Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  Kilmister goes on to distinguish heroin from his own banquet of chemicals by saying, “I only saw people die on heroin. I never saw people die on speed or coke. I only saw them die on smack, and hundreds died on that. I hate it because it turns you into an animal and then it kills you. I just never wanted it. I never thought it was a viable proposition because I saw it steal people’s lives. They would become heroin. They don’t have music anymore and they don’t have any goals—all they want is the heroin. Anything that controls you that much and makes you hurt that much when you don’t get it is bullshit to me.”

  Jimmy Miller, of course, had also produced Motörhead’s previous album, but this time ’round, the sound would be somewhat brighter and more immediate.

  “When we first heard we got Jimmy Miller,” recalls Eddie, “we were like, this is something very special. And Jimmy was great. Motörhead was not an easy band to control, because we were a bit out of our heads all the time, and Phil was a very difficult man to deal with. Lemmy would be the cool, calm and collected one. He’s very calm. Phil would be the extremely jumpy one and I’d be the really moody one. But we were all kind of moody; Lemmy was moody, I was moody, I was prone to losing me top, and Phil was too—we were all pretty crazy. So Jimmy was actually perfect for the job because he was fairly calm. He just used to sit there.”

  “Sometimes he was too calm,” continues Clarke. “I remember shouting at him once, ‘You fucking . . .’ giving him a right earful. It might have been the previous album, actually, the solo on ‘Capricorn.’ I remember doing a solo, looking up, and seeing what they thought of the solo, and fucking Jimmy’s reading the paper. You fucking bastard. Of course, I storm in there, fucking ready to have a fight with someone. But he did have a little bit of a problem. He used to like a bit of narcotics. And he used to disappear. He’d disappear for hours on end. And of course, we’d be in the middle of the session, and where the fuck’s Jimmy? We could never find him. Like I was saying, we used to look in the toilets, we used to look everywhere for him. We didn’t know he was hanging out in the ladies’ toilet. And what we’ve done, he’s obviously had a fix or something, and he was having a couple of hours chilling out. And we couldn’t find him. And he was often very late for the studio. Some of his stories were fantastic. You know, how he had to help push the cab to the petrol station, how he fell asleep on the bus and went past the stop and then, you know, took the bus back the other way. We’d be sitting there in the studio waiting for him for hours to show up. But we did like Jimmy, because he was sort of like the grand old man. You had a lot of respect for him, just because of what he’d done and everything. And he was American. He had a great demeanour, but he did get a little difficult at times.”

  Back to Bomber, “Lawman” dials it back, offering more of a bluesy heavy metal shuffle—but then again, the boys come from that background, original rock ’n’ roll with its limited forms, one being the shuffle.

  “Yeah, well not blues blues,” corrects Clarke (who, incidentally actually has to his name his own ripping Gary Moore–style blues album called Make My Day), “but rhythm and blues, from the Yardbirds and all the local bands in England, really. As I was saying, I think of myself as a third-generation blues player whereas people like the Stones and the Yardbirds are second generation, because they copied the old masters, as it were. I copied the Stones and the Yardbirds, so it’s not from the root, you know? Heavy metal came along later. The album Five Live Yardbirds was quite rocky and has quite heavy shit going in it, like build-ups and stuff like that. So I was brought up on that, and that was the start of heavy metal, really. Because they were all thrashing out a bit, and the volume was up.”

  So there’s a bluesy riff to “Lawman,” but also bluesy soloing, of a sort one might hear from Tony Iommi, arguably the only place you hear blues in Black Sabbath. And, curiously, the boys reprise that vibe for track three, “Sweet Revenge,” which takes the blues about as dark and brooding as it can go.

  “Yeah, a bit in the soloing, a bit in the riffing,” answers Eddie, on where his blues can be located within the context of Motörhead. “Lemmy and I were both brought up on that era. Lemmy was a bit before my time, but only by a few years. He goes back to Little Richard, back to late ’50s, whereas I suppose I came around about ’62, ’63. Lemmy always thought of us as sort of a rock band. I always thought of us as a metal band.”

