White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  I got a job at the riding school because I loved horses. I still do. We had a good time there because horses make women horny. There’s a sexual power to a horse. Women would rather ride a horse bareback, and it’s not for the obvious reasons. I think it’s to feel the animal’s body next to the skin. Through a saddle, you can’t, especially an English saddle. And then there’s the fact that they’re fucking strong too. A horse can do anything it wants with you, really, but it doesn’t because, except for a small minority, they aren’t temperamental animals. They give in to you. I think that’s what women like about horses – a being so strong that gives in without fighting back, or at least trying to assert its rights. It won’t do the washing up, but that’s a small price to pay.

  I was in love with Ann. She was five years older than me, which at that age is an impossible gulf to cross. But I can still recall how she looked – very tall, mostly legs, sort of a broken nose on her but she was well attractive. She went out with this really ugly geezer, though. I couldn’t understand that. I caught them fucking once in a barn and I tiptoed out, going, ‘Jesus Christ.’ But the funniest story regarding those Girl Guides involved a friend of mine called Tommy Lee.

  Tommy only had one arm – he was an electrician and one time he put his finger on the wrong wire and the shock literally burned his arm off up to the bicep. They had to remove the rest of it and stitch up his shoulder. He was never quite the same after that – he used to listen a lot to things that only he could hear. But anyway, he had this false arm with a black glove on it, which he would hook on to his belt or put in his pocket. So one night, the two of us sneaked over to the Girl Guides. We crawled under the hedge and through the gorse . . . but when you’re fourteen, you don’t care, do you? You’ll do anything for a piece. We finally got there and I went into this one tent with my bird and Tommy went in the other tent with his. Then it all went quiet, you know, apart from the sound of bed springs. Afterwards, I dozed off for a bit, like people do, because it all just felt so nice (that’s why I keep doing it!). Then I was startled awake.

  ‘[Whack] Ow! [Whack] Ow! [Whack] Ow! [Whack] Ow!’

  So I peeked under the tent-flap and there was Tommy, stark naked with his clothes under his one arm, running like a maniac. Following closely behind was a furious Guide mistress beating him on the head with his own arm! I laughed so hard, they caught me! I couldn’t move, I couldn’t run, I was just helpless. That was one of the funniest fucking things I’d ever seen in my life.

  My initial discovery of sex came before rock ’n’ roll, because you have to realize that for the first ten years of my life, rock ’n’ roll didn’t even exist. It was all Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney, and ‘How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?’ – that one was on the top of the charts for months! I experienced the birth of rock ’n’ roll firsthand. I heard Bill Haley first – ‘Razzle Dazzle’ I think it was. Then there was ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘See You Later Alligator’. The Comets were a very poor band, actually, but they were the only ones at the time. Plus, it was tough up in Wales – you could get Radio Luxembourg, but that was patchy. It would fade in and out and you had to keep on twiddling the knob to get any kind of reception. Then you’d never find out what they were playing because they announced it once at the beginning and if you came in five or eight bars into the song, they’d never mention the guy’s name again. It took me months to find out the name of ‘What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?’ by Emile Ford and the Checkmates. (There’s a geezer who just vanished. Emile Ford and the Checkmates had five hits in England. He was huge and then there was a scandal – he was caught charging a kid money for an autograph, and that’s what killed him. The Checkmates went out on their own for a while after that but it was no good.)

  Then if you wanted a record, you had to order it and wait a month for it to arrive. The first 78 I ever bought was by Tommy Steele, the British answer to Elvis Presley, and then I got ‘Peggy Sue’ by Buddy Holly. My first full album was The Buddy Holly Story, which I got right after he died. Actually, I saw him perform at New Brighton Tower. See, that fuckin’ shows your age – I saw Buddy Holly live! Nevertheless, I must say, my street cred is impeccable!

