White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  My chief memory of ‘(We Are) The Road Crew’ is Eddie lying on his back in the studio, helpless with laughter, his guitar feeding back all over the place, halfway through what was supposed to be his solo. And we left it on because it was so fucking funny. That song was my first ten-minute lyric. That’s how long it took me to get the words down in the studio. I remember going off somewhere because Vic had to go eat something – it had to do with his diabetes. He hadn’t finished buttering his first cracker when I was back in there, telling him, ‘I’ve done it.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said, ‘I haven’t even eaten yet.’

  When he realized I really had finished the lyric, he was astonished. I was quite surprised myself. Ten minutes of real work ain’t bad. I’ve dashed through a few more songs that way since then.

  One of our road crew cried when we first played that song for them. I’m not going to say who it was. We took the lot of them up to the studio one day and played them the track. And this one guy cracked and broke down right then and there. He was weeping, ‘Oh, that’s a great one. That’s great.’ It was really nice that it affected somebody that deeply. Bands as a rule don’t treat their crews too well. I try to.

  I’ve caught hell from feminists for several songs I’ve written, but for some reason, they never said anything about ‘Jailbait’. They never mentioned anything about that, and it was fucking blatant! But basically, my lyrics on Ace of Spades came from what I know personally. Like ‘The Chase Is Better Than the Catch’ – well, it is, isn’t it? I mean, whenever you move in with somebody, it’s fucking gone, you know. They leave their knickers in the bathroom and they have horrible habits that you didn’t know about, which you become aware of almost immediately. It’s fatal, you know – to have a relationship is fatal to the relationship.

  We did the photo session for the album cover on a crisp, cold autumn day. Everybody thinks we did it in the desert, but it was in South Mimms, north of London. The Western motif was Eddie’s idea; he had an aching desire to be Clint Eastwood. Keep in mind that at this point, I was the only one who had been to America. We all looked pretty good, dressed up as gunslingers, though. We had a slight problem with the wardrobe – the spade-shaped studs on my pants were too far apart. I took them off one leg and put ’em all on the other, so it turned out I could only be photo graphed from one side. But other than that, it went quite well.

  After we finished the album, it was back to all those TV shows and interviews, which seem to blend together in a haze. But there were some highlights. One was in November, when we went on an ITV show called TisWas. It was a kids’ Saturday morning show that featured a rock band every week. Chris Tarrant, who hosted the show, was a real strange person, but he knew what kids want to see: kids want to see grown-ups fuck themselves over, you know; they love that shit. There were buckets of water everywhere on this programme. It wasn’t warm water, either – it was fucking cold and they were slinging it all over. And there was the Phantom Phlan Phlinger: he’d come up to somebody during the show and go bhuuf with this huge fruit pie. It was great fun, completely slapstick. We were on that show a couple of times.

  Once, we were on with Girlschool and we were having a game of musical pies. The pie stopped in my hand and I had to smash it in the face of Denise, Girlschool’s drummer. The poor girl was cowering a bit, but it was like, ‘Sorry. I’ve got to let you have it, babe.’ Everybody who went on got it, bad. At one point on this November show, Eddie Clarke was decimated by about six buckets of water. It was funny as shit. And they had this cage there, and they’d put people in it. Viewers wrote in for weeks ahead of time, volunteering to get in. There was a waiting list to be stuck in this cage, where everything in the world was dumped on them. They had this big trough full of green gunge – viscous, garbagey slop – and they’d tip that all over ’em at the end of the show. Phil had volunteered to be in the cage, but our manager, Doug Smith, went in – then they wouldn’t let him out again. Ha-ha! So we had some revenge on the son of a bitch. Great show.

  Our ‘Ace Up Your Sleeve’ tour that fall was fucking mammoth. We barrelled through all of Great Britain with the ‘Bomber’ rig, the ‘Overkill’ backdrop with its flashing eyes, and on a couple of the earlier shows, we also had these lighting tubes forming a gigantic Ace of Spades playing card. The latter didn’t last very long – it was a bit on the fragile side and I believe it met an untimely demise. It was around the time of this tour that our old label, Chiswick, released the Beer Drinkers EP, the leftovers from the Motörhead England album sessions. The record charted, peaking at 43, and although we didn’t see any big monetary returns, it was good for us. Anything’s good that gets the name around, you know.

