant. And of course as Lemmy always said, if you go somewhere and play, next time you go back, everybody brings a mate along. And he was right. Because right at this time we were playing the Hammersmith Odeon and we didn’t quite sell it out, but I think we did close to three thousand. And that was just on the back of touring and that first album. And I remember we had ‘Overkill’ written then, we had ‘Sister,’ we had ‘Limb from Limb,’ we had ‘Damage Case.’ I’m not sure about ‘No Class.’ But then after we did that we went in and did the album. Of course we were really excited because we finally had a record deal. We were over the fucking moon. And we did a tour to follow up the album, which I think started about March that year—if I remember rightly, we got home for Easter.”
Moving on, “No Class” was just ZZ Top’s “Tush” on a speed jag and living in a squat, yer leather jacket and bullet belt your only friend. Its mention elicits a tale from Eddie: “I remember ‘No Class,’ I’ll tell you the story; this is Jimmy Miller. God bless his soul, he was a fucking lovely guy. And I think he did a really good job; he had done the Rolling Stones and Traffic in the past. He had this long gray hair and he had a beard and he was really this sort of mellow American guy. But he was a bit of a lad, old Jimmy. Remember, we were pretty fucking headstrong in those days. It took someone who could balance the whole thing out. But what happened on ‘No Class,’ I did the solo, and he is doing the mix of it. So I was doing this solo, it was an all done, and he’s doing the mixes, and he played ‘No Class,’ and I said, ‘Fuckin’ ’ell Jimmy, what happened to the solo?’ It had actually disappeared! Because it just didn’t go down on tape very loud. So I said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ He says, ‘Don’t worry, man, I’ll take care of it in the mix.’ That’s what he said. When we put it down, it didn’t go down very loud on the tape, and he said it was all right, he would take care of it in the mix. And then he did the fucking mix, and I said, ‘Jimmy, you never turned the fucking guitar solo up.’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it in the cut,’ you know when they cut the record.
“So we go to the cutting room, and I said right, what’s he going to do about this? So when it came to the solo on ‘No Class,’ when you hear it, he turned the fucking high mids up at the solo. That’s all he could do to get the guitar little bit louder. You can hear the solo and it thins out. He struck the high mids up just to get the guitar out of it, which was fucking hilarious. Yeah, so you think, well, fucking ’ell, that’s a bit cheap shot. But he was just a little bit . . . he could test you a little bit. In the end, our relationship was pretty much worn out at the end of it all.
“But I’ll tell you, Jimmy kept us very amused,” continues Clarke. “He used to do things like, he just wouldn’t turn up at the studio. He would be three hours late and it’s because he fell asleep on the bus; the cab broke down and I had to push the fucking cab. Or we would be in the middle of the session, and he would go out for a piss, and he would disappear and I remember, we used to go looking for him, but we couldn’t fucking find him. But we never looked in the ladies’ toilet. And I heard later—I mean, you can check this out with Lemmy—but I heard later that he was in the ladies’ toilet having a little sleep, as it were. So yes, we used to turn up at the studio, beca
use we were so keen to go, and of course he wouldn’t be there for three or four hours, drive us fucking mad!”
“Unfortunately Jimmy was a terrible heroin addict,” recalls Phil, back to the making of the Overkill record. “And we mainly got him because of the great album that he did, Sticky Fingers for the Stones—that was a great album. And unfortunately we didn’t know he was a terrible heroin addict when we recruited him. He was actually suggested by Gerry Bron, and I don’t think Gerry Bron even knew about his heroin addiction. Jimmy didn’t . . . Jimmy really didn’t have any influence on direction or sound. He just recorded us as we were, and produced it quite well. And to be honest, a lot of the times, he was very quiet, due to the heroin, I think. And when you thought he was awake, he was actually nodding off to sleep. You had to poke him with a stick. And more often than not he would be like hours and hours late, unfortunately. We would get pissed off at him. So he really didn’t have very much of an influence on the band at all. He produced a good album for us, but I don’t think he influenced our sound at all.”
