We also had this guy called Bob Calvert, from South Africa, who was the resident poet. Half the time he showed up for the gigs and the other half he didn’t. When he was around, he’d read his poetry on stage, or that of sci-fi writer Michael Moorcock, which added to the band’s mysterioso space warrior aura. But Bob had some very weird ideas. He wanted to go on stage with a typewriter around his neck on a guitar strap and type things and throw them to the audience. ‘It’s not gonna work, Bob,’ I told him. ‘It’s never gonna work.’ But he wouldn’t believe me. Luckily, he never got a chance to try out that particular trick. Another time, when we were playing Wembley Stadium, he came on stage wearing a witch’s hat and a long, black cape, carrying a sword and a trumpet. Then halfway through the second song, he attacked me with the sword! I was yelling, ‘Fuck you!’ and batting him about the head with my bass – ‘Look, fuck off!’ It was the biggest gig we ever played in our lives, and he was attacking me with a fucking sword – what’s wrong with this picture, you know?
Bob was very bright, but he went nuts while he was working with us. He started taking a lot of Valium and hyperventilating and speaking much too fast and much too much. And he went down to this Buddhist retreat in fucking Devon or somewhere, and this guy who was in charge – Bob’s new guru – was obviously a fucking charlatan. You know, hippies grouped around his feet, staring adoringly at this fount of wisdom. I just thought he was a cunt. And then Bob started getting really weird – ‘You don’t believe in this man, do you? You don’t realize his greatness!’ and all this shit. Eventually I had to pop him – he was playing with a piece of wire, and he hit me around the face with it, so I hit him back. He fell over and when he got up he was a much better guy. But he was falling apart mentally – he once got so bad, we put him in a cab with his girlfriend and sent him to check in at a mental hospital. Halfway there, he put a hammerlock on the driver, and the driver had to press a button under his dashboard so someone would come and fetch him. A real mess, Bob was. We had to keep sending him to asylums and they’d keep him locked up for like three or four days and then send him back out. It was a very difficult time for him; it was even more difficult for the rest of us! He’s dead now, had a heart attack at much too young an age. He was quite talented, but he wasn’t as brilliant as people make out now. Of course, when you die, you become more brilliant by about fifty-eight per cent. You sell more records and you become absolutely wonderful – ‘Man, what a pity we didn’t buy any of his records while he was alive, but still . . .’ I’m sure that’s where I’m going – ‘How about Motörhead? What a brilliant band. If only we’d seen them . . .’
But I liked Bob. I played on his solo album, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters, which he recorded in early 1974. He named it after that terrible plane, the F-104 Starfighter, which the Americans foisted on to Germany. There was a joke going round Germany at the time: ‘Do you want to buy a Starfighter? Buy an acre of ground and wait,’ ’cause they were crashing all over Europe. Captain Lockheed was a good album. Brian Eno produced and played on it, and some of the other guys who played on it were Dave and Nik, Simon King, Twink and Adrian Wagner. I must get a copy of it one of these days.
I had some wild times with Bob. When he got together with Viv Stanshall, the singer of the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, it was like hell! Once I was with Bob and Nik, and we were on our way to eat. We picked up Stanshall, who was standing at the kerb. He was holding a briefcase and wearing this blue suit with big black checks on it, and his head was shaved because he was in the Sean Head Band at the time. And he had a Homburg hat on and he was chewing Valium. So we all went to this Greek restaurant and Viv and Calvert started smashing plates on the floor – off they went, screaming at each other across the table, having these convoluted intellectual discussions. Jesus – it went on for hours. Then we went back to Stanshall’s place, which was quite near our house.
‘Don’t go through the door because of the turtles,’ Viv told us.
He had all these tanks with terrapins in them, and these little walkways between, and of course, they fell off and went all over. So to get into the house, we had to go round the side of the porch and climb through a window into the hallway. So we got in that way, and Bob trod on a turtle and that started it between him and Viv all over again. Then we went upstairs and he had all these false limbs hanging off the ceiling and robots and these big piles of priceless 78s by people like Jelly Roll Morton, which Bob immediately fell into, knocking them over and breaking them. About three hours later, I decided to go home. Just as I was leaving one of them decided he must take a bath, and the other one got a chair and took it into the bathroom so they could go on screaming at each other! I thought I’d had enough – but I was wrong! At 7.30 AM, I was wakened from a dead sleep by Stanshall, standing outside my window screaming.