  We finished up the ‘Ace Up Your Sleeve’ tour with four nights at the Hammersmith Odeon, and then an aftershow Christmas party was thrown for us at the Clarendon Hotel. There were some fire-eating strippers there – all good, wholesome English fun. I don’t know where they came from – it was some publicity-type scheme. If it had been somebody else’s party, I probably would have enjoyed it, but as I said earlier, I hate those things if I have to be involved. It’s terrible because you’ve just come off stage and you’re knackered. The last thing you want to do is to go to some fucking room upstairs at a boozer and be sociable! I mean, who needs it?

  After a gig, I prefer to get laid immediately, if possible (as you may have gathered). I like to get one on one with a chick and just go someplace with her. I don’t really mind where. A club or the back of the bus or whatever, you know. One time, I vanished with this chick out the side door of Hammersmith Odeon right after our gig. Her name was Debbie and she used to be a Page Three girl in the Sun. Saw quite a bit of her for a while. (Debbie, sadly, is no longer with us – rest in peace.) I walked off stage and gave the guitar to the roadie. Debbie was standing there, so I grabbed her and we immediately nipped out the door, joining the crowd that was walking away from my own gig. There I was in the middle of all these people walking down the road. A couple of them looked – ‘That’s Lemmy.’ ‘No, it’s not! Can’t be. Forget it. It can’t be him.’ They couldn’t believe I was out that quick, so nobody asked me for an autograph, nothing. It was really funny. I’d fooled them, stonewalled them!

  In late December, we popped on over to Ireland to do a few more dates. That’s where Philthy broke his neck. It was in Belfast after a gig, and he was on a staircase, playing ‘Who can lift each other up the highest’ with a large Irishman. The Irishman lifted Phil up the highest, and at the same time, took a step back to admire his work – into thin air. They went backwards down the staircase, with Phil flying, and he landed on the back of his neck. We went over to them – the other guy got up, but Phil didn’t.

  I said to him, ‘Come on, man.’

  With stark terror in his eyes, he looked up at me – ‘I can’t fuckin’ move.’

  We took him to hospital in Falls Road. Keep in mind that this was Belfast on a Saturday night, and Falls Road is a Catholic area. Jesus Christ, you know! There were fuckin’ bullets going by! We went into this hospital, past the gunshot wounds and the bomb-blast wounds, and they took him in. They had him braced on a table with his head propped up so he couldn’t move it – well, he couldn’t move it anyway.

  ‘I’m dying for a piss,’ he moaned as he was lying there. When he said that, our tour manager, Mickey, grabbed me and pulled me out the door.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I wanted to know.

  As we were just through the threshold, we heard a nurse saying, ‘I’ll just put this catheter in here, Mr Taylor.’ Then as the doors closed . . .

  ‘AAAAAARGH! YOU BASTARD!’

  ‘I just wanted to get out of there before the screaming started,’ said Mickey.

  I suppose Phil had assumed they were going to somehow walk him into the toilet, let him have the piss there and bring him back. He was lucky – he could have been paralyzed forever.

  Finally, Philthy emerged, wearing this huge brace on his neck. I cut a bow-tie out of bla
ck gaffer tape and stuck it on the front so he looked like a Spanish waiter with a goiter. Phil’s done lots of other stuff besides that. We were going to do a book called Hospitals I Have Known Across Europe, by Phil Taylor – a guide to European emergency rooms, you know. He’s not real graceful, you see. On the bus during one tour, he was almost completely prone at all times because he couldn’t get his bus legs together. The guy couldn’t walk down the aisle. He would affect this very strange, stiff-legged gait, which he thought would help him stand up, but in fact laid him flat nearly always. He spent that whole tour on one knee on the bus, mobile proposing across Europe!

  With Philthy out of action, we had to postpone the European tour we had planned at the beginning of ’81. Meanwhile, Girlschool were at Rickmansworth, making a record with Vic Maile. It was Vic’s idea to have Motörhead and Girlschool record a single together. The song we did was ‘Please Don’t Touch’, which was originally recorded by one of my favourite groups of days past, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. The band had some attention around 1977, after John died, as the Pirates. This cover wound up being part of a record called The St Valentine’s Day Massacre EP, which was released on 14 February. The flipside had us doing the Girlschool tune, ‘Emergency’ (Eddie’s second vocal), and also the girls covering ‘Bomber’. Denise Dufort played drums on all those tracks, since Phil couldn’t. That single turned out to be the biggest hit either Motörhead or Girlschool ever had in the British singles chart. It went to No. 5, and we went on Top of the Pops, billed as ‘Headgirl’. Although Denise played the drums on the show, Philthy made an appearance, dancing around and adding a back-up vocal or two.

