White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  Not only were Girlschool an excellent band, they were really feisty and they didn’t give a fuck. One night, a couple of days after the tour started, they walked out and some guy in the audience shouted, ‘Go on! Get ’em off!’, and Kelly walked up to the mic and said, ‘You get ’em off. We could all do with a good laugh.’ I thought that was really good – I like chicks who stick up for themselves. Then they kicked into their set and proceeded to knock the crowd on their ass.

  During the first week of the tour, we were in Edinburgh, and a few of us were sitting in the lobby of the Crest Hotel – it was me and Eddie, and Kelly and Girlschool’s singer, Kim McAuliffe, with her boyfriend Tim (he later wound up being the boyfriend of their drummer, Denise Dufort. See? There’s not much difference between male and female rockers). I don’t recall where Phil or the rest of Girlschool were. And I fed Kelly Johnson the worst fucking line I ever fed a woman in my life:

  ‘How’d you like to go up to my room and watch The Old Grey Whistle Test?’

  Fuck me, that’s lame, isn’t it – ‘Would you like to go to my room and watch TV?’ But she said, ‘Yeah,’ which only goes to show! So off we went. And I heard that later, Kim leaned across to Eddie and said, ‘Let’s go to your room and watch The Old Grey Whistle Test,’ too. Eddie was a bit embarrassed, but she got up and led him to the elevator, with Tim still sitting there in the lobby! And Tim walked out of the hotel, got in the van and drove home to London, stranding all the chicks at the hotel. So we had to take them on our bus with us for the tour, which suited me fine. They were great people, and really funny.

  A couple of them were real handfuls – Kelly could behave almost like Keith Moon: she used to get drunk so she couldn’t even see and then try to take baths and fall over in the tub, shit like that. Eventually Kelly left the band because she fell in love with Vicki Blue of the Runaways and she moved to the States. Vicki got her a green card, so maybe they got married? When I was having the overnight relationship with Kelly, she hadn’t yet realized she was gay, or bisexual. But I knew, when I was with her, that something was wrong, like she was trying too hard and it wasn’t working. But then, some time after she and Vicki broke up, she got married to some guy, so I think it was maybe she just didn’t fancy me! But whatever. She’s an excellent guitarist and a really nice person and whatever she fucks doesn’t matter. She’s an old friend of mine – all of Girlschool are. I’d go to bat for them anytime.

  As always, I digress, and frankly, this is where my mind starts to wander anyway because much of the next several years are a blur. That’s what happens when you start to be successful and you’re in a rock band. You’re either on the road for months, or in the studio, or people are leading you around somewhere – to a TV show or a radio station or whatever – and most of the time, you’re not even sure about where you are. It all starts to blend together and everything looks the same.

  Some incidents stand out, though, and Finland’s Punkahaarju Festival, which we played in June 1979, is certainly one of them. And not because it was a great gig, either. In fact, it was fucking horrendous. It took place at the side of a lake, in a forest of pine and birch, like fucking Peer Gynt, you know. And the crowd was really fucking dour, we played badly, the sound sucked, and it was too bloody anticlimatic for words. When we came offstage, we thought, ‘Ohhh, what a fucking awful gig,’ and I said, ‘Well, let’s run out through the equipment.’ So I went round behind my stacks and ran out through them and they all fell over, BA-DOOM! And Eddie was trying to knock his amps down – God, he was terrible at that! Ed could never knock a stack over. Then Phil – Clumso the Wonderdog – walked through his drums, but I think he did as much damage to himself as he did to the gear. Our roadie, Graham, got so excited that he pushed the PA over on the crowd. And there’s more.

  We were given this terrible caravan as a dressing room. There was no cooling in it, and Finland in the summer is fucking hot with loads of little mosquitoes flying around, not the frozen place it becomes in the dead of winter. And there was no booze in there, either – horrors! So we were sweltering in this thing and Chris Needs, a writer for Zig Zag magazine, was walking about with this tree, for some reason. It was a small tree, but nevertheless he put it through one of the caravan’s windows while he was trying to talk to us. I guess he forgot he was carrying it. So we felt, well, we fucked up the caravan now, so we had better disguise the fact by sailing it into the lake and setting it on fire – give it a Viking funeral. And it went out very well, floated off in a very Arthurian manner, flames and smoke pouring out of it, and it sunk in quite a dramatic display. That wasn’t the end of it.