‘You killed my terrapins!’
‘You cunt!’ I yelled back. ‘It was Bob!’ And I slammed the window shut.
Stanshall’s dead now, too – he went in early ’95.
In addition to the musicians and Bob, Hawkwind had several dancers. Stacia was the one who stayed with us the longest – she was there all through the time I was in the band and left to get married not long after I was out. She was six-foot-two in her stocking feet and had 52-inch tits. Quite an impressive sight. She was a bookbinder from Devon and when she first saw the band, she took all her clothes off, painted her body from head to toe and rolled around on the stage while they played. Then she wound up staying with them. She had a lot of male fans amongst our audience. We had a couple of other dancers, too – one called Renee was double jointed. She was small and blonde and looked very pretty until – presto! – she started her contortions and everything twisted all wrong. And then we had Tony, who was a professional dancer and could do pantomime.
Occasionally, Michael Moorcock would take part in some of our performances and recordings – he’s on Warrior on the Edge of Time. More often, though, Bob would recite the stuff he wrote. Hawkwind was inspired by him – the name comes from Moorcock’s Hawkmoon series of books. He was great. We used to go around his house for some free food now and again, and he would have these notices on his door: ‘If I don’t answer the first ring of the bell, don’t ring it again or I’ll come out and kill you. It means no, it means I’m not in, it means I don’t want to see you. Fuck off everybody. I’m writing. Leave me a-fucking-lone.’ That was brilliant.
All our equipment was painted in psychedelic colours by this guy, Barney Bubbles – another one who’s dead now. He used fluorescent, Day-Glo paint and we’d throw ultraviolet lights on them. He also did our covers for Silver Machine and Doremi Fasol Latido. He was really clever, and did a lot of trippy art for us.
The album covers in the early seventies were so much better than they are now – the designs were much more elaborate. If you can find an original copy of Space Ritual, you’ll see what I mean. The whole thing folds out and it’s loaded with art and photos and poetry. Now, that’s well worth your money. When you talk about packaging and getting an idea across to the public, that’s it right there. Nowadays with CDs, everything’s smaller and the record companies are so fucking miserable and cheap and nasty. They won’t spend five cents more to make it look better. And remember that long box thing when CDs first came out? What the fuck was that anyway? The CD was only half the size of the box, and you couldn’t open the fucking thing up to get your CD out. You had to use a carving knife and you’d wind up cracking the jewel case and putting scratches all over it. And it took ages to persuade them to get rid of that long box. I remember them fighting over it when Motörhead was on Sony. People were leaving the company because of the loss of the long box! How’s that for stupidity?
Anyhow, we made for one hell of a show. Hawkwind wasn’t one of those hippie-drippy, peace-and-love outfits – we were a black nightmare! Although we had all these intense, coloured lights, the band was mostly in darkness. Above us we had a huge light show – eighteen screens showing things like melting
oil, war and political scenes, odd mottoes, animation. The music would just come blaring out, with dancers writhing around onstage and Dikmik shaking up the audience with the audio generator. It was quite an experience, especially since most of our fans were tripped out on acid to begin with . . . not to mention everyone in the band. That included me and Dikmik, of course – just because we were Hawkwind’s only speedfreaks, it certainly didn’t keep us from indulging in anything else we could get our hands on! There’s one legend about how I was so loaded that supposedly I had to be propped up against my amp on stage so I wouldn’t fall over. Well, as loaded as I may have been, I remember that show and it’s not true about my having to be propped up.
That gig was at the Roundhouse in 1972, when we recorded the songs ‘Silver Machine’ and ‘You Shouldn’t Do That’. That was a big venue. It was once an old engine shed, where they used to turn the trains around on a huge turntable. These rock ’n’ roll people leased it and turned it into a venue by taking the turntable out and putting a stage at one end. There were still bits of locomotive lying around inside and shit. It was a great place, but now it’s used for theatre troupes – you know, Japanese acrobats and shit. Very interesting culturally, I guess, but . . . back to my story.
