Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  Lemmy’s first stab at replacing Fast Eddie Clarke did not go so well. As much as people appreciate the Another Perfect Day album now, much scorn was rained down upon Brian Robertson, with some of that being testimony to how much Eddie was beloved by fans as part of the band.

  As Phil explains it, Lemmy was having a hard time adapting to the new six-stringer as well. “For me it was great, but for Lemmy . . . you see, Lemmy had the stupid attitude, just from Rob being a Scottish guy, like [in a Scottish accent], ‘If Lemmy tells me not to do it, I’m going to fucking do it.’ It was just ridiculous. Because Lemmy had nothing against Brian’s playing. His playing speaks for itself; it was just the way he looked. When he joined the band, it was the tail end of the summer, and Robbo joined us in America and it was very hot and subsequently he wore shorts just like anybody else did. But unfortunately he didn’t change from his shorts when we went on stage. But he didn’t give a fuck. He’s not the kind of guy. And admittedly, I said to him, ‘Rob, you should at least put a pair of pants on.’ ‘Aar, aar, all right.’ And Lemmy would go, ‘Fuckin’ hell, Rob, you look like a fucking wanker!’ Instead of being reasonable about it. Well, of course, that got Robbo very pissed off, and it just got worse. And he started wearing headbands and all this kind of thing—that just set Lemmy off, really.”

  “And Rob was the sort of person, unfortunately—and in a way, I agreed with him—it’s like, why should they give a fuck? Go listen to the music instead of looking at my fucking shorts. Which is fair enough, but on the other hand, I would say, ‘Damn, well, Rob, it wouldn’t hurt just to put a pair of pants on if that’s what it takes to get the fans over.’ Because after all, unfortunately, if you want to call them shallow or whatever, they are seeing the shorts, not the man, not the music. And unfortunately it’s not very good.

  “Because that lineup was good,” continues Phil. “I thought Another Perfect Day was the best album Motörhead ever made. And so does Lemmy, as it happens. He just couldn’t stand the image that Robbo projected. It’s always down to—which was really stupid, because I used to have chats with Lemmy—‘Lem, when you speak to him about it, speak to him like a normal human being. Don’t jump down his neck. Because you know he’s just going to get worse.’ ‘Oh fucking, grrr . . .’ So anyway, he said Robbo had to go. It’s the shorts or you, so it was him.”

  “Apart from that, we got on really well, and musically it was really good, because Thin Lizzy has always been one of my favorite bands, and playing with Robbo was great. That whole album was virtually written by Robbo and me, I mean, not me from a musical point of view, but Lemmy was hardly ever at rehearsals. He came in and mostly did his bass parts in the studio. The arrangements were already done, and I think you can hear that just by listening to the album. There’s not a great deal of Lemmy influence in there. And of course, Lemmy I think is one of the best lyricists of our time, for that genre. He could always write good lyrics. So yeah, that was an unfortunate time. But Motörhead with Brian Robertson . . . I regret that it couldn’t have gone on longer, because it would have developed into a hell of a good band.”

  “I really enjoyed it, from what I can remember,” laughs Robbo, with regard to his one record cycle with Motörhead. “Because that was crazy. I mean, we were traveling in a bus. I’d never even done that before. Straight off the stage, into a bus, off to the next gig, blah blah blah. So it was a severe amount of Jack Daniels consumed, and other things. I enjoy the album thoroughly, but I did say to the boys when I joined the band, when they asked me, because I only went out to do the tour, just to help them out, because we were mates, right? And then they asked me to join, and I said if I do, and if we’re going to do an album, it’s not going to be like the old Motörhead, because it just won’t be. And they were like, ‘No, that’s cool.’

