White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  It was around the time Edmunds left that we changed drummers. We decided that Lucas had to go, because he was starting to get very weird. He was trying to keep up with my speed habit, and of course you can’t! In fact, I don’t especially recommend my lifestyle – it will slaughter the average person. This is no joke, and I’ll tell you how I know: around 1980, I decided to have my blood changed – you know, the same process Keith Richards is rumoured to have gone through. It is a good idea, logically, because instantly you get untainted, fresh blood and your body doesn’t have to go through all the stress of detoxing. So my manager and I went to the doctor, who took some blood tests and came back with the bad news.

  ‘I’ve got to tell you this,’ he said. ‘Pure blood will kill you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t have human blood any more. And you can’t give blood, either. Forget it, you’d kill the average person because you’re so toxic.’

  In other words, what’s normal for me is deadly to another human – and what’s normal for other humans is deadly to me, which is okay with me. I suppose that means I’ve made medical history of some sort. I’m gonna leave my body to medical science fiction! Me and Stephen Wright.

  So keeping up with my habit was getting Lucas very tense. The veins on his head would stand out and he’d stare at you very intently for long periods of time without speaking. He’d be doing this, and the rest of us would look at each other, thinking, ‘Well, he’s obviously gone over the fucking top.’ We were in the studio once listening to a playback and Lucas was leaning against the console. The top part was hinged a certain way so it could be cleaned, and somebody hadn’t put the catches back right. And there was all this stuff on it, half-finished drinks and ashtrays and shit. So when Lucas leaned on it, the whole fucking console flipped open and everything fell in. Sparks flew – the whole fucking thing blew up! So he screamed and stepped back and knocked the phone off the wall, then he shot out the door. And Larry opened the door and called after him, ‘Hey Lucas, don’t walk past my fucking stacks – they’ll burst into fucking flames!’ So it was clear that Lucas was on his way out. I ran into him, funnily enough, a couple of years ago in Paris. He was dressed like a Frenchman, with a handkerchief hanging out of his pocket. Looking at him, I thought maybe he’d turned gay, but he said he was living with a girl over there. Lucas was a good enough geezer, really, and a good friend to me, but he just didn’t have the bite.

  Meanwhile, Phil Taylor had been hanging around. I met him about six months prior at this guy’s flat – Paul, a guitar player. Paul’s a great anti-heroin advertisement. He fell asleep, passed out on smack, with his arm leaning against an iron bedstand and his hand died. He’d cut all the tendons in his arm. I saved Paul’s life – he was fucking dead, he was blue, and I beat him on the chest till his heart started again. He wasn’t the first one I saved, and he certainly wasn’t the last. But back to Phil.

  He had a car, so he was able to give me a lift down to the studio, which was about two hundred miles from London. And he had mentioned to me that he was in the habit of banging on drums now and again, so we thought we’d give him a go. We played a couple of numbers down at the studio, and Larry in particular was taken with him.

  ‘What a horrible little fucker!’ he chortled. ‘He’s fucking perfect!’

  Phil wound up overdubbing the drums on nearly the whole album. The only song he didn’t do was ‘Lost Johnny’, because that track sounded okay as it was. Overdubbing drums is quite a feat, because the drums are what you usually base a song on – it’s kind of like going ass-backwards. But Phil did it great, and for a very long time, he was an asset to Motörhead. One thing he couldn’t do, though, was sing. On this album – which eventually was called On Parole – Larry sang on three of the songs: ‘On Parole’ and ‘Fools’, both of which he wrote, and ‘Vibrator’, which he wrote with his roadie, Dez Brown. (Dez also wrote the words for ‘Iron Horse/Born to Lose’). Larry thought it would be good to have Phil sing on one track, so we tried him out on ‘City Kids’. It didn’t work – he sounded like two cats being stapled together. It was so funny that I was outside in the farmyard in the rain, on my knees, I was laughing so hard! So we had to scotch that idea.

  We finished up the album, which also included ‘The Watcher’ (another song I wrote while in Hawkwind). Then the assholes at United Artists began hedging about the record’s release. For months they fed us numerous lies, while still keeping us signed to the label. That, of course, kept us from being able to record with any other company. They wound up putting out On Parole four years later, long after we’d finally been released from our contract. They claimed that the UA staff had turned over and the new people had a new attitude towards the record. Strangely enough, their change of heart came just about the time we were starting to become really successful. Coincidence? I fucking think not! That was the beginning of our fucked-up dealings with record companies. Day one, Jack, and that was it!

  It was around the time that UA was buggering us about that we also began our sordid history of various management changes. Doug Smith farmed us out to this guy from Belgium, whose name I cannot remember to save my fucking life. He was funny: he tried to talk British slang in a futile attempt to appear hip. In England, one might say, ‘a bunch of cunts’ to describe a group of guys. You never say ‘cunt’ about a woman in England (I discovered the difference in America quite early on, incidentally!). So the Belgian would come into a room and say, ‘Where are my bunches of cunt?’ Belgian translations of English are miraculous. But he was fucking hopeless, and faded out because he ran out of money.