  Which is a very important distinction and nuance, really, and possibly one of the reasons the original band is beloved by so many, this balance between crushing, no-compromise heaviness and something familiar and traditional and grounded. What Eddie is implying is that his interpretation of the blues, being second generation, leans more into nascent hard rock than Lemmy’s. Add Phil to the mix, his look, his demeanour and that strange manic shuffle he’d articulated, and those of a punk disposition can find common ground as well.

  “I knew he did everything different,” laughs Clarke, asked about Phil’s roiling shuffle signature, especially up there on the high hat. “Lemmy used to shout at him at rehearsals, ‘Hey, Phil, why can’t you just play straight 4/4?’ And I’d look at them and think, ‘Well, it sounds all right to me, Lem.’ So we’d just carry on. But I know, he did find Phil a little odd. When I describe Phil to another drummer, I always think of Mitch Mitchell, really, or Keith Moon. He was not just laying down the straight 4/4, like John Bonham or even Mikkey Dee in Motörhead now. Phil was creating his own corner. You’d be playing a tune, and he would actually be augmenting the melody with his drums. He would be creating something more than just ‘boom, jab, boom, boom, jab.’”

  Back inside of Bomber, “Sharpshooter” underscores the band’s approximation to punk, the band’s bashed performance jostling the listener back to the unsafe and urgent sparks-a-flyin’ scrap-yard metal Motörhead had become cult famous for from their first two records. Plus, the immediacy of the track serves as microcosm for the record as a whole. Everything was immediate this time around—contrasted to the band’s experience with the Overkill material, Bomber featured songs that the band did not get to gig-test in advance of recording.

  “We started recording Overkill in October/November of ’78, I think,” explains Eddie, reiterating how quickly the band was working in those days. “It was to get the Bronze deal. And we did the Hammersmith on November 5 that year. We worked over Christmas on Overkill, and I think it came out probably March/April ’79. So we’d been doing it for quite a while, and we were on tour with it quite early on—that was the Girlschool tour. And then of course, we came back from the tour, and it was probably about Easter. I’ve got a feeling it was about Easter when the tour was over, because I remember sitting there on Easter Sunday thinking how fucking boring Easter is. Because it’s got a Good Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday off, you know what I mean? No partying. So I’m thinking, fucking ’ell. I remember sitting there after the tour fucking depressed because I wanted to be on the road. So that tells me it was Easter. And it was a great tour because of Girlschool and all of that. You know, you had . . . anyway, enough of that.”

  “We did a couple of festivals in the summer, and then they said, ‘We want another album,’” continues Clarke. “Well, we were hot to trot then. I mean, once we hit the ground running, once we got Overkill out of the way, we were hot to trot. So Bomber actually came very naturally to us. We went in the rehearsal room and we were just firing off the riffs. We were just on fire, really, at that point. And so we just knocked it out. We wrote songs very quickly, and then we went through the same process with Jimmy Miller, down in Bronze studios, and in fact we had a little stint, as I remember, in Olympic 1, which was fantastic. You know, we did ‘Step Down’ there, plus one other, I believe.

  “To clarify, we started at Roundhouse, but the studio was booked out; I think Uriah Heep was booked in. So rather than lose the momentum, we went to Olympic. We had been into Olympic before—we mixed the first Chiswick record at Olympic. And I’d worked at Olympic wi
th Curtis Knight. Olympic was like Mecca. You’ve got Zeppelin, Hendrix, Stephen Stills—all that stuff in the ’60s was all done at Olympic. At Olympic, as I recall, the Generation X, Billy Idol, he popped in. He was in another studio, and he’s a lovely fellow, very funny. Yeah, but not really any other guests per se. I’ll tell you what we were. We were a bit scary, Motörhead. And you know, other musicians didn’t see us as musicians. They saw us as noisy, scary people. So we were kind of avoided. You wouldn’t have Sting putting his head around the door and saying, ‘Hi guys.’ People avoided us. So no, we didn’t have many visitors in the studio.”

  Phil and an army of Motörheadbangers.