  “I mean, I know that Lemmy is quoted as saying that Robbo thought it was his solo album, right?” continues Robertson. “Now, that just makes me laugh, because the fact is, you know, Phil came in and got his drums down. I mean, I wrote half the music actually on my own, in the rehearsal studio. I wrote the bits that I did on my own in the rehearsal studio by recording myself on drums and then using the guitar to write the riffs. Because Lemmy was in the pub doing his one-arm bandit thing, and Philthy was already gone. He just went home. Phil really wasn’t interested once he got his drums down. He would come up for the mixes for a little while or whatever, but Lemmy was busy off writing his amazingly funny lyrics that he comes out with. I thought the lyrics were absolutely incredible. There’s one track there that I really had a hard time doing the solo on, because, every time I heard the vocal, I burst out laughing. And Tony Platt, the producer, kept saying, ‘Robbo, come on.’ And I said, ‘Look, you’re going to have to take the vocal off. Take the vocal out and I’ll launch into the solo.’ It was ‘Back at the Funny Farm,’ and ‘I really like this jacket, but the sleeves are much too long.’ What a thought. He really had an amazing mind. He is a really good lyricist—weird, but it’s tongue-in-cheek.”

  “It’s a long story, but I’ll give you the short version,” begins Phil, when asked about his own eventual departure from the ranks, concluding the death of the classic Motörhead lineup. “Lemmy was under the impression that I was fucking his girlfriend, which I wasn’t. And for a start, she wasn’t even his girlfriend, and it was as simple as that. And Lemmy and I had been at loggerheads for a long time. I had rejoined the band two or three years earlier, when I was away for about a year, and my mom had passed away the summer of . . . I left in the May of ’92, and my mom passed away in the late summer of ’91—and that hit me very hard. And I mean, it was still affecting me a lot, so I wasn’t exactly the person I had been. I guess looking back now, you could probably say I was depressed or something. But my heart wasn’t in anything. And I guess Lemmy could see that. I was just very quiet and not me.

  “But the thing is also, when I rejoined the band [Note: Phil left in ’84, returned in ’87 and was gone for good in ’92], Lemmy had a different attitude toward me. It was like, once I left the band, I was the last original member to leave, and then so he really became God. He was the boss, it was his band, and whatever he said went. Well, when I came back in the band, as far as I was concerned, it was still the way it used to be. If I saw something, I would give my honest opinion no matter what it was or who was asking the question. Considering those two or three years I was back with the band, Lemmy didn’t like that anymore. Because I would challenge him on something that I didn’t think was right.

  “For a start, there were things like when we got the record deal in America, Lemmy moved over to America before I did, and me and Phil Campbell and Würzel [born Michael Burston, the first guitarist hired after Brian Robertson’s ousting] were still back in England. And I found out that it became obvious—not so much by actually saying so, but more by omission—that Lemmy was lying. Because the record company would get in touch with Lemmy in L.A., and they just believed that he was like an Ozzy sort of figure. They would tell Lemmy everything. They would ask him everything. They wouldn’t bother with the rest of the band because they thought they should meet with the leader. He always did everything, and if there was anything he wanted the rest of the band to know, he would pass it on.

  “Well, that was the case in a democracy,” reflects Phil, “but it was lying by omission, and that’s how it ended up. I got pissed off with it, but Phil Campbell and Würzel turned out to be two brown-nosers who just went along. So I went to Lemmy and said, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ One of the things that really brought it to a head was over the 1916 album sleeve. I mean, we’d finished doing the album, and me and Phil Campbell and Würzel had just flown over to America, and well, Lemmy’d already been living there. Obviously, we were getting ready to start the new tour, and the first thing we had to do was get off the plane and go straight to the record company for a meeting about the album launch and this, that and the other. We got there, and I was completely blown away
. What the fuck was going on here?! We got to this conference room, and there was a big easel up there with one cover after another. Lemmy, he might as well have had a pointed stick, ‘Right, boys,’ and that’s how it was. He kept pulling out all these ‘I like this one,’ and they came up with this sleeve—rubbish. And apparently, while Lemmy had been in L.A., they went through about four different artists for this album sleeve for 1916. And Lemmy rejected them all. And he rejected them all at a cost of approximately fifteen thousand pounds a time.

  “So he was making decisions like that, but he never even told anyone. And so he was throwing our money away. And so I blew up at him and said, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? If you want to be the fucking big cheese, and you want to hire and fire and just pay us a retainer, fine. That’s fine, we’ll do that, and pay us a good retainer. But if this band is still a democracy, you’ve got no right. How can you make decisions like this that are costing all of us money? And then, number two, you can make all the decisions you want without any problem from any of us, like rejecting artwork, as long as it comes out of your pocket.’ But that’s not what was happening.