  Then for a while, we had this sweaty maniac, Frank Kennington, managing us. He was a friend of our guitarist, who by then was Eddie Clarke (I’ll be getting to Eddie very shortly). Frank’s father had a factory. I don’t know what they were making – small things, I believe, small, indispensable shit . . . Lenses, that’s it, lenses and prisms and things like that for industry. And Frank had taken the factory over from his father, so he had quite a bit of money. We rectified that situation, however, by bankrupting him completely! We owed the poor bastard some money till the day he died, in fact (although, incidentally, I finally paid him my share in 1996 – twenty years late! Still, better late than never). He eventually moved to America, where he was known (not surprisingly) as English Frank.

  After we ruined Frank’s financial affairs, we were managed for quite a while by this guy called Tony Secunda. I believe I met him through Chrissie Hynde, who I’d known for a number of years. Chrissie used to be a journalist for the New Musical Express, and I was always very impressed by the fact that though she had no tits to speak of, she could play very good guitar! She was very good indeed. She was squatting in Chelsea when I knew her, and I used to go round there and jam with her all night. Before she had the Pretenders, she was in a band called the Moors Murderers. That was in extremely bad taste. They all wore black, pointed hoods when they played – very bad taste, indeed. Luckily they never had a hit, or we probably would have never seen Chrissie’s face – she would have been in a black hood for the rest of her professional career.

  Anyhow, back to Tony Secunda. Tony used to manage the Move and Steeleye Span and he had a label, Wizard Records, in England. He was a very interesting man . . . from an anthropological point of view. A complete fucking lunatic. He went to Peru and came back with this Indian, who went everywhere with him. And he was doing cocaine like nothing on earth – teaspoons of the fucking shit. And he was paranoid about people eavesdropping. He used to mutter, ‘Fucking earwigs! Listening to what I say, earwigs all over. Fucking bastards!’ And this Indian would be standing behind him, arms folded across his chest. Really very weird.

  But Secunda came up with some wild publicity schemes. He did this publicity stunt once where the Move took an atomic bomb to the middle of Piccadilly in Manchester for a photo shoot. And once, on being told that he had a very large tax bill coming up, he changed £20,000 into £1 notes. Then he dropped them thro
ugh the ceiling at the end of one of Steeleye’s gigs at the Hammersmith Odeon – he figured that since the government would have taken the money away anyhow, he might as well make it a deductible gift. Another Secunda stunt with the Move involved a pornographic postcard with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, but that backfired on him. He had to apologize to the Prime Minister and pay all kinds of money and shit – libel, you know. While he was working with Motörhead, he had our logo painted on the side of this building on the main roundabout coming into London from the west. It only took us an hour to get it up – we put ten art students up on scaffolding and had them paint a square each – but it took the residents three months to get it taken off. So for those three months, we had top-drawer publicity. Free!

  Originally, I had intended that Motörhead be a four-piece band, and we tried out a couple of different guitarists. One was Ariel Bender – known at the time as Luther Grosvenor – who was in Mott the Hoople and Spooky Tooth. We did a few rehearsals with him, but it didn’t work out. He was a nice guy, but he just wasn’t our type. He didn’t have the same sense of humor as the rest of us, and I couldn’t imagine being on a bus with him. So we carried on as a three-piece until we found Eddie Clarke . . . and wound up carrying on as a three-piece anyhow.

  Phil met Eddie while they were both renovating a houseboat down in Chelsea. But it wasn’t Phil who brought him to us, it was Aeroplane Gertie, who was a receptionist for this rehearsal studio in Chelsea. We were rehearsing there for free – if somebody quit early and there were a couple of hours left, we’d whip our gear in and use the leftover time. Gertie used to wear a hat with a plastic aeroplane stuck on it, hence the name Aeroplane Gertie. She was living with Eddie, and it was she who brought him round to the rehearsal studio. We decided to try him out, and it turned out to be a very weird situation. Larry didn’t show up right away, so me, Eddie and Phil began jamming. It was going along pretty well by the time Larry showed up, hours later. Then Larry started playing along, but he was so loud that we couldn’t hear anything else for half an hour. After that, he left and that was it, he’d quit the band. And Larry was the one who was always on to us about getting another guitar player, so go figure.

  But Motörhead always worked really great as a trio anyway (and still does today). If there’s two guitars, then you have to sort of toe the line a bit, because if the two guitarists ain’t together – and the bass too, of course! – it’s really messy. But with only one guitar player, you can do anything. I used to play all kinds of weird shit behind Eddie and it would work.

  Right off the bat, I was trying to find nicknames for everyone. Nicknames are good, people like them. So Eddie became ‘Fast Eddie’ Clarke, which was logical, really. I mean, he was a fast guitar player. Phil became Phil ‘Dangerous’ Taylor for a few months, but although the nickname was apt – he certainly was dangerous to himself! – it didn’t last. It was Motorcycle Irene who christened him ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor. By then, Phil and Irene were living together, so she knew whereof she spoke.