  It was a long time before I bought an Elvis Presley record – the first I purchased was ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, I believe. His style, his look was great, he really was a one-off, but I thought he was inferior to Buddy Holly and Little Richard. The problem was he had really naff B-sides. See, albums in those days were different: an album could be a collection of the last six hit singles and the B-sides. So half of Elvis’s albums were crap. He only started making good B-sides when he did ‘I Beg of You’. Buddy Holly never did a bad track, as far as I could hear. Eddie Cochran, too, was an idol of mine. He used to work at a studio in Hollywood and if somebody finished an hour ahead of time, he’d dash in and make a record. And he used to write and produce all his own stuff. He was the first one ever to do that – a very inventive guy. I was supposed to see him on the second leg of his tour through Britain, but that was when he was in the accident out by Bristol that killed him. I remember being dismayed. That was a great tragedy for rock ’n’ roll. He and Holly were the ones who inspired me to play guitar.

  I decided to pick up the guitar partly for the music, but girls were at least sixty per cent of the reason I wanted to play. I discovered what an incredible pussy magnet guitars were at the end of the school year. You get shunted in the classroom for a week after the exams with nothing to do, and this one kid brought in a guitar. He couldn’t play it, but he was surrounded by women immediately. I thought, ‘Ah, now, that looks like fun!’ My mum had an old Hawaiian guitar hanging on a wall in our house – she used to play it when she was a kid, and her brother would play banjo. Hawaiian guitar had been very popular not long before: they were lap steels with a flat neck and upraised frets. Hers was very smart, covered with mother-of-pearl inlay. So that was a stroke of luck – not many people had a guitar lying around the house in 1957.

  So I dragged the fuckin’ thing into class. I couldn’t play it, either, but sure enough I was surrounded by women straight away. It actually worked, instantly! That’s the only thing that ever worked so immediately in my life. And I never looked back. Eventually, I got the idea that the girls expected me to play the thing, so I taught myself, which was pretty excruciating on that Hawaiian guitar with the strings raised up.

  When I was fifteen, we went on a school trip to Paris and I’d learned ‘Rock Around the Clock’. So I played that for three hours one night, even though I’d just nearly cut my forefinger off with a flick-knife that refused to do what it was told. I bled on my guitar, and the chicks thought that was absolutely cool. You know – sort of the equivalent of a Sioux warrior going out into the tall grass and killing a bear with his own hands, I suppose. Bleeding for ’em!

  Back home my mother and stepdad knew exactly what I was up to. It was quite obvious – they saw the constant procession of chicks. The garage had been converted into living quarters, which I had to myself, and I’d take the girls there. My stepfather used to come in and catch me going at it. He caught me so many times, it was fucking silly; I think he was a voyeur.

  ‘Do you know you’re on top of that girl?’ he’d shout.

  ‘Yes, I know I’m on top of the bloody girl!’ I’d say. ‘How do you do it?’

  It wasn’t long after that Paris trip that I was expelled from school. I played truant with two of my friends. We went on a train to the other side of the island for the afternoon and came back in time for the bus home. But as luck would have it, some bastards from another class saw us on the platform and turned us in. There’s always a snitch, isn’t there? So I was taken up before the headmaster. He was a real moron, a do-nothing. I think he became headmaster because he was too old to be a magistrate. For two fucking weeks, he had me in his office every day during break and lunchtime, trying to break me down.

  ‘You were seen by two Holyhead boys, when the train turned around,’ he t
old me.

  ‘It wasn’t me, sir,’ I’d insist. ‘I was never there.’

  That’s when I learned to lie. Another thing discipline teaches you is lying, because if you don’t lie, you’re in the shit. Anyway, to cut a long story in half the length it would have been, he was going to give me the cane, two on each hand. This was right after my accident with the flick-knife in Paris, remember. It had taken ages for that to start healing. I mean, you might know how you bleed from a cut like that – every time your heart beats, berdoom, blood straight across the fucking room! I must have lost a pint at the time. So I asked the headmaster, ‘Could I have four on one hand because of my finger?’

  But no, that wouldn’t do for him. He stood there impassive, urging my hand up and – whap! Fucking blood all over the place. And as if nothing had happened, he said, ‘Put your other hand up.’

  ‘You bastard!’ I thought. So when the cane came down on my hand, I grabbed it from him and whacked him around the head with it.

  ‘I think you’ll find that we don’t need your presence here anymore,’ he glowered.