  © Piergiorgio Brunelli

  “It didn’t scare me,” says Phil Taylor, asked about the band’s aggressive, leather-and-studs image. “To be honest, we didn’t embrace the biker thing. It’s more like they embraced us, which is through Lemmy. Because Eddie and I didn’t know any bikers at all. But when we joined Motörhead . . . well, actually, Lemmy was living in a squat with the Hells Angels in London, and that connection came through Hawkwind, and all the acid days, and the Hells Angels going to their gigs. So naturally the Hells Angels got into Motörhead, and they seemed to like Motörhead more than Hawkwind, so that’s how we got this image. Because we weren’t really associated with the Hells Angels, like in having photographs of us with them, and we weren’t bikers. None of us ever claimed that we were bikers. But we just kind of looked like bikers, because in those days, if you wore a leather jacket you were a biker or you were affiliated with bikers.”

  “None of us ever claim that we were bikers.” There’s much telling in that statement: it would have been easy to, but the Motörhead guys were so much on their own path, so unconcerned with impressions, that they would have instantly felt like prats trying to play those connections up.

  But Doug Smith alludes to the idea that there was a little more to the association than the band lets on. “We had this relationship with the Hells Angels that caused a few problems,” recalls Smith. “And I had to put them all in separate hotels so that the Hells Angels couldn’t find them all. It was exactly the same time my wife was pregnant, and the majority of my staff in the office was female. So I told the band that we had to sort this out with the Hells Angels and keep them away, keep everybody away from each other until the whole situation cooled down. Because there was a little fracas that went down that I won’t go into, between them all. And I had to go to America while my wife was pregnant at the time, and of course she was the main person in the office then. And they could be . . . well, Marco was their official spokesman as far as the business was concerned, and he and the rest would march in and they would tell us what they wanted to do and what they were going to sort out.”

  “I mean, nothing against the bikers,” continues Phil, “but I don’t think we had any more kinship with bikers than we did with factory workers, really. None of us ever owned a bike. Well, I owned a Honda 250 for a few years, but that’s not really being a biker. But, as we say, we certainly knew a lot of bikers and some of our roadies were bikers, and we knew plenty of Hells Angels, and they were cool, and it’s kind of a lifestyle. Our music seemed to fit in with the way they lived their lives. And a lot of them since have said they really related to the lyrics. But I mean, whether you agree or not, I’ve always thought that, well, any lyrics by anyone, no matter what kind of song it is, lyrics mean all things to all people. It all depends who you are and what you’ve been through. Every song is something different to different people.”

  Biker image or not, Phil, speaking to Robbi Millar back in 1981, said Motörhead was shunned nonetheless. “I don’t think many musicians come to our gigs in London. I don’t know if it’s anything to do with the type of people that we attract, but we don’t get many megastars mingling with us. We had a big party a while ago and all the people that ever invited us to a party—Lizzy, the Police and that—they didn’t turn up! I don’t think they’re afraid of us anymore so much as the other people who seem to be attracted to our parties, the seedy, heavy-looking characters.”

  And this wasn’t an entirely nonsensical reaction. Especially from the hostile messaging of the debut, it almost felt like Motörhead was threatening to destroy music. Granted, this was sort of the punk proposition as well, but with Motörhead, it looked like they could—and would—carry through, ’cos they had nothing to lose. No one liked them anyway, other than the unwashed and unlearned, and who cares what they think?

  “It was the fans,” says Eddie, on the band’s appeal. “Right place, right time. We really had nothing to lose and a lot of our fans could identify with that as they were in the same boat. We never sold out and we rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but we were honest about it. I miss those times. Things were much simpler. I think life is more fun when it’s a bit of a struggle. They were great years and we made some great music. It was a good time to be in a band. I think we were really lucky. But if you told me then we would still be an item, I probably would have laughed.”

  “It is my dog-eared determination to ignore the evidence,” adds Lemmy, on the band persisting despite the struggle. “If we were in it for the money then we would be gone by now. If we were in it for big record sales then we would be gone by now. But that is not what we are in it for. You know, my only allegiance is having a good time, and fuck everybody else. Rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be fun. That’s the idea. If it ain’t fun, why would you do it?”