  Eddie and Phil were great friends – at one point, Phil was living at Eddie’s house. They were as close as brothers, which was occasionally problematical because they fought like brothers, too. Like one would turn around and the other would say something and the next thing you know, bang! They were beating the shit out of each other. The two of ’em used to fistfight all the fucking time. On the way to one gig we had in Brighton, Phil and Eddie were punching each other in the van the whole way down. By the time we got there, Phil had a black eye and Eddie’s arm was bad. But when it was time to go on, I said, ‘Okay, that’s it. On stage.’ And they both straightened up and went, ‘Ahem! Okay!’ and we did the show. Then when we were coming off the stage, Phil smacked Eddie in the back of the neck and sent him sprawling, and there they went all over again. As fighters, they were pretty well matched.

  Eddie was always thought of amongst our fans as the quiet one, but he was more vicious than Phil. He really is a nasty piece of work when the fists start flying. I remember him and Phil both rescuing me out of a fight. This guy jumped me from behind in this boozer in Portobello Road, and Eddie and Phil got a hold of him and his two mates and they just wound them out the door and kicked them down the street! I never even got a chance to get a punch in. I couldn’t get at them because Phil and Eddie had ’em busy. Incidentally, the week after that, the geezer from the pub broke a pool cue over my head! Those were the days, eh?

  This new line-up of Motörhead had been working together for a few months when Tony Secunda got us a deal to make a single for Stiff Records. So some time during the summer of 1976, we did ‘White Line Fever’ – a song that the three of us had written together – and ‘Leaving Here’ for the label. Somehow, UA got wind of this and started giving us trouble because we weren’t yet officially out of our contract with them. At that point, we hadn’t talked to UA in months – I don’t know why they gave a shit. But they kept the single from being released until 1977, which frustrated us.

  All through the rest of ’76 and early ’77, we played gigs here and there, a lot of one-offs. I remember at one gig, in a disco place in Shrewsbury – Tiffany’s, for God’s sake! – Eddie and I both fell flat on our backs onstage. It was one of those slippery plastic floors with lights under it. But the crew only lifted me up – Eddie used to treat them like servants so they left him down there. There he was, lying on his back, waiting confidently to be picked up and it never happened. On the way to another gig, Phil was angry about something and kicked the side of the van, breaking his toe. By this point, the morale of the band was getting pretty low; all our efforts were getting us nowhere. We were starving, living in squats and nothing was happening. I was well prepared to keep going but Phil and Eddie wanted to give it up. It wasn’t their band and they didn’t have the commitment I did. So finally in April, after much debate, we decided to do a goodbye show at the Marquee in London and call it a day.

  Around this time, I had hooked up with Ted Carroll from Chiswick Records. I asked Ted to bring a mobile studio down to the gig so we could document our farewell performance and our fans would have something to remember us by. Well, Ted apparently couldn’t get the studio down to the Marquee, but he did show up backstage after we played, and he made us an offer.

  ‘If you want to make a single, I’ll schedule you two days at Escape Studio in Kent.’

  So we went down to Escape with producer Speedy Keen, who had been in a band called Thunderclap Newman, which had a No. 1 hit in England with the song ‘Something in the Air’. In two days, we recorded eleven backing tracks with no vocals. We all agreed there was no point in doing a single, because we wanted to at least leave an album as a memento. So we just barrelled our way through an album’s worth of material in forty-eight hours with no sleep. Speedy Keen and the engineer, John Burns, were speeding out of their heads because they couldn’t afford to go to sleep – they didn’t have the time, and they wanted to make an album as much as we did. They mixed twenty-four versions of ‘Motörhead’ alone! Then they asked me which one I liked the best, as if I would remember. I mean, you can’t tell after three. I just said, ‘Fuck it! That one!’

  At the end of the two days, Ted came down to hear two finished songs and we gave him eleven unfinished ones. But as he was listening, he was doing the boogie at the back of the studio, so we knew we’d got him! He gave us a few more days to finish vocals and such, and Motörhead was our first album to see the light of day. By then, we had wrestled our freedom away from UA, so we were back in business.

  We recorded a total of thirteen songs for Chiswick and eight of them wound up on the album. Much of Motörhead was material from On Parole, which we re-recorded: ‘Motörhead’, ‘Vibrator’, ‘Lost Johnny’, ‘Iron Horse’, ‘Born to Lose’ and ‘The Watcher’. We also did two new songs, ‘White Line Fever’ and ‘Keep Us On the Road’, and a Johnny Burnett song, ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’ (you’re probably familiar with Aerosmith’s version of it – it was a hit for them). The ot
her songs that didn’t wind up on the album included ‘City Kids’, which was a B-side for the ‘Motörhead’ single; a ZZ Top song called ‘Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers’; ‘I’m Your Witchdoctor’ – a great song by John Mayall and Eric Clapton; ‘On Parole’, and an instrumental jam which was appropriately called ‘Instro’. Those last four songs were released as The Beer Drinkers EP in 1980, long after we’d left Chiswick and not-so-coincidentally near the peak of our success. Once again, it was cash-in time – for the record labels, at least. I’ve never recorded more than we need since! But having said that, I don’t begrudge Ted Carroll that – he saved my band, after all!