It was about this time that we were starting to have some differences with Secunda. For one thing, he wanted us to get our hair cut! Obviously we weren’t gonna do that. Doug Smith started coming back into the picture when he put us on a tour through England with Hawkwind, whom he was still managing. That was in June of 1977. But with our usual bit of luck, Phil broke his hand in a fight on the day before the tour. We were all at my house, painting our equipment, and this guy came over, a junkie who was a real drag. We told him to leave, but he wouldn’t go, so Phil hustled him out the door and punched him. Unfortunately, this shoved Phil’s knuckle back to about the centre of his hand. So we ended up gaffer-taping the drumstick to Phil’s bandaged hand, and we did the whole tour that way. Other than that, it was a good tour, and things were fine between us and Hawkwind.
Phil injured himself again a couple of months later, with more disastrous results. We’d just started a headlining tour to promote the new album, which was due out in a few days, and we were supported by a band called the Count Bishops, who were very good. We called it the ‘Beyond the Threshold of Pain Tour’, which should have given us a hint. Round about the fifth show, Phil got into an argument with Bobs, one of our roadies, over Motorcycle Irene. This time he broke his wrist instead of his knuckle, so we had to cancel the whole tour. Tony Secunda fired Bobs that night, but it wasn’t really Bobs’ fault. It was unfortunate because Bobs had worked hard for us – he was actually going down to phone boxes with bags of two-pence pieces and getting us gigs. But in the end, I guess it didn’t matter – we had to wait for Phil’s hand to heal before we did any more shows, and we were offstage until November, when we did a show at the Marquee.
During the first few months of 1978, nothing much was happening; the odd gig here and there, including one in Colwyn Bay, near where I grew up, but that was about it. Tony Secunda had had some sort of dispute with Chiswick and fired them. I believe it was also around this time that we parted ways with Tony. He bailed out, and eventually went to work for Shelter Records in San Francisco. In 1995, he died, rest in peace. This was a bleak period for us. It seemed like we couldn’t even get arrested. Our lack of forward motion was getting to Eddie and Phil once again, so they went off and did some shows with Speedy Keen and a bassist, Billy Rath (who had played with Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers and Iggy Pop). They called themselves the Muggers. I think Speedy wanted to form a band with them permanently, and he might have been successful because we were about to break up. But finally Doug Smith took us back and got us a deal with Bronze Records, who had bands like Uriah Heep and the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band on its roster. It was just for a single – they wanted to see how it did before they invested any more money in us – but it turned out to be the beginning of our long-awaited upward ascent.
Not only did the Bronze deal give us a shot in the arm, we would have our biggest hits with the label. And, really, they treated us quite well there. Not that we appreciated it at the time. In fact, we found a lot to gripe about! We thought Bronze gave us a hard time, but considering the dealings I’ve had with record companies since, they were fucking great. Since then, I’ve often looked back on the Bronze days with nostalgia. The label head, Gerry Bron, and his wife, Lillian, were really enthusiastic about us and A&R exec Howard Thompson – who was the one responsible for signing us – was brilliant. They believed in us and made some good efforts on our behalf.
So that summer we went into Wessex Studios in London and recorded ‘Louie Louie’, with one of our own numbers, ‘Tear Ya Down’, as a B-side. Covering ‘Louie Louie’ was an idea Phil had come up with some months back, when we were still with Tony Secunda. We’d been sifting through some old songs, and I wanted to cover a Chuck Berry song, ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, or something like that, but ‘Louie Louie’ was the better choice, really. I think we did a very good version of it – people tell me that it’s one of the few times it’s been recorded where the lyrics can be understood! Actually, I only got the first two verses and then the last verse was largely improvised. We produced it jointly with this guy, Neil Richmond. We never did work with him again, but he was good . . . except for that weird clavioline thing he put in. I thought that was suspicious. We used to call him Neil Fishface. I don’t recall why, ’cause he didn’t really have a fishface – well, only from certain angles.
Anyhow, the single was released on 25 August 1978 (the photograph of us on the sleeve, incidentally, was shot by Motorcycle Irene). By the end of September, it had gone up to No. 68 in the charts, which was enough for Bronze to give us the go-ahead for a full album. As it was making its move up the charts, we started a tour around England, but before we took off, I had my brief excursion with the Damned.
