White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  Lemmy Kilmister was born in Stoke-on-Trent. Having been a member of the Rocking Vicars, Opal Butterflies and Hawkwind, Lemmy formed his own band, Motörhead. The band recently celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary in the business. Lemmy currently lives in Los Angeles, just a short walk away from the Rainbow, the oldest rock ’n’ roll bar in Hollywood.

  Since 1987, Janiss Garza has been writing about very loud rock and alternative music. From 1989 to1996 she was senior editor at RIP, at the time the World’s premier hard music magazine. She has also written for Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Times, Los Angeles.

  ‘From heaving burning caravans into lakes at 1970s Finnish festivals to passing out in Stafford after three consecutive blowjobs, the Motörhead man proves a mean raconteur as he gabbles through his addled heavy metal career résumé’ Guardian

  ‘As a rock autobiography, White Line Fever is a keeper’ Big Issue

  ‘White Line Fever really is the ultimate rock & roll autobiography . . . Turn it up to 11 and read on!’ Skin Deep Magazine

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2002

  This edition first published by Pocket, 2003

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A Viacom Company

  Copyright © Ian Kilmister and Janiss Garza, 2002

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Ian Kilmister to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  Africa House

  64-78 Kingsway

  London WC2B 6AH

  www.simonsays.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia

  Sydney

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from British Library

  Paperback ISBN 0-671-03331-X

  eBook ISBN 978-1-47111-271-3

  Typeset by M Rules

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks

  PICTURE CREDITS

  The publishers have used their best endeavours to contact all copyright holders. They will be glad to hear from anyone who recognises their photographs. Cover photograph of Lemmy by Nicola Rübenberg ©; Hawkwind photograph by Michael Odis Archives © Referns; Motorcycle Irene, Phil Taylor and Lemmy photograph by Ray Stevenson © Retna Pictures Ltd; Motörhead at Bloomsfield Terrace © Redferns; Motörhead photograph by Fin Costello © Referns; Motörhead photograph © Corbis; Motörhead photograph by Paul Slattery © Retna Pictures Ltd; Motörhead photograph by Fin Costello © Redferns; Bishop Lemmy photograph by Fin Costello © Redferns; Macho Lemmy © Henri Clausel; Motörhead photograph by Glenn Laferman ©; Motörhead’s 10 year anniversary party photograph by Tony Mottram ©; Lemmy photograph by Mick Hutson © Redferns; Lemmy photograph by Mitran Kaul © Redferns

  This book is dedicated to Susan Bennett,

  who might have been the one.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 Capricorn

  2 Fast and Loose

  3 Jailbait

  4 Metropolis

  5 Speedfreak

  6 Built for Speed

  7 Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

  8 Keep Us on the Road

  9 Back at the Funny Farm

  10 (Don’t Let ’Em) Grind Ya Down

  11 Angel City

  12 We Are Motörhead

  13 Brave New World

  Index

  Plates 1

  Plates 2

  PROLOGUE

  I was born Ian Fraser Kilmister on Christmas Eve, 1945, some five weeks premature, with beautiful golden hair which, to the delight of my quirky mother, fell out five days later. No fingernails, no eyebrows, and I was bright red. My earliest memory is shouting: at what and for what reason, I don’t know. Probably a tantrum; or I may have been rehearsing. I was always an early starter.

  My father was not pleased. I suppose you could say me and my father didn’t hit it off – he left three months later. Perhaps it was the hair falling out; perhaps he thought I was already taking after him.

  My father had been a padre in the RAF during the war, and my mother was a very pretty young librarian with no idea of the duplicity of the clergy – I mean, you teach people that the Messiah was the offspring of a vagabond’s wife (who is a virgin) and a ghost? And this is a basis for a worldwide religion? I’m not so sure. I figured if Joseph believed that one, he deserved to sleep in stables!

  So anyway, I didn’t really miss my father, ’cause I didn’t even remember him. And on top of that, my mum and my gran spoiled me rotten.