  ~

  Back to Bomber’s track list, “Sharpshooter” is more a general tale about a sniper than anything directly war-related. On top of an opening salvo consisting of “Sweet Revenge,” “Lawman” and “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” what we’ve been subjected to, by this point, is an oeuvre of menace more or less about the seedy side of life, even though in “Lawman” the biggest nuisance is the police themselves. And yet, Lemmy considers himself one of the good guys. “Yeah, but it’s like a joke, isn’t it?” muses Lemmy. “Nobody’s that bad, are they? It would be a full-time job and cost a lot of money to be that bad, you know.” And Lemmy considers himself honorable as well, despite all these tales of deceit he was writing. “Yes I am. Because it’s like, the only thing you have that you can take to your grave is your integrity. If you sell out, then you’re fucked. I believe so, anyway.”

  Next up is “Poison,” one of the better pure heavy metal classics on the album, slashed with some memorable lyrics from Lemmy, who, says Fast Eddie, lived by the time-honored tradition of gathering up inspiration on the crapper. “Yeah, well, he’d go off and have a shit or something. We’d say, Lem, you go have a shit and maybe write some lyrics, you know? Take a quiet moment. Or he’d go off and have a beer somewhere in another room and just write a few down. He could do it almost instantaneously. He was fantastic like that. So it’s a bit like the guitar riffs. I’d say, Lem, why don’t we do something on this, say on ‘Sharpshooter.’ He’d go yeah, fantastic, and he’d be on it and Phil would start playing. That’s what I mean, the song is on its way then and it’s practically done. So the moment you say, ‘What about this?’ it’s off to the races and because we were all so in tune, it was done. And Lemmy was the same with the lyrics. He’d go off into a room, he’d come out maybe 15, 20 minutes later, and say, ‘Here, here’s me first draft.’ And he’d show it to us, ‘Fucking, that’s great, Lem.’”

  The “Poison” lyrics find Lemmy artfully yet viciously and tragically blaming his absentee father for the poisons in his life. The ex-preacher is poison himself, but there’s plenty more toxicity around to deaden the pain of his life in rock’s blackest sheep of a band, a life Lemmy wound up banging together in the absence of advice from a male role model.

  Dueling banjos.

  © Martin Popoff

  “Sometimes I write on the road,” says Lemmy, fleshing out the discussion on inspiration. “I’ll be on a long bus journey, and you’ll be bored shi
tless and you’ll write down a couple words. But they won’t always fit the tune when you get into the studio. Sometimes I don’t know where the fuck they come from. When I wrote ‘Orgasmatron,’ I wrote those lyrics in my sleep. I woke up and I had the first verse altogether written in my head. I went over to the notepad and I wrote it down and went back to sleep. You can’t just say, ‘I am going to sit down and write a song.’ It just does not happen like that. But yeah, I do always have a few lying around.

  “Normally I’d do them in the studio, under the clock, though,” continues Lem. “I do them at the last minute but, believe me, I concentrate on them. I have a pretty good vocabulary. But we always wrote better that way. I don’t know why. In the early days it was because we were fucking broke. We had to do it quick because we had to get out of the studio.”

  What Lemmy means by that is the only way the guys made any money was if they were playing live, and even then it was sometimes only a pittance. Most bands would cite the cost of the studio time as the most onerous part of recording albums. Motörhead was more worried about how making records was taking them away from playing live, their best shot at making any money being Motörhead.

  In terms of subject matter, in Lemmy’s early songs, there is much about living the life of an outlaw. Later on, war themes creep in and become prevalent, but a perennial theme is, essentially, getting shafted, man against man and neither acting particularly mature or benevolent in the battle, the machinations, the backstabbing ruses. “I always write about injustice, asshole politicians,” laughs Lemmy. “You’ll always get couple of those on the album. And the rest is sex and rock ’n’ roll, mostly. But there’s always plenty of injustice, you know? No problem there. So I write about the usual—war and sex and murder and playing in a band.” And what are his best lessons about playing in a band? “Read the small print and never trust a promoter.”