In America, the Damned were never more than a good-sized cult band, but in England they were much more famous. They were the true punk band, not the Sex Pistols. The Pistols were a great rock ’n’ roll band, but really that’s all they were. I actually gave Sid Vicious some bass lessons – he came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Lemmy, teach me how to play bass,’ and I said, ‘All right, Sid.’ But after three days I had to tell him, ‘Sid, you can’t play bass.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I know,’ and he was all depressed and went off. Then a couple of months later I saw him down at the Speakeasy and he said, ‘Hey, Lemmy, guess what! I’m in the Pistols!’ ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘I’m the bass player in the Pistols!’ he said. ‘It’s great, innit?’ ‘You can’t play bass, Sid.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, I know, but I’m in the fucking Pistols!’ Steve Jones just taught him the basic bum-bum-bum-bum. That’s all he had to do, really. Anything more complex than that on the album, it’s either Steve or Glen Matlock. Sid – he wanted to be in a punk band so bad. He’d been in a band called Flowers of Romance for about three weeks, and in Siouxsie and the Banshees for about three days – he just talked everybody into it. But he was very good for the image. He was perfect – fuckin’ hell, he out-Pistolled the Pistols as far as image was concerned!
Even though he couldn’t play bass worth a damn, Sid was a nice enough geezer. I got quite friendly with him. But he used to get into all sorts of fights. One night at the Marquee, he mixed it with Bruce Foxton, the bass player out of the Jam and Bruce stuck a broken glass in his face. I was walking down Wardour Street towards the Speakeasy, and the lights were still on at the Marquee so I put my head in there – you might find some birds, you know – and there was Bruce, going, ‘Fuck me,’ and all this. I said, ‘What’s up?’ and he said, ‘I just fucking glassed Sid. I think I cut him.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m sure you cut him, else he’d still be here jumping on you.’ He was worried that he’d hurt him bad, so I went to the Speak – there used to be all these cinema seats in the front of the stage for a while and Sid was sitting right in the middle of them, all on his own. So I went over to him and said, ‘What’s up, Sid?’ ‘Cunt done me,’ he said, and he had this three-cornered fucking wound going right through his cheek. ‘You wait till I get better,’ he promised, but he never did try and do Bruce again.
One time he was trying to take a bird into the toilet for something or another and this huge Maltese bouncer who was really a hard man said, ‘You can’t go in there!’ And Sid just went for him! I’d never seen anything like it – the geezer was down on the deck, rowing backwards on his elbows up the stairs, horrified ’cause this fucking bundle of pipe cleaners in a pair of tennis shoes was kicking the shit out of him. The guy didn’t know what to make of it – Sid frightened him to fucking death! Anyway, that was the punk era for you.
So I like the Pistols, though as I said, I thought they were really a rock ’n’ roll band. And I never liked the Clash, for that matter. Joe Strummer was better in the 101’ers, the band he had before the Clash. When it came to punk, the Damned were the real thing. They never quite got it together, but they were great fun. Dave Vanian couldn’t sing, none of the guitar players could play, and the drummer, Rat Scabies, just sort of went along with it all. But they were fucking crazy – I mean, seriously in need of professional he
lp. One time we supported them at the Roundhouse with the Adverts. And at the start of their show, Captain Sensible – there’s a true maniac for you – came out wearing a pink ballet tutu, fishnet stockings, a pair of hobnailed boots, these big wing-tipped shades, and orange hair. And the punks all spat on them, and by the end of the gig, the band was skating around in this green goop all over the stage. They were soaked in it. And then the Captain took all his clothes off . . . of course, he used to do that at most of the gigs. When they played at another London club, the Rainbow, he took a piss on the front row. The audience was throwing seats at him, and he was throwing them back – while pissing down his leg, I hasten to add. Just your typical mid-seventies punk show – and then some.
Anyhow, I’d got to know them over the years. I met Rat at Dingwalls. I was at the bar and this over-scruffy urchin came up behind me and said, ‘Hey, you’re fucking Lemmy, are ya?’
So I replied, ‘Yeah, I fucking am.’
