“I signed Motörhead because there is something unique about Motörhead,” mused Gerry Bron, speaking with Dmitry Epstein in 2004. “There isn’t another Motörhead—they have a fantastic following! Some of what they do, things like ‘Ace of Spades,’ are not my cup of tea, and I can’t say that Motörhead is something that I play all the time. But it’s good in its own area, no question about that. You’ve got to remember that when we reached our height, when we were very successful, we had Motörhead, Uriah Heep, Manfred Mann, Sally Oldfield. They’re all completely different, but everyone thought we were a rock label. And I said, ‘Listen to what they’re doing, they’re not the same at all, they’re not like each other.’
“I don’t think we would have signed Hawkwind if it weren’t for Motörhead,” continues Bron, divulging a spot of irony, given Lemmy’s firing. “I can’t say I was that interested. When you have a record label, you get to a point where you have Motörhead, the manager of Motörhead manages Hawkwind, you know they are—and you hear it—quite good and you can’t put them down. When you get to that level, you haven’t the same passion for every artist, because it becomes commercial. Although we never lost any money on Hawkwind, we never made any money, so it was okay. It was okay. Once you run a record label and you’re employing people, you have to make good commercial decisions. You can’t turn away business, even if the business isn’t what you particularly want to do. You can’t always find many people that you like. You’ve got to move on. The fun of the business for me is to find somebody who isn’t well known and create somebody who deserves that success over a period of time. Most of the things I’ve signed were not successful before I signed them. I don’t think Motörhead would have got anywhere if we hadn’t signed them to Bronze. I mean, nobody wanted to sign them. They tried to get a deal, to get a single out, and they never got anywhere. But I wouldn’t sign Motörhead again, or Uriah Heep, because I want to do new things.”
Respected NWOBHMers Angel Witch were also on Bronze, which bassist Kevin Riddles characterizes as a productive home for diversity. “Yes, well, first off Motörhead were—and still are—absolutely unique. They were, in my eyes, the first punk band. Before people like the Ramones or Iggy Pop or anything like that. But they were a European version of those punk bands, if you can understand what I mean: basic, hard-driving, incredibly loud rock. And, I’m trying to think of how to . . . I wouldn’t say that we felt in any way superior, but we certainly felt different from Motörhead. And I think that’s exactly why the Bronze record label worked so well: it was pretty much all rock stuff, but every band was different. You had Motörhead, Girlschool, Tank, Bernie Tormé, Barón Rojo from Spain. We were all rock bands, but you couldn’t say that we were all similar in any way. But as for Motörhead and what they were like, they were just absolutely brilliant.”
Onward through the Overkill album, “Limb from Limb” features “second guitar solo” by Lemmy. “Well, when I first met Lemmy—this was about ’69—he was playing rhythm guitar,” reveals Clarke. “Well, rhythm guitar . . . he was playing guitar in Sam Gopal’s Dream, which, I think that all fell through. But he came to a party that I was jamming at. Some friends of mine were having this bash, and Lemmy came and guested, and he came up with his bass player and used our drummer, and he played for about half an hour and it was really good—he was playing a Fender Jaguar. And he was a very accomplished guitar player, I remember thinking at the time. I remember saying quite clearly, ‘Oh, he’s very profesh, isn’t he?’ I was 19 then and I hadn’t really done much, so I just figured I’ll get up and do a bit of the noise and play me solos. So what happened was, Lemmy kept that guitar, and he always wanted to fucking use it, so I saw no harm in getting him to do a solo on ‘Limb from Limb.’”