  Back at the hotel, Phil and Eddie took all the furniture and everything out of their room and put it up in the garden outside. It was a complete replica of the room’s layout only out of doors – like I said, Finland summers are warm. Then we had a food fight on the bus on the way to the airport. Well, we had to do that because the driver told us in a very firm Finnish accent, ‘Anything is happened to my bus, make dirty, then is coming trouble!’ So immediately all the packed lunches came out and started flying. The bus looked totally destroyed, with fruit and eggs all over it, but it wasn’t actually damaged. Then when we got to the airport customs area, the trouble really started.

  ‘I think you have done something very terrible in Punkahaarju,’ the customs guy told me.

  ‘Not me, guvnor!’

  ‘Come this way, please.’

  So they stuck me in this room and took my passport away. And one by one, everyone else came in, too. We all got thrown in jail, the band and the crew, except for Rish, our roadie who also did the front of house sound. He’d signed in at the hotel as Rish, which wasn’t what his name was on the passport, so he wound up going straight through, getting on the plane and flying home, wondering why there were all these empty seats around him. The rest of us were stuck in this Finnish jail for three or four days. All we had between us to read that whole time was one copy of the Melody Maker, and I read that thing, literally, from cover to cover. I read the date, page numbers, the adverts, every fucking word. And the food was crap, too.

  Finally, we got deported. They put us on a plane to Copenhagen, then we had to change over for the flight to London. The first flight went okay, except that Eddie immediately poured his vodka and orange down the neck of the woman in front of him – we were celebrating because we were free. Then we got on the second plane and before we took off, the captain came storming down the aisle.

  ‘I have heard about you and your being deported from Finland,’ he glowered. ‘If you try anything on this plane, I will have you arrested in London.’

  So we didn’t do anything the whole way back to London, but when we landed, there were all these cops on the tarmac. ‘Oh fuck!’ we thought. And then they arrested the captain! It turned out he was flying the plane drunk, which only goes to show.

  A couple of weeks after our Finnish excursion, we went back in the studio and began working on our next record, Bomber, with Jimmy Miller. By then, he was completely out of it, and that got to be a little much. He would say he was going to the toilet for a moment, then he’d be in there for an hour and when he came out, he’d be nodding. Once he went to the men’s room and he never came back at all, so we went in and he was gone! Apparently, he’d left to find his dealer, and we found him in his car, asleep at the wheel. Even when he was around, he was in absentia. When we had the rough mix down, we transferred it to quarter-inch tape and we started playing it back. Jimmy was nodding out in his chair the whole time we were setting it up, and when the music came on, he woke with a start, he looked at us, and started moving the faders up and down like he was working! And the tape wasn’t even going through the desk – that was a bit of a giveaway. Poor bugger – he died a couple of years back. It’s a shame; he was truly a good guy.

  Ironically (or perhaps not so ironically), Bomber has one of my first anti-heroin songs on it, ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ (which, when we play it live, is often called ‘Dea
d Men Smell Toe Nails’). It was about someone else, though, not Jimmy. Bomber is also the one album where Eddie sings a track, ‘Step Down’. He’d been bitching that I was getting all the limelight, but he wouldn’t do anything about it. I got sick of him complaining, so I said, ‘Right, you’re gonna fucking sing one on this album.’

  ‘Oh no, man,’ he protested. ‘I can’t sing, man. I don’t fucking got no voice . . .’

  ‘You’re a perfectly good singer, man, get on the fucking microphone.’