‘Yeah? You fucking think you’re a rock star or something?’ the little bastard inquired.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but you do. That’s why you’re talking to me.’
‘Fair enough,’ he shrugged. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’
The Damned went out of business for a while, after Brian James left the band. Then when they reformed, the Captain wanted to play guitar. It was probably his idea to ask me to fill in on bass for a gig at London’s Electric Ballroom. They were calling themselves the Doomed for that show, but they returned to being the Damned shortly thereafter. We had about five hours of rehearsal. I learned eleven of their songs, and they learned one of mine, which they wound up fucking up on stage. I shouldn’t have even bothered having them do one of my songs, really. But it was fun, playing with those boys.
So much fun, in fact, that Eddie, Phil and I wound up doing a recording session with them, too. We recorded a couple of songs – a version of the Sweet’s ‘Ballroom Blitz’ and a Motörhead tune, ‘Over the Top’. That was a joke. The Captain was watching cricket on TV and wouldn’t come out of the TV room, for starters. And Eddie and Phil were fighting, as usual. Dave Vanian showed up late, and by then we were all drunk as shit. He took one look at us all, spun on his heel and walked straight back out. In the end, only me and the Damned bassist Algy Ward were still alive, so to speak, so we just went in and fucked around. I did a bass solo on ‘Ballroom Blitz’ and he did the vocals. That song wound up as a B-side to the Damned single, ‘I Just Can’t Be Happy Today’, but we had a rough mix that was much better than the one that appeared on the record. We never did get around to putting vocals on ‘Over the Top’. Oh yeah, and we broke the toilet bowl at the studio, too. I think the Captain kicked it in. But back to Motör-business.
We toured through September and October, and on 24 October, we filmed our first Top of the Pops appearance. Top of the Pops is a terrible programme, really. They had bands on the show who were either in the Top 30, like Slade and the Nolan Sisters (I did a record with those ‘innocent little virgins’ once – more on that later), or who the programme thought were headed for the Top 30. There was no regard to anything like talent – it was just reflecting the charts. We weren’t anywhere near reaching the Top 30 at the time (‘Louie Louie’ had peaked at 68), but this friend of ours who worked at Bronze, Roger Bolton, used to work for the BBC, so he had a lot of handy influence. Roger wound up getting us on the show about five times before we really had a hit! In fact, Roger’s efforts on our behalf helped us quite a bit on our way up the charts, for which I will buy him a drink any time.
So we went down to the labyrinthine BBC studios to tape our appearance. It’s like a rat’s nest in there – hundreds of studios and corridors – and you need a guide to take you to the studio. It’s lunacy. Some day, all the guides are gonna be ill and everybody’s gonna be fucked. We were supposed to re-record the song, but no one ever did. We just used to remix the original track slightly, put the vocals up a little bit higher or something. Then we’d put our amps up, lean the guitars on them and turn everything on. Then the inspector from the BBC would come round to the studio to make sure you’d done the work. He knew what was going on, of course, and we knew that he knew. It was all a game – tacit agreement, we’d call it. At least we really played on our records, instead of having studio musicians, like a lot of pop stars did.
The Top of the Pops people treated us all right, but only because they had to. I don’t think they liked us much, really – especially because I won £100 on the one-armed bandit that was in their canteen. That pissed off everybody from the BBC, because they’d been waiting for it to pay off!
By this time we had already worked up several songs for the upcoming album, playing them on stage, and we were looking for a producer. We wound up getting Jimmy Miller, who had produced Exile on Main Street and Goats Head Soup for the Rolling Stones. So things were really starting to look up for us. Our years of struggling were paying off, and by now Phil and Eddie had stopped complaining about lack of momentum (that doesn’t mean they stopped complaining, however!). The kicker was in November, when we headlined the Hammersmith Odeon, the same place where Blue Oyster Cult had so soundly fucked us over three years earlier. It was fully packed with 3,000 fans cheering us on. You could feel the energy – our rise up the rock star food chain had begun.