  ‘I wasn’t coming back anyway,’ I told him, and with that, I was out the door.

  But he was right, I stayed away and they never came after me for truancy. There were only six months left to go anyway. I didn’t tell my parents about it: I would leave like I was going to school every morning and then come back every night. I just used to go up to the riding school and work up there on the beach with the horses but eventually I got a couple of jobs. One was as a house painter with this gay guy, Mr Brownsword (what a name for a queer, absolutely perfect!). All the same, he never hit on me. He was after my good-looking friend, Colin Purvis, which I was quite pleased about. I left him to it, you know – ‘Colin will paint in here, Mr Brownsword. I’ll go upstairs, shall I?’ And Colin would be muttering ‘Bastard!’ under his breath.

  Then we moved off the island to a farm in Conwy, along the Wales coast, right up in the mountains. That’s where I learned to be alone and not mind it. I used to wander around the fields with the sheepdogs. I really don’t mind being alone now. People think it’s weird, but I think it’s great.

  About that time, my stepfather got me into a factory that made Hotpoint washing machines. Everyone worked on just one piece of them. I was one of the first in line: I had to take four small brass nuts and bolt them on this thing and then a machine came down and knocked a ridge across the sides of them. Then you took the pieces off and threw them in a huge box. There were 15,000 of them to do, and when you were done with that batch, and really garnered a sense of achievement, they’d come and steal them and give you an empty basket. You can’t be smart and do that job, man. It’s impossible because it would fucking drive you out of your mind. I don’t know how those people did it. I suppose they submerged their intelligence because they had responsibilities.

  Everybody I knew who left home in search of something better wound up coming back. I had other plans for my life. So I grew my hair till the factory fired me. And I stayed out. I would rather fucking starve to death than go back to that. I’m very lucky and privileged that I escaped.

  CHAPTER TWO

  fast and loose

  I needed a companion, and one was right there – a guy called Ming, after the emperor in Flash Gordon. Ming had long hair and that kind of a long, droopy moustache. We began to hang out in coffee bars and dancehalls and pull other blokes’ birds and generally appal everybody!

  After a bit of this it seemed to us that we should take drugs (not that we knew what the fuck they were), so we got in touch with a friend of mine from when I lived in Anglesey, Robbie Watson of Beaumaris (famous also for its well-preserved castle). Robbie had lived in Manchester and had very long hair, which we thought was a Very Big Thing. We started smoking a bit of dope and then one night, in the Venezia Coffee Bar in Llandudno, Rob gave me an ampoule of speed – methyl amphetamine hydrochloride – with a little skull and crossbones on it. You were supposed to shoot it into your arm.

  I never fancied fixing anything, and I never have, even to this day. You get into the ritual. I’ve seen people do weird shit around needles: shooting water just to have an excuse for getting the needle in their arms. That’s what Rob was doing, and he thoroughly recommended that I should try it, too. But I put it in a cup of something – chocolate, I think – and drank it.

  There was a poor little girl behind the counter at this coffee bar, and I talked to her non-stop for about four or five hours. I kept saying to Robbie how it was having no effect on me, and then back I went to this poor devil who was in a kind of alphabetic shock from my babbling – but I felt great, you know, King of the World! Trouble is, it wears off. (By the way Robbie Watson, who was my best friend for a long time and had a brilliant dry, ironic sense of humour, has been dead these twenty years – one needle too many. Any questions?) But back to me and Ming – or the Ming and I!

  I was sixteen when Ming and I left Wales and headed east to Manchester. Actually, we were chasing after a couple of girls, whom we’d met while they were on holiday in Colwyn Bay. We were going to marry them and all kinds of shit. But of course, it ended up just being sex, as usual. They are much better off than if we had married them, I assure you of that.

  I don’t remember Ming’s girl’s name, but mine was called Cathy. She was a great girl, all of fifteen years old, and a curious, enthusiastic fifteen at that. So when they went back to Stockport, Ming and I followed them. We got a flat in Heaton Moor Road and we kept meeting people, and they would have nowhere to stay, so we’d let them sleep on the floor, or the sofa or somewhere, and within a month there were thirty-six of us in one room! The only one I remember was Moses (whom he resembled very closely, if all those Charlton Heston films are to be believed).