“Myself, I’m blues-rooted, and I just go for it, at the time it’s happening,” continues Eddie, concerning soloing but also underscoring one of the possible/debated/arguable magic points of Motörhead, namely that their metal rises up from the blues. “And normally once I go for it, that is the solo that sticks. I don’t sit down and work them out; none of that. We would be at rehearsals, and we would be jamming, and I would be soloing right there in the rehearsal room, and of course be going for it in such a way that, it seems that whatever I go for initially, is where I sort of stay around, that area. Occasionally there were openings. I think of a solo as how you start it and finish it, really. The middle takes care of itself if you kick it off with a good start. So I wouldn’t have much say in it—we would just be jamming and whatever I did seemed to stick. And if I wanted to change it, I would have to really think about changing the beginning. It’s all about, for me, the opening. But what happens is I won’t be able to get over the solo that I already put down. So sometime I’ve got to find a way to get that out of my head and just do another one.”
As for his own favorite solo on the Overkill album, Eddie says, “Fuckin’ ’ell, mate, that’s a difficult one. On side one, ‘Overkill,’ ‘Stay Clean’ and ‘Capricorn’—those are possibly the three. Don’t get me wrong; I love side two, but those are the three that probably stick out in my mind. ‘Overkill’ was fucking brilliant, playing on the run-down on the end. It was fantastic. We just turned up and we went for it. And then we went for it again. And then we went for it again, which was fucking brilliant. I remember playing it in the office, with our manager, and he said, ‘That’s a bit over-the-top.’ And we said, ‘Yes, but that’s why it’s called fucking “Overkill,” man! We can do this; we can get away with this! Because we are Motörhead and it’s called “Overkill!”’ That’s why we can do three false starts at the end. Well, two false starts, you know, three endings. And I remember listening to ‘Overkill’ in the studio, because Gerry, the owner of the record company, and his wife came to listen to the session, and Jimmy put ‘Overkill’ on and it fucking rocked. I mean it was a great studio, and it was loud, and you could see that it just blew them away. I don’t know whether they liked it or not, but they just look completely overawed by it. It just sounded fantastic. Because nobody had done it until then, on that level. It was just pounding, and it just kept pounding, start to finish. It was fucking awesome. I can still remember being in the studio and looking at their faces to try and get some idea of what they were thinking. I didn’t have a clue. I thought they looked shocked.”
Indeed “Overkill” is of paramount importance in the invention of what would become thrash metal. Through the blitzkrieg that was this album and the two to follow, Motörhead became chief and potent inspirers of those who would craft nascent thrash: the bands of the big four, namely Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer and Megadeth. Really, its only precedent is “Fireball” from Deep Purple.
“Yes, but Deep Purple, they never kicked in that way,” qualifies Clarke. “The drums in those days were still a little bit back in the mix. And to have two bass drums at the center of the song was fucking brilliant. But these things, they come about just by accident. It’s like Phil saying, ‘Hey, let’s do a song like this. It’s got two bass drums.’ Because he never had two bass drums before. We could never afford them, you see what I mean? It was little things like that that just added that bit of spark to do something a little bit out of the ordinary.”
Shifting sights to the road, Clarke comments that “with ‘Overkill,’ we took Girlschool out on support. We met them at West London Pavilion, I remember, for the first time. And Lemmy said to me, ‘Oh, I fancy the guitarist.’ I said, ‘Oh, I’ll have the other one.’” Indeed Motörhead with Girlschool was a union on many levels that bore fruit for years to come, the former inspiring the latter toward a great catalog of their own, and Lemmy going to his grave wistfully commenting that Kelly Johnson had been the one true love of his life, even though the dedication in his autobiography picks otherwise—one Susan Bennett. “I don’t want to say too much,” notes Eddie. “Kelly, God bless her, died a few years back. All I will say is we had great times together and I have many fond memories. Yes, and they really
could play.”
“The majority of that all happened in the U.K.,” notes Doug Smith, confirming that he was at many of the Motörhead/Girlschool gigs. “We might have done some dates in Europe, but I can’t remember exactly how many. When we packaged the band out on the road, we were looking for a band that nobody else had sort of got involved with. And a friend of mine had made a record with these girls, and the record just happened to come to our attention, and I suggested it to Lemmy, and Lemmy said, ‘Oh, why not? A bunch of girls on the road? Sure!’ And that was it. There was no further planning than that. They did a few gigs and I went and saw them to decide whether they should be doing this, and they were great. And I thought, well, why not? And so they became part of the whole office situation, joined us for management, and we had so many years working with them until the whole thing went belly-up. Well, it didn’t go belly-up, it closed gently.”