As illustrated, Clarke wasn’t always completely pleased with what Miller had accomplished with the Motörhead sound. Which is understandable, given the polished vibe Eddie would embrace later with his Fastway records. “True, now when I listen to them, they’re fine, but I wasn’t sure at the time, I mean, I thought he was just there, you know? I didn’t really pay much attention to what the producer was doing. He was more like a suit, you know what I mean? It was hard to discuss anything with him. And you wondered if he was really taking on board what you were saying. So in the end you didn’t bother saying too much. But the job got done, and when I listen to the albums now, I think they’re fucking great and I think he did a really, really good job. Because I tell you what—recording Motörhead is no mean feat. It’s very, very . . . it’s a difficult sound all around. It’s difficult to play in, it’s difficult to do live, it’s difficult to record, you know? It’s Lemmy’s extreme bass sound which kind of sets the tone. And you have to work around that. It’s just not usual. It’s kind of unique. But also exciting, I suppose.”
“I’ve got two Marshall hundred-watt amps,” Lemmy told me, years later, on how he gets his signature “drill bit to the head” sound. “Old amps, tube amps, JMP Super Bass II’s, right? They’re from the ’70s, I guess. I’ve got four cabs, two 4x12s and two 4x15s, one of each on each side. They’re next to the drum riser. The settings are presence at about 3 o’clock, bass at about . . . no, bass is off actually, middle is full-on, treble is about 7 o’clock and volume is about 3 o’clock on both of them. And they are joined by the inputs at the front, not at the back.”
And if you’re playing guitar against that . . . good luck with it live. “We have talked about it, but it doesn’t change anything,” says Lem. “If I’m going to play with my sound, then it has to be gotten around. I mean, if you can’t tell bass from guitar, I don’t care what kind of tone you’re playing, you’re in serious trouble. You better get professional help. But you can always tell which is which. That’s nonsense. I play rhythm guitar bass. Later Brian Robertson had problems with it because he was always bitching about it. He used to say, ‘There is no bass. How can I do this? Can we set up another bass drum? I need bass.’ I said, ‘What makes you think that I wanted bass?’”
Lemmy at Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto.
© Martin Popoff
Chuckles Eddie, “I mean, Lemmy’d probably be the first to admit that he’s not a proper bass player, inasmuch as Stanley Clarke or something, you know what I mean? He’s not that kind of bass player. But as bass player goes, he’s probably the best bass player there is. I mean, the amount of power he gets on that. The guitar, the way he holds it, he’s got hands as strong as fuck, Lemmy—he’s like Samson. Nobody can play bass guitar like Lemmy. He’s definitely a one-off. And then of course, he sings on top of it. So yeah, he’s quite a unique animal.”
Articulating the Motörhead sound further, Eddie affirms that, “Lemmy would be playing the rhythm on the bass, you got this ‘grrrrr,’ so Phil and I would work around that and try to see what we could do within it. We’d sort of do a riff power noise thing and then I’d think afterwards, what can I put on this to make it a bit more interesting? So it wasn’t just me playing the same as the bass. It was often really fast so it was quite tricky, and I think that’s one of the things that gives it its flavour, that little lick that you get. But with Lemmy, as I was saying, it’s like any song that he would do, we’d have to work around Lemmy’s bass sound. I was playing obviously with Motörhead all those years and I was struggling all the time to get a really nice guitar sound. It was really hard, on stage especially. And I just sort of fought with it the whole time. Phil had the same problems with his drums. It was hard. It didn’t always settle right, you know?
“But Phil was very, very fast,” Eddie continues. “I remember later when I was doing some remixes on the No Sleep ’til Hammersmith live album, I wanted to add some other shows to it, add some bonus tracks, this is in 2001. So I went to the studio, and I used to sit and listen to Phil’s drumming, and he’d take off on a fucking roll around the drums, on a really fast song here, and I’m thinking, fuck me, he’s not going to make it. Straight off, he’s not going to make it. But every time, he made it. So that always fascinated me. I’m thinking, fucking ’ell, I didn’t think he was going to make that one. Oh, and that one! But he always got back in time.”