Dikmik and I had been up for about three days prior, whacking down Dexedrine. Then we got a bit paranoid and took some downers – Mandrax – but we thought it wasn’t very interesting because it calmed us down too much, so we took some acid, and then we took some mescaline to make it more colourful. It started getting a bit freaky, so we took a couple more Mandrax . . . and then we took some more speed because we got too slowed down again. Then we went to the Roundhouse. Dikmik was driving and he was really interested in the side of the road, so he kept steering over to look at it. Finally we got up there and we walked in the dressing room and it was full of smoke – everyone was smoking dope. So we sat there for a while and somebody came in with some cocaine and we had some of that, and then some Black Bombers (or Black Beauties, as they’re known in the States – uppers) arrived, so we each had eight of them. Oh yeah, and we took some more acid as well. By the time we had to go on stage, me and Dikmik were like boards!
‘Fuckin’ hell, ’Mik,’ I said, ‘I can’t move. Can you?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, but we’ve got to get onstage soon.’
‘Oh, they’ll help us,’ he assured me.
So the roadies hooked our bootheels on to the back of the stage and pushed us up, and they strapped my bass on me.
‘Right, okay,’ I said. ‘Which way is the audience, man?’
‘That way.’
‘How far?’
‘Ten yards.’
So I stepped up – ‘One, two, three, four, five, right. Hit it.’
And that was one of the best live gigs we ever taped. The jamming between me and Brock was great. But I never saw the audience! We got ‘Silver Machine’, our only hit – and a No. 2 at that! – from that gig! My vocals wound up on the recording, even though Bob sang it at the show. Bob wasn’t on that night and he sounded horrible, so everybody tried overdubbing it later and I was the only one who sang it right. That was really my only time singing lead, except for ‘The Watcher’ on Doremi Fasol Latido, ‘Lost Johnny’ on Hall of the Mountain Grill, and ‘Motorhead’, which was a B-side for the single ‘Kings of Speed’ and later appeared on the re-release of Warrior on the Edge of Time. But I did sing a lot of back-ups.
It was magical, the time I spent with Hawkwind. We used to go to this huge, deserted estate and trip out. It had immense, overgrown gardens surrounding little pathways, ornamental lakes and tunnels all around this burned-out house. It was like madness in there. The whole band with about ten chicks and a couple more guys would all climb over the wall and we’d get high and wander around – you’d find the occasional person, tied in a knot under a tree, gibbering. That was a great time, the summer of ’71 – I can’t remember it, but I’ll never forget it!
Maybe you’re wondering, with the massive amounts of drugs I consumed in those days, why I never became a casualty. I did die once – well, the band thought I had, at least. But I hadn’t. The whole thing started when we were going home from a gig in the van. This guy, John the Bog, was our driver – actually, he died, about two years after this incident, come to think of it. He was going down the road, dropping everyone off, and I was the last one. We were in the midst of dividing up about a hundred Blues (pills that had speed with downer mixed in them) between us. I had the bag on my lap and I’d just handed him fifty and I had fifty. Right then, a carload of cops pulled in front of us. Brilliant timing, that.
‘Look, Lemmy,’ John said, ‘we’re getting busted!’
Well, no shit! But I wasn’t about to let that happen. So I said, ‘Fuck this,’ and ate all my blues – John did the same. So here we were, chewing fifty blues apiece. Let me tell you, that was fucking foul! And we couldn’t exactly take a drink to wash them down, either, because the cops were standing right outside.
‘Step out of the van.’
‘All right, officer,’ we mumbled through the mush in our mouths.
‘What were you doing in the front of the van there?’ one cop interrogated me. ‘You were doing something with your hands when we pulled you over.’
‘No I wasn’t,’ I insisted, drooling blue shit all the while.
