Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  Over onto side two of the original Bomber vinyl—blue for the U.K. (Eddie: “We never got told anything; they had blue vinyl, they had fucking gold vinyl, they had green vinyl. I mean, Bronze Records would do anything to sell a record.”) The first track is a mid-grade Motörhead anthem called “Stone Dead Forever,” yet another metal rocker set to Phil’s oddly shuffling high-hat work. As for what happens when we’re stone dead forever, well, says Lemmy, “I have no idea, but I figure I can wait, you know? People spend their whole lives thinking about avoiding death. I mean, that must be pretty depressing, to think about dying. No, I know about mortality. I know there’s no Santa Claus.”

  Says Eddie, “The riff on ‘Stone Dead Forever,’ the actual run-down of the chords, is something you do when you first play the guitar. And you do that, and then play a solo over it, because it’s easy to solo over. It’s got a descending pattern. If I had to put that into context, it’s probably similar to an early ’60s song called ‘Fortune Teller.’ But yeah, ‘Stone Dead Forever’ was a case of ‘Let’s try and do something on this.’ I remember playing it, and then what we would do was set about sorting things out, just concentrate for sort of 15 minutes and put it into shape. Lemmy would start singing on it, and it took a natural shape.”

  This assembling of songs was taking place in between bouts of getting legless, however—a state of being that soon became manageable—simply because the guys had to get the record done so that they could go back on the road.

  “We were all the same,” laugh Eddie. “We were all speed freaks and drinkers, so we all pretty much had the same roster, you know? The only thing was, with me and Phil, we used to drink very quickly. So we’d have our speed or whatever, and then of course we’d drink quite heavily. Whereas Lemmy, because he was an old soldier, he could sort of control his drinking; he would pace himself. And so Lemmy was always standing and me and Phil would be in a heap on the floor. Lemmy would still be there doing a vocal, and me and Phil would be fuckin’ passed out somewhere. You know, after we’d have a fight. So you get the good periods. But as for sleep patterns, sleep—for me, particularly, and Phil to a point—was passing out. Lemmy used to stay awake all night. So it did give us a slight problem at some shows later on, because Lemmy would stay up for maybe three or four days at a time and then he would suddenly find himself getting very weak. We did Bingley Hall once and he collapsed at the end of the show and we couldn’t do the encore because he was just absolutely fucked. So we tried to avoid that in the future. We’d kind of have to look out for each other.”

  “Well, when I get drunk, I don’t fight people,” laughs Lemmy, citing this as one of his positive attributes. “So that’s one good thing. I can’t stand those drunks; three drinks, and they’re saying yes, I’ll fight anybody in the place. That’s really boring. And another good point I suppose I have is that I persevere, and that I believe in the innate goodness of people, although I’m terribly cynical, and I believe that we’re all going to hell in a handcart.” As for what else it takes to get the job done in the studio, “Ruthless determination,” says Lemmy. “And I’m in a job I like, so it’s a privilege, isn’t it? Most people have to work in jobs they hate all their life.”

  And so the guys had to figure out how to be productive, when to work and when to fall down, says Eddie. “When were we most productive? Well, we realized after going into Bomber that recording until six in the morning was a waste of time. Because after fucking 12 o’clock at night, you know, you go in the next day after working all night, thinking it sounded great, and you listen to what you’ve done, and say, what the fucking hell’s that?! And you’d have to redo it all because you were so out of your fucking head. So we made a thing that we knocked it on the head at midnight, sort of thereabouts, 1 o’clock-ish, in the end. We had kind of a regime going. We’d get in the studio, 4 o’clock, 3 o’clock, after getting up at noon, 1 o’clock, eat breakfast, whatever. Just generally putter about, make your way to the studio, get to the studio for three or four. Of course, typically wait for Jimmy Miller; that would be a bit difficult. We’d have a few beers at the studio, maybe a burger and that, and that’s how it would start. Speed, have a few toots, a bit of speed and that. You know, nothing too over the top I’d say—the normal amount, you know. And then you’d be working.”

  Second track into side two of Bomber was “All the Aces,” another searing heavy metal number, rendered so by its sinister melodic structure and its sophisticated riff. That title, like so many others throughout Overkill and Bomber, was setting up Motörhead nicely for the image that would be solidified with Ace of Spades, less the outlaw about London town and more the outlaw archetype as it exists outside the shackling rules of space and place. Lyrically, Lemmy picks up a bit of the theme of “Stone Dead Forever,” namely the corruption of those running the music business. No threats this time, but it’s a scathing denouncement nonetheless.