CHAPTER SEVEN
beer drinkers and hell raisers
We only had a fortnight to record Overkill, our second album and first for Bronze. Considering our checquered recording history, however, it was a world of time for us, and besides, being quick in the studio has always been natural for us. The whole experience was pure joy. We recorded at the Roundhouse Studios, which were next to the club of the same name in north London. Jimmy Miller was excellent, as were Trevor Hallesy and Ashley Howe, the engineers. Overkill was supposed to be something of a comeback album for Jimmy Miller, which is exactly what it turned out to be for him. He had gotten very heavily into heroin (which likely began when he was working with the Stones) and he had lost it for a couple of years. Since Overkill charted right away – it eventually peaked at 24 – he got a lot of work from it, but months later, when we were working with him on Bomber, it was sadly clear that he was back on smack. Come to think of it, he must have been doing it during Overkill too because he’d already started showing up late now and again to the studio and coming up with completely preposterous excuses. One incident will give you a good example of his modus operandi.
This particular day, he arrived five hours late for a session, and we were all sitting in the studio, twiddling our fucking thumbs at a thousand bucks an hour, muttering, ‘That bastard! He cometh not.’ Finally, he showed up and before he was even through the fucking door, he’d launched into his tale – that way, of course, we didn’t have room to start in with, ‘You bastard! Where have you been?’ and all that.
‘Guys! Guys! You wouldn’t believe what happened!’ he said. ‘I called this taxi and it didn’t come, so I had to call another one, and then that arrived in the snow, you know what I mean? And then he ran out of gas, so we had to push it to a filling station! And then the thing on the solenoid was gone, so I had to call another cab from the filling station and he didn’t arrive for ages. And anyway, he broke down on the way after that too, and I’ve been walking through the snow for three hours! Look at my clothes!’
We knew he’d been rolling in the snow outside for three minutes to get his drawers wet – I looked out the window and saw him doing it as a matter of fact! But at least he was jovial, and he got the job done. And he took the trouble to be original, God rest his soul.
As is usual with Motörhead, there were quite a few new songs that we’d already been performing live. ‘Damage Case’, ‘No Class’, ‘I Won’t Pay Your Price’ and ‘Tear Ya Down’ were among those. Others we wrote in the studio. ‘Capricorn’ (which happens to be my astrological sign) was written in one night. Eddie’s solo for that one, I recall, happened while he was tuning up. The tape was running while he was fooli
ng around with his guitar, and Jimmy added some echo. When Eddie finished tuning, he came in and said, ‘I’ll do it now,’ and Jimmy told him, ‘Oh, we got it.’ That saved us some money!
‘Metropolis’ was another fast one. I went to see Metropolis, the movie, at the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road one night, then I came home and wrote the song in five minutes. The words don’t make any sense, though. They’re complete gibberish:
Metropolis, the worlds collide
Ain’t nobody could be on your side
I don’t care.
Metropolis is something new
Ain’t nobody got their eyes on you
I don’t care
See what I mean?
But some of my lyrics have more meat on ’em. I always wanted Tina Turner to record ‘I’ll Be Your Sister’, for instance – I like writing songs for women. In fact, I’ve written songs with women. I’ve been called sexist by some factions of radical, frigid feminists (the kind who want to change the word ‘manhole’ to ‘personhole’, that kind of crap), but they don’t know what they’re talking about. When I find good women rockers, I’ll lend them a hand. I’ll never get any kind of credit for helping to advance women in rock ’n’ roll, but I have. Girlschool is an example. They were never that well known in the States, but in England they were quite popular for a while. In March, 1979, when we began our Overkill tour – our first big outing, really – they were our opening act. A lot of their early success came from their association with us, and they wound up being quite an asset for us, too.
It was one of the guys in our office, Dave ‘Giggles’ Gilligan, who found Girlschool originally. The band was from Tooting, south London. I listened to a single called ‘Take It All Away’ that they’d put out on some little label and thought they were fucking excellent. Plus I liked the idea of girls being in a band – I wanted to stick it up these pompous bastard guitarists’ asses, because Girlschool’s guitarist, Kelly Johnson, was as good as any guitarist I’ve ever seen in my life. The nights when she was really on, she was as good as Jeff Beck. So I went down to see them at a rehearsal they were having. I thought they were great, and I went back and told the others, ‘They’re coming on tour.’ The boys were a bit weird about it at first, but after the first night they played with us, they shut up.
White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography Page 10