  “And then on top of all that, we find out that he charges us . . . he ended up, as he says, actually designing the final sleeve that came along, and he charged the band eighteen thousand pounds for doing it! Exactly. I think he spent about sixty thousand pounds of our money, and Phil Campbell and Würzel, after that, made a big stink about it—only afterwards. And we decided, I said to them, ‘Listen, you’ve got to fucking speak up. Because Lemmy just thinks it’s me being an asshole.’ And they never fucking did; every time it came down to it, Campbell and Würzel just sat there and went, ‘Oh.’ And Lemmy goes, ‘What do you think, guys?’ And they said, ‘Well, I don’t know, Lem. We’re with you.’ And I just turned around and said, ‘You fucking wankers! That’s not what you fucking said.’ And then of course Lemmy would look at me and smile with that shit-eating grin, ‘Oh yeah? I thought you said it wasn’t just you then?’ And so that really put it in a bad light, and then I think Lemmy was just looking for any excuse to get rid of me, because he didn’t like being challenged. But at the same time he wasn’t prepared to say, ‘Right, okay, I am the boss, and I’m going to put you all on retainer and I’m going to take all the royalties.’ Because that would have been fine by me. But don’t fucking claim it’s a democracy and everybody sharing everything fair and square, when you’re doing shit like that.

  “And then the final straw actually came in Japan. We went to Japan on tour, and the very first gig—very first gig—Lemmy refused to go on stage, in Japan, right? And there’s all these fans. And he refused to go on stage because the merchandising was all wrong. Which was totally ridiculous. And during that particular argument, it was just me and him in the dressing room, and we had a big fucking fight. And the last thing I said to him, I remember saying, ‘Fucking ’ell. Whatever happened to you? Is this band a democracy or not? Is this a democracy anymore?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, it’s a democracy. It’s a democracy when I say so.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Well, at least, Lemmy, you’re showing your true colors. Fuck it.’ And then after that tour, we got back in the studio and it all came to a head and he accused me of fucking his girlfriend, which was totally ridiculous—absolute bollocks.”

  To add insult to injury, not much head-held-high Motörmusic got made during Phil’s second stay in the band either.

  “I didn’t like Rock ’n’ Roll much,” tells Taylor. “It was a bit uninspired and dead, I thought. And the title was a bit iffy. I didn’t like 1916 that much either. The one song on it was really good, but that album was written by me, mainly, and Phil Campbell and Würzel, in a dingy, damp little studio in Suffolk, in south London, while Lemmy was in Los Angeles. All the songs were put together by us three. The ideas for the riffs obviously came from Campbell and Würzel, but when we got over to L.A., we had about a week’s worth of rehearsal and Lemmy just put his bass parts on. But he would never admit to that, of course, and of course he wrote the lyrics.

  “Oh, and that’s when he dropped the bombshell of—that was another situation—from that album forward, he decided that he was getting 50 percent of the royalties. Which fair enough, that’s the law. The person who writes the lyrics, they are entitled to 50 percent of the royalties, because that’s the way it worked. But he never did that before, and all of a sudden he’s doing it. So, I mean, I was glad when he fired me. I said, ‘You can’t fucking fire me, I’m fucking leaving! I’m glad. Thank you very much. You’re such a prick. And guess what—you are firing the only fucking friend you’ve got in the world. Because these cunts are just fucking sycophants, and the only thing they want to know is how far they can stick their noses down your trousers, and that’s it.’ I get a bit emotional about that because I loved Lemmy as a brother. And it’s true, he doesn’t have any friends and he got rid of the only real friends he had, which were the ones who would tell him to his face what they thought. But now he just hires sycophants and people who tell him how great he is.”

  “Ah yes, Phil Taylor, that’s a different story,” counters Lemmy, asked about Phil’s departure from Motörhead. “We were family for years and years, me and Phil. Then one day he did something that I considered unforgiveable, so I haven’t forgiven him. So no, I don’t keep in touch with him at all, even though he’s in L.A. somewhere.”