  I met him twenty-five years later, in a pizza place on Earls Court Road, since he had apparently worked himself into a frenzy of remorse and wanted to ‘help me’. My mum and I figured, ‘Maybe we can get some loot out of the son-of-a-bitch!’ So I meandered off up there to meet the sorry blighter – I thought it was iffy, and I was right.

  I recognized him right away – he looked smaller, but I was bigger, right? He was a crouched little wretch with glasses and a bald spot all over his head.

  I suppose it was awkward for him – having walked out on someone for whom you were supposed to be the breadwinner, and then not a word for twenty-five years . . . awkward, sure. But it had been bloody awkward for my mum, bringing me up on her own and providing for my gran as well!

  So he said, ‘I’d like to help you in your career, to try and make up for not being a proper father to you.’ Ha!

  I said, ‘Look, I’ll make it easy for you. I’m in a rock ’n’ roll band and I need some equipment’ – amp on the fritz again! – ‘so if you can buy me an amplifier and a couple of cabinets we’ll call it quits, okay?’

  There was a pause. ‘Ah,’ he said.

  I could tell he wasn’t a hundred per cent into this scenario.

  ‘The music business is awfully precarious,’ he said. (He’d apparently been an excellent concert pianist in his day. But his day was gone.)

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I know, but I’m earning my living at it.’ (Lie . . . at least at the time!)

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what I had in mind was paying for some lessons – driving lessons, and sales technique. I thought you might become a sales rep or . . .’ He trailed off.

  It was my turn to be unenthusiastic.

  ‘Bugger off,’ I said, and rose from the table. He was pretty lucky the vast reunion pizza hadn’t arrived, or it would have become his new hat. I strode back into the fatherless street. It was clean out there – and that was the Earls Court Road!

  Talking of two-faced bastards – my band, Motörhead, got nominated for a Grammy in 1991. The music industry doing us yet another favour, you know. So I got on the plane in Los Angeles – New York’s a long walk. I had a pint of Jack Daniels in my pocket: I always find it helps with the sobering up. As we taxied elegantly out on to the sun-drenched tarmac, I took a sip and mused pleasantly on this and that.

  A voice: ‘Give me that bottle!’

  I looked up; a stewardess with concrete hair and a mouth like an asshole repeated herself, as history will – ‘Give me that bottle!’

  Well, I don’t know what you might have done, honoured reader, but the fucking thing was bought and paid for. No chance. I volunteered this information. The reply: ‘If you don’t give me that bottle, I shall put you off the plane!’

  This was becoming interesting; we were about fifth in the queue for take-off, were already late, and this boneheaded bitch was going to take us out of the line
for one pint of Jack Daniels?

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Put my ass off this fucking plane right now,’ or words to that effect. And can you believe it, the stupid cretin did it! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! She made all those people late and miss their connections in New York, all for a pint of the amber pick-me-up . . . So what? Fuck her! And the horse she rode in on! Come to think of it, perhaps she was the horse she rode in on! I got another flight an hour and a half later.

  It was an inauspicious start to the festivities, and it carried on like it began. When we got to the fabled Radio City (Home of the Stars!), everyone was dressed in hired penguin tuxedos, trying to look as much as possible like the motherfuckers who were stealing their money! I don’t wear tuxes – I don’t think it’s really me, you know? And I don’t think the ushers liked the Iron Cross.

  Anyway, having been nominated for a Grammy for our first album for Sony, I had foolishly entertained the idea that the company might be pleased. I don’t think they even noticed! I have still, to this day, not been lucky enough to gaze, enthralled, upon the splendour that is Tommy Mottola – that night, I think he was probably too busy chasing Mariah Carey around her dressing room. I’m not an overly ambitious man: ‘Hello’ or just ‘Glad to have you aboard’ or even ‘Hey, dude’ would have sufficed. Nothing. Nada. Fuck all. So I went to Sire’s party. Better. Got laid.