Continues Eddie, on the grinding tones of the band, “When we were in Texas and we were supporting Ozzy, Mountain was supporting us and they were using our gear. So Leslie West was using my amps, right? He used all my gear, and I tell you what I said to my roadie, ‘Fuckin’ ’ell! Why don’t I sound like that?!’ And he kind of looked at me as if to say, ‘Well, you ain’t Leslie West.’ But what I realized later was that it was the contrast with the bass. Because Lemmy, on stage, he has a couple of Marshall 100s with all the treble full-on and all the bass off. There’s no real bass anywhere. So the guitars are clashing with the bass. The frequencies are the same. And a similar thing for the drums. I mean, we used to always say—and our sound man used to always say—the only real bottom end we had was the bass drum. You know, no disrespect to Lem, because it was our sound and it made life interesting, but it was odd. I always wondered about Brian Robertson when he took over from me, how it must have fucking done him in! Because he’s coming from a band with two guitars and a nice fat bass, you know what I mean? You fart on the strings and it sounds great. But with Motörhead, man, you’ve got to fucking work every second to get some sort of sound and cohesion out of it. It was fucking hard graft man, and really the demise of the original lineup came through that. It was a lot of stress at times.”
All of that noise is one of the reasons the band was considered punk rock with long hair.
“Well, kind of . . . yes and no,” figures Phil, on the extent that punk influenced the direction of Motörhead’s mania. “Eddie couldn’t stand it at all. Lemmy and I did, you know, just because of the energy, I guess. And I kind of liked it for the energy and the people. The people, really. Because I was more of a punk than heavy metal guy, by the way I dressed and my attitude, but I didn’t particularly like playing the music, because to me it was just too simple. It wasn’t anything special. It was just a lot of kids—at the time I was probably like 24, 25, and a lot of the punk bands were in their teens or early 20s. But even the ones who were the same age as me weren’t particularly good musicians. And I’m not wishing to boast or anything, but they weren’t into the same music; they didn’t have the same musical tastes as me. I quite liked the energy, and as I say, I liked the people, so that’s why we kind of crossed over mainly—because of our personalities. Not necessarily the music. I think the punks liked Motörhead music more than we liked their music. Because we were these long-haired people who played loud, energetic music, and we weren’t what most punks thought the hippies would be like when th
ey met us. Because when they met us, we were just as rough and ready as they were, but we had long hair.”
~
Back to Overkill, what about engineers Ashley Howe and Trevor Hallesy—what did Eddie figure their place was in the scheme of things?
“I don’t remember a lot about Ashley,” says Eddie, “but he was obviously, for us, he was the guy, with Jimmy Miller, getting this album together. But he was quite sought after at that time, and unfortunately he married an American bird and disappeared off the scene forever. And Trevor, we used Trevor on Bomber. Halfway through Overkill, I think Ashley went off and wasn’t there anymore. Because we always thought Ashley was fucking great, and then when he wasn’t there it made us think he was even greater, because he’s not available. But for Bomber it was only Trevor. In fact, we tried to do something with Trevor; we did the Golden Years EP. I think that was Motörhead and Trevor. I don’t think Jimmy Miller was on that because he was back in the States then.”
In regard to label head Gerry Bron, forever remembered for his turmoil-enhanced relationship with the Uriah Heep guys, Eddie says, “He was like a fucking headmaster, wasn’t he? When you spoke to Gerry, it was like your granddad or something. Not his age, but in the way of respect. We had the deepest respect for him because he was the guy who made it possible for us to do what we did. And plus, he had all the fucking power. If he says fuck off, we would have to fuck off, you know what I mean? When he was about, we were actually quite well behaved. It wasn’t until much later Phil got out of his head once or twice with his wife, screaming at her, threatened to kill her, I think. That was in ’81, so that was toward my end of the stay in the band anyway.”
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