  So he did it with much grumbling. And it was like pulling teeth to get him to do it live. He hated it, but really, he was a good singer, Eddie. I don’t see why he didn’t do more of it. Later on, when Wurzel was in the band, he wouldn’t sing either, and he was good too. And he used to sing in all his other bands. Whatever – I came to the conclusion long ago that there’s something wrong with you if you’re a guitar player. They whine about how artistic they are, and they never get any recognition, and they think they’re the main force of the band – which, when it comes to my band, is really dangerous.

  Overall Bomber was a good record, but there are a couple of really naff tracks on it, like ‘Talking Head’. ‘Bomber’, ‘Stone Dead Forever’, ‘All the Aces’ – those were great. ‘Lawman’ was a weird pace for us – that was quite nice. Bomber was basically the transition record between Overkill and our next album, Ace of Spades, and that was its function, really. And it peaked at No. 11 on the charts, so it got us up another notch successwise.

  In the middle of making Bomber, we played the Reading Festival. We were on the same night as the Police and the Eurythmics. That was the great thing about the Reading Festival in those days – there were a lot of different kinds of bands on the bill. Rock ’n’ roll hadn’t yet become the categorized mess it is today. We were selling Motörhead flags that year, and they were flying in abundance during that show, much to the consternation of some of the more pretentious critics in the audience.

  After Reading, we finished up mixing Bomber and Bronze threw us a record release party at London’s Bandwagon Heavy Metal Soundhouse. That was awful – I’ve always hated those things. You’re supposed to be all things to all people all night, which is impossible and fucking unpleasant besides. Phony bullshit is what it is. We were far more excited about getting back on the road: we had a few dates in Germany, our first, and then it was back up and down England again. Plus, we had a new toy on stage: our infamous ‘Bomber’ lighting rig.

  The rig was a replica of a German WWII bomber, made out of heavy aluminium tubing, forty foot by forty foot. It flew four ways, backwards and forwards, and side to side – the first lighting rig that ever did that, by the way. It was heavy as hell, and if it had ever fallen it would have smashed us flat. But it was an impressive prop, and we used it for several tours. We never got the chance to take it to the States, though, because it was too massive for the venues we played there. So America, unfortunately, has never received the full Motörhead attack.

  By this time, the band was generating quite a bit of money – for somebody, not for us. After Bomber charted at 11, it was clear that we would continue to get even bigger. But none of us in the band ever really saw a return. All we made immediately went into more elaborate stage productions. We were all right, though. Around the time Overkill came out, we were put on wages, and we finally found decent places to live. Before that, we were always living on somebody else’s couch. Eddie was sharing with five other people, so his flat was halfway decent. Phil had been sharing a place with a couple of guys in Battersea. But for ages, I was crashing at people’s flats and walking around London with this little World War II tank map case that contained a tape recorder, five tapes and a pair of socks. It didn’t have a map in it, though. I needed one too, wandering around London. I quite liked drifting about like that, really – you go and live with chicks for a week and disappear. That was quite fine. But that all changed when our records began selling – our living conditions showed much improvement, even if they weren’t exactly castles.

  Of course, having a home isn’t all that important when you’re spending most of your time on the road. We did something like fifty-three gigs with two days off before having a break. On our dates through England, we had Saxon supporting us. They were nice guys, but kind of weird because they didn’t drink or smoke. They had a tea urn in their room. We found that a bit odd. Interestingly, their drummer, Pete Gill, wound up joining Motörhead a few years later. He’d started drinking heavily by the time he joined us, however. He drank even heavier after he joined! The tour with Saxon was also where I discovered acupuncture. Biff, Saxon’s singer, and I both lost our voices (apparently living healthily didn’t get him any farther than my lifestyle got me). Phil knew this amateur acupuncturist, and she put pins all over me and hooked them up to a 12-volt tractor battery. My voice was back in twenty minutes. Biff didn’t try it out so he suffered.

  In the midst of our travels, Bronze put out an EP of four tracks (‘Leaving Here’, ‘Stone Dead Forever’, ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’, and ‘Too Late Too Late’), recorded live while we were gigging. As a joke I told the label to call it The Golden Years – turned out they were our golden years (I think I sort of knew, really). The songs were pretty badly recorded, but the record got in the charts.