  Next up on Bomber is “Step Down,” another dirge in the leaden spirit of “Lawman” and “Sweet Revenge,” but with a twist.

  “We’d done this track, ‘Step Down,’” explains Eddie, “and, well, it wasn’t called ‘Step Down’ at the time. We’d done this sort of bluesy thing, thinking we needed something a bit mid-paced. And Lemmy started singing it, and to be honest, I didn’t feel it suited Lemmy’s vocals well. So I said, ‘Should I have a go at this one, Lem?’ Because I felt it suited my range a bit better. And he said, sure, sure, sure. So I went out and had a go, and we agreed that it sounded quite all right. And it was good to get me singing, because it broke the album up a bit. I wasn’t keen on singing, but it would have been more helpful had I sung more with Motörhead, I think. The original plan, even back when we did Overkill, was to have me singing more. There was talk of me doing vocals, but I don’t know what it was, I just didn’t have the desire for it. It would have been just occasionally, to break it up with Lemmy, just to give him a bit of a break. Lemmy used to work so hard on stage. I mean, he had to do everything.”

  Then we’re onto a punk metal highball called “Talking Head,” Phil turning in a frantic shuffle, Lemmy and Eddie scurrying along, trying to keep up. “Lemmy told me once, not long ago, ‘That fucking “Talking Head,” I never want to do that again,’” laughs Eddie. “And then the song was stuck in my head for about three weeks after that. I couldn’t get it out of my head. The thing was, that was the one tune—I’m just remembering now—where we were struggling.”

  “Talking Head” is charming enough but bordering on filler as we move on to the album’s highlight, its closing title track: Lemmy’s stun bass sound pervasive, Eddie throwing off melodic licks, the whole thing rumbling along hook-laden and highly memorable, transition to transition to simple chorus. “Bomber” wouldn’t have been out of place on the Damned’s (also) 1979 album, Machine Gun Etiquette, again, underscoring the nasty rule-breaking punk aspect to Motörhead’s subversive approach to heavy metal mores.

  Bomber’s title track, besides its ties to a terrible and romanticized time of war, is also illustrative of this idea that the sound picture for Bomber is brighter and—dare say some—lighter, than that of Overkill.

  “Yes, I think, it was,” agrees Eddie. “It was somewhat of a move forward for us, inasmuch as we’d been waiting a long time to do Overkill. It’s cleaner and sharper. Overkill was kind of a dark, although I’m quite fond of Overkill. But I suppose it’s a bit mushier, and I don’t know why that would be. The guitars certainly stand out a lot more on Bomber. It’s more guitar-oriented, because I was leading the charge with the riffs. I was really firing on all sixes, at that point.”

  And even though much of the talk around Motörhead’s sound focuses on Lemmy’s head-drill of a bass tone, Eddie was working hard to get it right as well. “Yes, but I didn’t actually change much for Bomber. I used to use my Marshalls, and my Les Paul and my Strat—they were my two guitars of choice.

  “I used to like using them both for rhythm tracks. So I ha
d two separate guitars, left and right. When you played the double-track, you got a really good, nice sound out of it. So that was how I got me double-tracked-guitar sound, two tracks, a Les Paul and a Strat. Later on, with Fastway, I started to use just the Les Paul for both tracks, and I did notice that it didn’t quite have what the Motörhead sound had. It was nice and rich and warm and punchy, but the Motörhead sound was quite unique—raunchy, as opposed to warm and cuddly. I probably used the Les Paul more for solos, although I did use the Strat as well. I couldn’t tell you which ones are which. The trouble I had with the Strat was sometimes it would get a bit dirty. I liked it dirty, but I liked it hard as well. And the Strat used to sometimes flatten out a bit, so I found myself going to the Les Paul.

  “I didn’t really change much, so the cleaner sound of Bomber as compared to Overkill . . . I wonder if that’s to do with the engineer, Trevor Hallesy, or whether that was a directive from Gerry Bron, you know, a directive put down behind our backs.”

  Ah yes, the legendary Gerry Bron, associated, surely, with Motörhead, but more tied to his monolith of a cash cow, Uriah Heep. Eddie offers an additional vignette on the mild-mannered man back at the office.