  “Once Phil got kicked out of Motörhead by Lemmy in the early ’90s, he never did anything else after that,” sighs Eddie. “He fucked about a little bit with an electronic kit, but he never played again. And it’s a waste, because he was a fucking brilliant drummer.”

  ~

  Motörhead would of course soldier on, making some of the best music of their career with Phil Campbell and Mikkey Dee. “I know this is the best version of the band, because I’m playing in it and I know,” says a somewhat exasperated Lemmy, having to perennially defend the current band against the legend of the original. “This is certainly the best band I’ve ever had, but people are just stuck with it, you know? People won’t come out of 1981. The old stuff is pretty ropey when you listen to it up against this band, without the benefit of nostalgia painting it gold, you know?”

  There’s much to be said for that supposition. Whether it’s dark horse Bastard or Motorizer or Aftershock or the band’s last album ever, Bad Magic, there are piles of great songs everywhere, recorded with grit and heft and determination, year after year, the modern Motörhead distilling rock ’n’ roll to its hard essence (and yes, please do call it heavy metal). And yet there’s still a boozy romance with the original band that cranked those six records—bang, bang, bang—from 1977 through 1982, Ace of Spades the evergreen pop culture icon amongst the stash.

  Staring down mortality, Lemmy told me with a typical smirk and snort, “I figured I’ve already gotten away with it, you know? I’ve made it. And a lot of my contemporaries really didn’t. I keep doing it because I love rock ’n’ roll, I really do. Almost ever since I could remember, I’ve been doing it. I mean, it’s been good to me, and I’ve been pretty good to it too. I don’t think I have any reason to stop doing it.”

  And of course, doing it means living on the road. When I asked Lemmy how he stays mentally fit during all those miles, he counters, “I’m mentally unfit. That’s the secret. There’s no way of going on the road and being normal. I mean, what the fuck are you on the road for if you’re going to be normal? You’ve got to be fucking nuts to go there in the first place. I mean, to stay there, you’ve really gotta be tragic. Going home scares me. The road is where I live, you know. I live on the bus—that’s it.” Lem clearly doesn’t like those four walls: “Well, why do that when you can have 150 fucking walls on tour?

  “But the business has always been a pain in the ass,” adds Lem, always able to find the cloud inside the silver lining. “The music business is cutting its own throat, and it doesn’t even know it. Because all they promote is singl
es by faceless bands who are going to disappear immediately. And you wonder why they have no fan base. They’re just destroying the fan base by making it disposable. And MTV is helping them as well. I mean, MTV, I’ve never seen such an abortion in my life. Game shows on Music Television—that’s what we need! Like there weren’t enough game shows on TV. It is wonderful, isn’t it? You have to keep a sense of humor about this shit. Mankind, as a race, is hilarious. We just keep killing each other. The only thing we improve is that we can kill each other from farther away. We don’t need to see the handiwork that we did. I think if we still had to see the dead man with our sword stuck in him then there would be a lot less fighting. How they do it now is cowardly. You are killing a guy from several miles away and you don’t even know what he looks like.

  “I just do what I do and that is to be the bass player and vocalist for Motörhead—that’s my title,” continues Lemmy, true to the rock world’s assessment of his noble role as well as his harried band mates’ and managers’ assessment of his lack of cooperation and ambition. “What we do is we kick ass. As far as the popularity goes, I never saw the point of letting them win. If you let them win then the whole thing was for nothing. You’ve got to prove it. You’ve got to say, ‘Yeah, I was here and I shit on your hydrant’—you’ve got to leave your mark. Seriously, I’ve always felt that we were a pretty good band and I always have thought that we deserved more attention in America. We’ve been putting albums out here since 1982. If it takes making a movie about one of us [Lemmy, 2010] to get us more recognition, then I say, ‘Let’s do it.’ Most of our dreams have come true. There are only a couple left that have not come true, like having that hit in America. But I never did see the point in it. I am not going to throw my heart away for money. You may be able to do that, but you will lose all of your original fans because they will know you’re selling out. Plus, we’ve never played in Africa or China or Thailand or places like that. I’d like to do that before we go. Sure, I’d like to have a giant hit in America before we go, but I don’t see that happening. Because we’ve never even been in the Top 100 here, you know? Other than that, I’m pretty satisfied with my life.”