  So fuck ’em. And the horse they rode in on!

  CHAPTER ONE

  capricorn

  I started life in Stoke-on-Trent, in the West Midlands of England. Stoke consists of about six towns clustered together. Burslem was the nastiest, so it’s only fitting that I was born there. The area is called the Potteries, and the countryside used to be black with slag from the coal used in the kilns that produced all kinds of pottery, including the famous Wedgwood. The ugly slagheaps stretched over the landscape wherever you looked, and the air was dirty with the chimneys’ smoke.

  By the time my wayward father took off, we had moved to Newcastle, my mum, my gran and I – Newcastle-under-Lyme, that is, which is not too far from Stoke. We lived there until I was six months old, and then we moved to Madeley, a village nearby that was really nice. We lived opposite a big pond – nearly a lake – where there were swans. It was beautiful, but definitely amongst the hoi polloi.

  My mum had it rough, trying to support us on her own. The first job she had was as a TB nurse, which was rotten fucking work, because in those days it was like being on a terminal cancer ward – so she was more or less just seeing the patients on their way. And she saw TB babies being born – apparently there were some real horrors. TB does something weird to the chromosomes: she saw newborn babies with rudimentary feathers on ’em, and another one born with scales. Eventually she left that job and worked for a time as a librarian but then she stopped working for a while. I didn’t quite understand the pressures she was under and I figured we’d be all right. Later on, she was a bartender, but that was after she married my stepfather.

  I had problems at school right from the start. The teachers and I didn’t see eye-to-eye: they wanted me to learn, and I didn’t want to. I was always like a fuckin’ black hole when it came to maths. You might as well have spoken Swahili to me as try to teach me algebra, so I gave up on it early. I figured I wasn’t going to be a mathematician so I might as well fuck off. I played truant constantly, and that was it from day one, really.

  The first episode in my difficult schooling that I remember clearly was at primary school. This stupid woman wanted to teach the boys knitting; she was probably a feminist, right? I must have been about seven, so really it was a bit pointless. And this woman was a real brute, too – she quite enjoyed hitting kids. I wouldn’t knit because it was sissy. In those days, we still had sissies, see. They weren’t running the country, like they are now. I told her I couldn’t do it, and she hit me. Then I said I couldn’t do it again, and after a while she stopped hitting me.

  Honestly though, I think hitting a kid’s good for him if he’s a bad kid – not if he gets hit indiscriminately, but when he does something wrong. It’ll stop him from being bad early if he’s fucking terrified of a teacher. I used to get it regular: I got the board rule, the T-square that hung near the blackboard. The teacher would stand behind us and he’d whop it in the back of your head. Later on, the physics teacher would hit us with the leg of a chemistry stool. That was a good one but I never got it ’cause I was pretty good at physics. That is, until I left school, by mutual agreement.

  If you get a good smack around the ear so it rings and sings for about half an hour, you’re not going to do that shit again in class; you’re going to listen to what you’re being told. That’s how it worked, but now it’s gone. It worked for me and it worked for my generation pretty well, because as far as I can see, we’re smarter than this generation’s shaping up to be.

  Anyhow, my mum remarried when I was ten. His name was George Willis, and she met him through my Uncle Colin, who was her only brother. I think the two of them were friends in the army (Colin and George, that is . . .). He had played professional football for Bolton Wanderers, and as he told it, he was a self-made man with his own factory, which made plastic shoe stands for shop windows. That went bust about three months after my mum married him. He was too much. He was fucking funny as shit: he kept getting busted for selling purloined washing machines and fridges off the back of lorries, but he wouldn’t tell us about it. He used to say he was off on a business trip; you know, ‘I’ll be gone about a month, darling,’ and he’d go and do thirty days in jail. We didn’t find out about this for a while but he turned out all right in the end.