  “Gerry, well, he was all right, the head honcho,” reflects Clarke. “You know, we never had too many dealings with Gerry. He was like the big boss, as it were. And he would come in and have a listen. I remember when we did Overkill, for instance, him and his then-wife, Lilian, came into the Bronze studio, which was a great studio. I have to say, the Roundhouse was a great studio, and we were very fortunate to have that, because it was like our home. I remember, when they came in to hear Overkill for the first time, and we were loving Overkill with the double bass drums. It was cooking like a bastard. And him and his wife came and sat down, and we played it to him, and you could see it just blew his fucking head off. He loved it. I mean, he did love his music, you know. He loved his guitars and heavy music, so fair play to him. But he was a rich businessman and somewhat unapproachable, I would say. You know, he’s not the sort of guy to slap on the shoulder and say, ‘Oh, let’s go have a fucking beer, man, and a fag,’ you know what I mean? You wouldn’t do that with Gerry. He was like seeing a lawyer or something.”

  Eddie wearing Oakland Raiders, the Motörhead of the NFL, or, for those of us growing up in the ’70s, the Kiss of the NFL.

  © Wolfgang Guerster

  “It was just a natural progression,” shrugged Phil, when asked by Sam Dunn about the element of power inherent within the nascent idea of speed metal, represented by the first song on Overkill, and then, oddly, the last song on Bomber. “Any band that stays together for a while, you progress. I mean, hopefully—obviously, the ones that digress, don’t stay together. But the longer you stay together, the better you get, and the more comfortable you feel playing with each other, and it becomes easier, and hopefully you come up with better numbers, and hopefully you come up with more, and they’re more powerful, if powerful is the correct term to use. But I mean, that’s always what it’s like with music, for me anyway. If people think that our music is powerful, that’s up to you. Because as the saying goes, if you’re a great person, other people tell you that you’re great. You shouldn’t go around . . . everybody who goes around saying how great I am, they’re not great. If you truly are great or good or fantastic, believe me, other people will tell you. It’s the same with music. I don’t think anyone ever set out to be called great or powerful, what was it, the godfathers of heavy metal or whatever, fucking ’ell. But I mean I’m certainly glad we’re thought of that way, and as being powerful, powerful, Motörhead powerful.”

  “I guess because Motörhead was the first, as far as I can remember; we were the first band to play really fast,” continues Phil, speaking to his influence on thrash drummers. “But as they say, again, it wasn’t intentional at all. But I can see why I would be the influence of a lot of thrash metal kids. Because all the bands that came after us, a lot of them, they intentionally wanted to play that fast, whereas for myself, I never intended to play intensely that fast; that’s just how it ended up. So, it’s very nice; it’s a great compliment to be cited as sort of an influence, and a lot of people say that now and again, and I’m very flattered by that.

  “But as Motörhead got faster and faster and faster, I was always wishing that it would slow down,” chuckles Taylor, “so that what we were actually playing could maybe be actually heard by people. Because there’s an old adage that goes, you know, volume can cover up many mistakes, just sheer volume and speed. And it can. And it would have been nice to have been recognized by other musicians at the time, as being good musicians, but I don’t think we were thought of like that. I mean, it’s great to be admired by the fans, but at the same time, you kind of want to be acknowledged as a good musician by your contemporaries as well, and I don’t think we ever got that, because we just played so fast and so loud. But don’t get me wrong, I’m trying to relate to how I felt at the time. And of course now, with hindsight, which always comes too late, it’s a great thing. And if we had slowed down, as I used to think about sometimes, then we probably wouldn’t have gotten to where we got to at the time. So my way of thinking was obviously wrong.”

  The song “Bomber” (inspired by the Len Deighton novel of the same name) is thrown into higher profile not only given its status as title track, but also its ties to the record’s highly professional and amusing album jacket, painted, figures Eddie, about two foot square, and damned if he knows where it resides (probably at Gerry’s house).