Further with respect to Motörhead on the road, Clarke recalls that, “There were a lot of parties. We used to party all the time, really. Except we didn’t like to go on stage out of it. So we would party all night but we would sleep all day and play the gig and start again. It was kind of like that. Except one or two times in the early days we did make the error of getting a bit too gone. And we made a pact that we shouldn’t do that.”
It’s a cliché, starting with Cream and then The Who and later Manowar and the Guinness Book of World Records and all that, but Motörhead most definitely had a reputation for being very loud.
“Man, it wasn’t our fault,” defends Clarke. “I was forever trying to get a fucking . . . to hear myself. So I was forever adding fucking amps over my side, and Lemmy was just adding more and more on his side, and then Phil had bigger monitors, see what I mean? It was one of those. Each one of us, because we never really interfered with each other’s stuff. I let Lemmy get on with his and Phil get on with his and vice versa. So I’d be over my side trying to hear what I wanted to by adding more and more stuff. And of course, they’d be doing the same over on their side. It was like, ‘Hey guys, why don’t we try turning down and starting again?’ It was too late for that. You were all trying to hear yourself really. I mean there were times onstage . . . I’ll tell you what, man, your ears shut off. And all you got was this ringing and you had to just kind of look around and watch Phil and what his hands were doing just to keep up . . . where are we? I’d watch his hands and know roughly where we were.
“Me and Phil used to fight a lot. We used to have this running thing. And it was usually about the sound. We’d have these differences about the sound. And Phil, being a drummer, he had a very short fuse. So I’d be sort of trying to reason with him and all of a sudden he’d thump me and I’d have to thump him back and a couple of times we ended up rolling around hotel foyers. But because we were such great mates it used to be a right laugh. We used to have a laugh and a drink afterwards. It was nothing real bad. I don’t want to tell you something that sounds really ridiculous. We did have some shitty stuff, but you have to imagine that it was pretty much full-on.”
And of course no one is wearing earplugs. “No, fuck that! Yeah, you can’t do that, man. Ted Nugent did that. He used to say, ‘If it’s too loud, you’re too old,’ and then he wore fucking earplugs! I mean if that’s not a fucking hypocritical shitbag, you know? Although I did like Ted Nugent; I was a big fan of his. He was always great. He used to do a lot of shows over here in the mid-’70s. This was one of his markets, which was nice.
“We were always struggling for recognition as musicians,” adds Eddie, reflecting on how the band’s already uncouth songs made double the racket live. It’s always been a point of contention, but it’s a badge the fans pinned on their heroes proudly, rooting for their beloved underdogs just like the punks did, but with a band that breaks the mold.
“It was very odd in Motörhead. We were just the fucking noise band, the loudest band in the world, you know what I mean? So we never had any real musician friends and we never had any respect from musicians or the business as players. So that doesn’t really matter, you think. But it fucking sort of does. It sort of does, when everybody thinks you can’t play. And I remember somebody telling me in the Motörhead office, when I left the band, it was some record guy who phoned up and said, ‘Well, what’s Eddie Clarke going to do now? Because he can’t play fucking guitar,’ you know what I mean? It’s just an indication that we weren’t . . . our actual souls, our musical souls, weren’t really fed that well with Motörhead. We always felt like second-class musicians. It’s a tricky one to actually put into words but it’s something we all had to live with, and that put pressure on us because you’re inevitably unhappy a lot of the time, disenchanted, disgruntled.”