But they missed that somehow and let us go. So John dropped me off in Finchley, where I was living in a house with the rest of the band. Apparently, I fell asleep and my metabolism hit an all-time low. It looked like I had stopped breathing, although I hadn’t. But I was lying there with both eyes open, and it scared the shit out of Stacia. She freaked out.
‘HE’S DEAD! HE’S DEAD!’ she began screaming. Then she got Dave, and he was standing over me too, screaming, ‘HE’S DEAD!’
Meanwhile, I was lying there thinking, ‘What the fuck is the matter with these people? Can’t they see I’m trying to get some sleep?’ I wanted to tell them to shut up, but I was having kind of a hard time speaking. Eventually they figured out I wasn’t dead and after a while, I was all right again.
Other than a couple of scares like that, I have to admit I had a lot of fun. So did everyone else. You have to realize, it was okay in those days to do shit like that. It really isn’t now – everyone’s into health and being politically correct, anti-drug and all that. But back in the Hawkwind days, drugs were our common denominator. It was the only way we freaks could tell if somebody was one of us. We were always showing up at our gigs completely spannered. And like I said before, sometimes those turned out to be some of our best gigs. There were also the legendary shows where we spiked the food and drink with acid. Actually we only did that a couple of times – one was at the Roundhouse, I recall. And since most of our fans showed up at the gigs already stoned, it didn’t make much of a difference anyway. There was an innocence about those days, because we didn’t know yet that some people would go nuts on acid, or that others would start putting needles in themselves and dying from an embolism. We started getting a few psychotics, but they were usually taken away after a short while. So we really didn’t know about all that. It was all bread and circuses for us.
Because of our massive drug use, there was always the chance of running afoul of the cops. But as you can tell from my adventure with John the Bog, they were pretty thick. I’ll give you another example of police stupidity. Often, cops would be lurking around outside the clubs. One time, I was leaving the Speakeasy with this guy, Graham, who was working for Jimmy Page and who later became Motörhead’s tour manager. I had half a gram of speed on me and we were walking down the road to his truck, and these two cops, who were waiting in the doorway opposite the club, started following us.
‘Let’s do this quick,’ I said, and quickly unwrapped the packet. Just as I had it opened in my hand, this arm came over my shoulder and closed over my fist – and contents!
‘What have you got th
ere, son?’ the cop inquired.
‘It’s a . . . piece of paper.’
‘Well, let’s have a look, then.’
So I opened my hand and he took the piece of paper. All this white powder spilled all over his black cop outfit – he looked like he’d just been powdered like a baby! And he turns the paper over and said, ‘Nothing on there.’
‘That bitch!’ I said. ‘She didn’t write her number down after all!’
‘Oh, right,’ he nodded. ‘Let’s have a look at your pockets.’
And there he was with the shit all over him – his mate didn’t notice, either! So he searched the both of us, but we didn’t have anything and they went away. How’s that for dense?
But we did get busted all the time. Cops would be standing outside your house, just waiting for you. Finally, we got pretty good at stashing our contraband – Nik would hide stuff in his saxophone. And the undercover cops never did get that hippie look right. You know, the guy would be standing there, wearing a Nehru jacket with a big green medallion, thinking he was really hip. Then you’d look down and see plastic sandals. It was fucking terrifying, really, at times, but it certainly never stopped us.
The first album I made with the band was Doremi Fasol Latido, their third. I played on three other full albums: the Space Ritual double live album, Hall of the Mountain Grill and Warrior on the Edge of Time. A lot of Hawkwind’s best work came from the time I was with them. When it came to making the records, it didn’t matter, really, who the producer was – Dave was always the one who was in charge. I didn’t get any help, however, recording ‘The Watcher’, since it was my song, not Dave’s. He was like that. Somewhere between Space Ritual and Hall . . . we did the Greasy Truckers album, which also featured several other artists. It was recorded in London at the Roundhouse on 13 February 1972. One side of the album is entitled ‘Power Cut’, and it’s completely blank because the miners shut off all the power in England for about three hours that night – that’s how they brought down the government. Everyone sat around in the dark, smoking dope, until it was switched back on again, and the gig continued.
White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography Page 7