  On the album jacket, the band’s proud Joe Petagno–penned “Snaggletooth” logo is emblazoned expertly on the side of a bomber plane and all is well with the world. “Well, it’s never spoken to me,” chuckles Lemmy on the band’s monster of a mascot. “Not like, one-on-one, you know? I think it’s more a symbol with an attitude. I’m sure if it could talk, it’s screaming, ‘Fuck you,’ if you could hear it. Joe’s brilliant. He’s got a book out now called Orgasmatron; you should pick that up if you can, it’s brilliant. He’s very odd. Most people who listen to Motörhead for more than two years will become kind of odd, you know? He lives in Denmark. He’s American, but he lives in Denmark, and he has for years now. He does advertising stuff for a living, and we are his pressure cooker valve. We let him go nuts for a while, enjoy himself. I usually just ring him up and say, ‘Send us a few drawings, Joe.’ I mean, he’s pretty quick. He’s a Capricorn like me, you know; he’s paranoid and pretty quick, and he sends them over and we pick one. I’ve only asked him for one painting. I’m sure he would give me another one if I asked him for one, but he likes to keep them. And that’s good, he should keep them; it’s his life, you know?”

  The back cover says as much about this band as the front does. Lemmy is pictured in a typical “morning after” state of bedraggledness with a bit of the ol’ hair of the dog. His youth is still apparent in this oddly Hawkwind-evoking shot. Eddie is shot in low light, fag in hand, looking bewildered at what fresh hell has just shown up. And then there’s Phil, who, undermining the seriousness of what looks like a very plush and expensive sleeve, is inexplicably allowed to pose goofed-up like Captain Sensible from the Damned. The effect is . . . well, for this writer buying that record as a new release in 1979, I remember looking on mildly irritated, thinking, this band ain’t no joke . . . stop it. Disdain bled into an uneasy sense that Motörhead represented anarchy, an upturning of metalhead mores very much like the punks, specifically perhaps the Damned, who were clearly the least serious of the lot.

  Bomber tour program, autographed by all three members.

  “I remember we had a lot of fun doing the sleeve. They got the head guy who does the paintings of World War II bombers to come and see us in the studio. He showed us all these pictures and Lemmy was in his element. ‘Oh, fucking hell, man. Oh, let’s do a bomb there!’ We’ve got Lemmy on the machine guns, Phil underneath. It was fantastic, ver
y enjoyable. We were really at the top of our game at this stage. And we didn’t care. We didn’t have any money or anything, but we never gave a shit. You didn’t need money in the ’70s, you know? It wasn’t like how it got in the ’80s. Everybody was after money. Now it’s ridiculous.”

  “There are a lot of us into this,” muses Lemmy, on the subject of his interest in war themes and its logical extension for those serious about it, the collecting of war artefacts. “There’s Ozzy, and who’s the other one? John Sykes. There’s a lot of guys into it, you know? Wars are the more interesting periods in time. I mean, you don’t hear about medieval agrarian reform, do you? You hear about fuckin’ Attila the Hun. It’s much better. Have a few swords and lots of gore and a few maidens carried off into northern regions where they are repeatedly ravaged by huge Viking warriors. You know, much more fun than fucking around with the printing presses.”

  And that’s really the rub when it comes to Lemmy’s hobby of collecting Nazi memorabilia. First off, he was a hobbyist and ardent student of the great wars in general—let’s not forget his absentee father’s role in World War II, nor Lemmy’s birthing directly in the rubble-strewn wake of it. It’s ludicrous to pen Lemmy as a Nazi sympathizer (as some have tried and then become quickly dissuaded through the sense of Lemmy’s words to the contrary). It’s more like, as Lemmy says, war is simply interesting, and, deeper than that, the senselessness, waste, cost and atrocities of war affirm Lemmy’s world view that man is a brutal beast. It’s therefore a huge topic for him to write about simply for color, but it also serves as a platform for Lemmy to espouse his philosophies.

  However, Eddie sees Lemmy’s hobby as more of an obsession, sometimes to his detriment, “All the time since I’ve known him until I left the band, this thing with war and Hitler and Nazi Germany was like a healthy sort of hobby sort of thing. It didn’t mean anything, but then it kind of got worse and worse, and now, in the last 20 years, it’s been almost like an obsession. I mean, if you go to his apartment, there’s nothing but wall-to-wall Nazi memorabilia, this, that and the other. And all the songs, virtually all of them that he seems to write, all have to do with war, and I don’t think that’s his forte. I mean, when I was with the band, he wrote great songs like ‘Stay Clean,’ ‘Capricorn,’ ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales,’ all kinds of stuff. And he’d come up with stuff that wasn’t just about war and the futility of man and fighting and killing each other. It gets to be a bit boring after a while when all the songs are about how futile war is, because we all know that. And I do think that he has wandered away from what I thought his forte was, which was writing lyrics that were pertaining to life in general and life experiences.”