And then, after the success of Overkill, Britain’s new noise heroes found themselves crashing headlong into another great record called Bomber. “Yes, it was straightforward, carry on,” muses Fast Eddie. “Because we were so fucking on it. I remember, we went into the studio, and everything we played was a new tune! We had this couple of weeks that were just out of this fucking world, man. And was, ‘Fuckin’ ’ell, what about this?!’ All that sort of thing. I think we ran a little short. We might have run out at about nine tunes, I think, and we might have had to struggle right towards the end a tad. But basically speaking, that’s how it felt, ‘Stone Dead Forever,’ ‘Bomber,’ ‘Lawman’ . . . it’s fucking brilliant, man. They just flowed. We were flying along and all of a sudden, you run out, you know? But apart from that, Bomber was just a continuation of the spirit of Overkill.”
CHAPTER 5
Bomber: “They saw us as noisy, scary people.”
Bomber, issued October 27, 1979, just might be the second heaviest record ever issued in the ’70s, after, arguably, the band’s own Overkill. Rainbow’s Rising? Stained Class? Sabotage? Full Speed at High Level? (Look it up.) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ram? (Look that one up too.) For all the grief set upon Bomber as “lighter” than Overkill, it’s quite possibly heavier than all comers by bands lacking mutton-chopped bass-abusers.
“It’s weird, but to us we were just a band that was playing hard rock,” muses Phil, addressing the idea of Motörhead as a heavy metal band—and perhaps the heaviest goddamn ever, as of 1979. “However it came out, it came out. I don’t think any of us—or anybody who is in a band that becomes successful—ever sits down and says, ‘Right guys, we’re going to be the heaviest band in the world!’ Well, a lot of them do, but a lot of them that do never make it. Anybody who sits down and tries to make a plan like that, it never works. It has to happen naturally. So really it just happened naturally, and it’s other people who apply these great labels. Or say good things about you. And as the saying goes, people who truly have talent don’t need to tell people they have talent. Other people tell them. And so we didn’t really intend to be heavy. I mean, we thought we’re a heavy rock/hard rock band, but we certainly didn’t think, ‘Oh, we’re going to be the heaviest band in the world.’ We wanted to be, but we didn’t actually sit down and work on it. It just came out like that.
At the London Zoo, 1980.
© George Bodnar Archive/IconicPix
“But sure, when those two words came out, and were pointed on us—heavy metal—we didn’t mind at all. Because we thought, ‘Oh, that’s quite a good name, heavy metal.’ Based on heavy rock. But to us it didn’t really matter what you called us; it was what it was, as long as somebody didn’t come up with a name like pink metal or nice fluffy pink elephant metal. So we thought heavy metal, oh, that’s cool, that’s all right.”
Jacked up on a diet of crank and booze a mere six months after the incendiary Overkill, Bomber opens with the gnarly “Dead Men Tell No Tales” and the record’s producer has gotten his second warning from Lem’s pen about the evils of the narcotics, Miller being a notorious heroin addict, eventually dying of liver failure in 1994 at the age of 52.
“Me and Lemmy particularly, we
had an anti-smack thing going on,” explains Eddie, “as you can tell from Overkill. So we felt very strongly about that. Lem’s lyrics sometimes got a little dark, but I always loved Lemmy’s lyrics, so I never interfered. He’d do a lyric and he would show it to me, and I’d read it and I’d think, fucking fantastic, man. I never really interfered with it because on Bomber, he was cooking as well. I mean, as I was firing out the guitar riffs, Lemmy was firing out the lyrics. And that’s why it all worked so well; Lemmy and I were a very, very strong writing team. I don’t care what anybody says, we had a fantastic chemistry between the two of us.”
“We have tried throwing the police at it for years but there is more heroin on the streets than ever before,” Lemmy told Jeb Wright, so exasperated with the scourge of horse that he’d be willing to try legalizing it. “We have tried throwing all the junkies in jail where they get sodomized and turned into real criminals. Before they went to jail they were usually just pretty quiet junkies. The people who kill each other and everybody else are the dealers. If you legalized it then you could ration it out better. It would be trackable and you could cut out the dealer. People are going to buy it, whatever you do. I hate the fucking shit; it killed my old lady. I’ve never done it myself. If you are going to have it in society—and apparently you are because people want it—you might as well legalize it and control it; that is my take on it.”
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