  With him, of course, came his two children from his previous marriage – Patricia and Tony. I was the youngest of the three and was constantly being bullied by these huge, newly acquired siblings. And I had a very fraught relationship with my stepfather, because I was an only child, as far as my mother was concerned. She used to fight like a fucking bantam for me, so he’d get a terrible hard time. Patricia’s lofty ambition was to work at the Treasury, of all things, and eventually all her dreams came true. Tony lives in Melbourne, Australia, head of some plastics division (I didn’t know plastic was hereditary!). He went in the Merchant Navy for about ten years and didn’t write to us for nearly twenty. My stepfather thought he was dead.

  When my mum and stepfather married, we moved to his house in Benllech, a seaside resort on Anglesey. It was about this time that I began to be known as Lemmy – it was a Welsh thing, I believe. I was in a very bad school, being the only English kid among about seven hundred Welsh – that was made for fun and profit, right? So I’ve been known as Lemmy since I was around ten. I didn’t always have the moustache . . . I’ve only had that since I was eleven.

  But I did manage to entertain myself. By stealing some gelignite and rearranging the coastline of Anglesey. There was this construction company redoing all the drains in the village. They could only work in the summer because after that the weather got too cold. So they used to pack up around September or October and they would stash all their supplies in these PortaKabins. And around the end of October, beginning of November, me and some friends would break into them. I mean, Jesus Christ, if you’re a boy of about ten or eleven, it was like finding buried treasure! We found caps and overalls, gelignite and detonators and fuses, all kinds of wonderful shit. We would bite the detonator on to the fuse and shove it into the gelignite. Then we’d dig a hole in the sand on the beach, shove the contraption down it, twill the fuse out and cover it up. We’d finish up by putting a big rock on top, lighting the fuse and running like bloody fuck. And BOOM! – the stone would fly fifty feet in the air. It was great! Later, I’d find crowds of people standing there in the rain, looking at the damage and muttering, ‘What do you think?’, ‘I don’t know – aliens?’ I have no idea what the village copper thought was going on, ’cause he’d hear all these terrifying bangs and he’d come out to the beach and half the cliff had slid into the sea. About two miles of coastline was
different when we were finished with it. Just innocent fun, right? Schoolkids get up to all kinds of shit, and after all, why not? That’s their job, isn’t it – to piss off their elders and give them a cross to bear; otherwise, what use are they?

  Of course, these were mere diversions compared to my growing interest in the opposite sex. You have to realize that in those days, the fifties, there wasn’t Playboy or Penthouse. The kicks then were those magazines that featured things like nudists playing tennis – Health and Efficiency and shit. That’s what an awful world the fifties were. And people call it the age of innocence. Fuck that – you try living in it!

  My sexual education began when I was very young. My mother brought home about three uncles before we decided on one being Dad. But that was always fine with me – I figured she was lonely and she was working all day to feed me and my granny, so I didn’t mind going to bed a bit early. And growing up in a rural area, one would find people goin’ at it in the fields. Plus there were always cars, of course, with the windows steamed up – you could always get a good look at a bared leg or breast as the couple crawled from the front into the back seat. In those days, the fashion was those skirts with the two petticoats underneath, which you whizzed around dancing the jive – so I used to dance a lot. I gave up dancing when the twist came in because it offended me – you couldn’t touch the woman any more! Who wants that when you’ve just discovered adolescent lust? I needed to get close and warm; tactile, hands-on, experiencing, giving and receiving and counter-groping and stuff like that, you know!

  But it was when I was fourteen and working at the riding school that I really discovered my lust and desire for women of all shapes, sizes, ages, colours and creeds. And political persuasions. The whole of Manchester and Liverpool would come down to our little seaside resort town every summer. College students on holiday would take out the rides at this school. And the Girl Guides would come every year, en masse – the whole troupe, with their tents and gear. And there were all of two Guide mistresses to look after them – ha! Who were they kidding? We were going to get to those chicks if we had to don wetsuits! And the girls obviously felt the same way. They were eager to learn and we were eager to learn and between us, we learned it. Believe me, we learned every fucking note.