  Then Cathy got pregnant . . . I mean, she was wonderful, but she was also fifteen – visions of prison bars! Her father was writing letters to my stepfather calling me an exiled Welsh beatnik. The two of them worked out one of those ‘convenient’ solutions and the baby, Sean, was adopted at birth. I remember Cathy was taking her O-levels at the maternity home and I used to go and visit her. She got really big and I used to fall off the bus, laughing – ‘Hello, porky!’ and she’d crack up laughing, too. She was a great girl, my first love. I didn’t see Cathy again, I don’t know why. Funnily enough, she got back in touch with me two or three years ago, just in time for this book . . . She said she’d found Sean, but I won’t go into it here – let him have his life.

  As for my living situation, we (the thirty-six roommates) obviously got flung out pretty quick – the landlord probably wondered why the gas bill was for £200,000. Since Ming the Fearless Adventurer had gone back to Wales (eventually to become a clerk at a social security office – and you tell me there’s a grand pattern and a meaning to life . . .), I was alone again.

  During the time I knew Cathy, and for a couple of years after, I was a ‘dosser’, which then was a particular occupation among kids in the country. We all used to wear US Army jackets, the waterproof ones with a double lining. You could get them really cheap secondhand, and the thing was to get everyone that you knew to write their names on your jacket in felt-tip pen, so you were covered in these weird autographs. And we’d hitchhike around the country, staying with girls or staying in parked railway carriages or caves or whatever, just visiting women of local persuasion. In those days, it was a great thing to be ‘on the road’. It was the time of Bob Dylan, with the guitar on the back and the bedroll. A lot of girls like the transient thing. It’s a tradition, if you think about it: the circus, the Army, pirates, rock bands on tour – the girls always find them. I think women see something romantic in a geezer’s being here today and gone tomorrow. I like it too – but being a geezer, I would like it, wouldn’t I? Those days in the early sixties were great. We’d grow our hair down to our assholes and just bum around and live off women wherever we found ourselves. Chicks used to steal food out of the fridge from their parents to feed us and shit – ki
nd of like bringing a meal to the convicted prisoner on the run. They liked the drama of it, and we liked the food.

  It wasn’t all fun and good times, however. Sometimes, when I was hitchhiking, guys would stop their trucks to come and beat me up. Or you would wind up getting a lift with some huge, homosexual trucker.

  ‘Hello, son. How far are you going?’

  ‘Manchester.’

  ‘Manchester, right. I’d like to suck your dick.’

  ‘I’ll get out here, then.’

  The flat in Heaton Moor was like a forerunner to the commune, I guess. If one of you had a chick, it was murder. You’d be surrounded by very big eyes in the darkness, and you knew their night vision was getting better all the time! Sex was a lot more fun then – there weren’t dire things attached to it like there are now. And sex should be fun, instead of all this stigma – ‘Oh, you only want one thing!’ Well, of course I do, don’t you?! When it stops being fun, then don’t do it any more, for Christ’s sake.

  All of us used to go out begging on Mersey Square and if you got anything, you’d come back and share it. I think we lived mainly on Ambrosia Creamed Rice. You used to have a beer can puncher and you’d sort of suck it out of the can. It was a great delicacy at the time, much better cold. I believe that is when I acquired my taste for cold food, which I have to this day – I can eat cold steak, cold spaghetti, even cold french fries, and that takes some doing! But if you’ve got enough salt on them, they’re all right.

  Manchester is not many miles from Liverpool, and there was incredible music coming out of both towns during the early sixties. Through both cities runs the River Mersey and so the music scene of that area took the name Merseybeat. There was even a very well-known band from those days called the Merseybeats, as well as the Mersey Squares, named after the place we went begging. There were hundreds of bands coming out of Manchester and Liverpool, and they all played the same twenty songs – ‘Some Other Guy’, ‘Fortune Teller’, ‘Ain’t Nothing Shaking but the Leaves on the Trees’, ‘Shake Sherry Shake’, ‘Do You Love Me’ . . . All the bands from 1961 to 1963 were cover bands, including the Beatles.