  In July we played Stafford Bingley Hall and we were presented with silver discs for Bomber – it had sold over 250,000 records. And they had this Queen Elizabeth impersonator give them to us. The three of us got down on bended knee to receive them, like we were being knighted. Actually, that woman impersonates the Queen to this day, but she looks a bit rough now. The real Queen isn’t looking all that great these days either, for that matter. In fact, I was feeling a bit rough at this particular show – I collapsed backstage after we’d finished and had to be revived for the encore. I don’t recall why – I’d probably been up for three days. So I blacked out, but Phil and Eddie, those two miserable bastards, thought I was goldbricking! I was sitting there with damp towels on my head and those two cunts were standing there going, ‘Fucking hell, man, you fucking stayed up for three days! How dare you! You motherfucker!’ They were worried about the slant on their careers it would cause and shit like that. Jesus! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Whenever Eddie got really drunk and obnoxious, he would always go on at me for drinking – in the press! He’d say, ‘Lemmy drinks too much,’ and he was always drunk when he was doing the interview! But nobody ever mentioned that.

  After that gig, I told the papers that I’d collapsed because I’d had three blow jobs that afternoon. The part about getting the blow jobs was true, actually. There were chicks all over the place, and there was this really cute little Indian bird – she was two of them. There was this room in the hall that was full of cushions and shawls hanging down. It was like some Maltese fucking dream. So I locked myself in there with her and wouldn’t come out – well, wouldn’t you do the same? See? Wonder where she is now?

  Not long after Stafford Bingley Hall, we went into rehearsals to prepare for our next record. Ace of Spades was one of our longer albums, in terms of the recording process. It went easier than our previous albums, because we were on a roll, and we couldn’t be stopped then. Well, we can’t be stopped now, but we couldn’t be stopped nationally then because the band’s popularity had been building – Bomber did better than Overkill, and Ace of Spades promised to do even more. We were on our way up, and we knew this one was going to be a hit. We felt good. I didn’t realize then how doomed we were. It was the end of something, really, instead of the beginning. Ace of Spades was the ultimate record for that particular line-up of Motörhead. I only started thinking about that when we were recording Iron Fist – out of the frying pan into the bear trap!

  We were at Jackson’s Studios in Rickmansworth for about six weeks, from the beginning of August 1980, until mid-September. Our producer was Vic Maile. I knew him from the Hawkwind days, when Vic was with Pye Records. He used to own a mobile studio – Hawkwind
hired it out to do Space Ritual and he came along with it. Vic was a great man and a great producer, really brilliant. He had diabetes, of which he later died. It’s just an on-going thing – the nice guys always go. That’s why I’m still around.

  The songs on Ace of Spades are considered classics by Motörhead fans, and I must say, they are an excellent bunch. We really enjoyed doing ’em. Those were good times; we were winning, and we were younger, and we believed it. The older you get, the less you can believe. It’s not your fault, you know. It just comes to you that everything isn’t corn flakes and skittles and beer. It’s a jungle out there. But I never cared about it when I was young. I wasn’t starving, you see, and I was having a good time. It certainly beats high-paid plumbing!

  Like always, there were a lot of funny little segments in the songs. We had a tap-dancing part in ‘Ace of Spades’ – you know, ding-dang-dangady. We always imagined ourselves tap-dancing at that point. I used gambling metaphors, mostly cards and dice – when it comes to that sort of thing, I’m more into the slot machines actually, but you can’t really sing about spinning fruit, and the wheels coming down. Most of the song’s just poker, really: ‘I know you’ve got to see me read ’em and weep’, ‘Dead man’s hand again, aces and eights’ – that was Wild Bill Hickock’s hand when he got shot. To be honest, although ‘Ace of Spades’ is a good song, I’m sick to death of it now. Two decades on, whenever people think of Motörhead, they think ‘Ace of Spades’. We didn’t become fossilized after that record, you know. We’ve had quite a few good releases since then. But the fans want to hear it so we still play it every night. For myself, I’ve had enough of that song.