  About a week before that Top of the Pops appearance, both Motörhead and Girlschool were filmed in concert for a Nottingham TV show called Rockstage. It was held at the Theatre Royale. I’ve still got a video of that performance. At the end of ‘Motörhead’, I leapt on to the Bomber lighting rig, pointing my bass at the audience like a machine gun, as one does – and got stuck halfway up. The guy who was in charge of lifting the rig left me up there for what felt like fucking years, but it was only a couple of minutes. I had this curly lead and it was stretched out tight. It was fuckin’ pulling me out of the plane and I was thinking, ‘You bastard! If I ever get down alive, I’ll fucking kill you!’ You can’t tell that from watching the show, however – the effect looked great. The guy responsible for that SNAFU miraculously and wisely disappeared after the show.

  In late February, Sounds magazine ran its 1980 readers’ poll results and we came out on top in everything. I think we even nabbed ‘Top Girl Singer’! Oh, except for one category – I came second for ‘Male Sex Object’, below David Coverdale. I didn’t mind – he had more hair!

  By March, Philthy had healed enough so that we could resume touring. We went all through Europe with Girlschool, and then came back and did four dates in England. We recorded all the English gigs for our live record, No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith. Originally, we were going to make it a double album but we didn’t quite have enough material. It would have been three sides, which would have been a bit of a con. Incidentally, none of the recorded shows were at Hammersmith – they were at West Runton, Leeds and two dates in Newcastle. The last three dates turned out the best, and we chose the songs from those shows. It was also Leeds and Newcastle where we were presented with silver and gold albums for Ace of Spades, a silver disc for Overkill and a silver for ‘Please Don’t Touch’. This time they gave ’em to us backstage, however.

  We didn’t stick around for the release of No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith. By mid April we were off in the States for our first tour there. We were opening up for Ozzy Osbourne on his ‘Blizzard of Oz’ tour. While we were doing that, the record came out and immediately charted at No. 1. I heard about it in New York – I was still in bed when somebody phoned me.

  ‘You went straight in at number one,’ I was told.

  ‘Uhhh – call me back, will you?’ I mumbled and hung up. Then about ten minutes later it hit me and I was up like a shot. That was the height of our popularity in England. Of course, when you’ve peaked, there’s nowhere to go but down. But at the time, we didn’t know we’d peaked. We didn’t know anything.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  keep us on the road

  So here we were in America, blissfully unaware that Motörhead had already reached its peak in Britain. And we did have a great time – Eddie and Phil had never been to the US before; I, of course, already knew my way around. But it’s always refreshing seeing a place through new eyes. Phil – Clumso – managed to go all the way across the US without suffering any major injuries, although the salad nearly killed him in Florida. He and Eddie, see, they were used to English salads where you get a leaf and a couple of boiled eggs. So at this restaurant in Florida they both ordered double salads – and I didn’t discourage them. I just watched as the waiters rolled up with two carts – an acreage of fucking greenery! Phil and Eddie practically had to fight their way out through this treacherous Mugwambi swamp. Myself, I won’t go near vegetables – too healthy for the likes of me.

  I’d never met Ozzy, nor anyone in his band before but I got to know them during this tour. Rudy Sarzo and Tommy Aldridge were nice enough guys, but they were quiet, like. They were just, you know, the bassist and drummer. Rhythm sections never get much attention, really, unless the band belongs to one of them. Randy Rhodes was Ozzy’s guitarist back then, and he was a much bigger deal. I believe he’d been writing songs with Ozzy. My big memory of him, however, was that he was terrible at Asteroids, so I wound up beating him at Asteroids all the way across America. I was quite friendly with Randy so I found it a terrible shame when he died in a plane crash a year later. Nevertheless, I have to say he wasn’t the guitar player he became after his death. As with Bob Calvert, a guy who was more or less ignored during his lifetime suddenly becomes a huge genius. Randy was a good guitar player, to be sure, but he wasn’t the great innovator he was later made out to be. God knows what people will say about me after I’m gone!

  Ozzy was a nice guy – still is. Very twisted, but nice. Of course, you’re going to be a bit warped when people are throwing half a dozen doves with broken legs and wings on stage every time you play a gig. Other things landed at his feet too – frogs, live rattlesnakes, a deer’s head, a bull’s head, all because of that story about him biting the head off a dove during a meeting with his record label. I don’t know how he went on working after that tour. He must have been constantly freaked, never knowing what was going to come flying up at him. Makes you kinda feel for the guy, doesn’t it?

  Ozzy really was having a rough time on the tour we did with him. He nearly died on this trek: he was at the height of his nervousness and the depths of his despair, and he was just overdoing everything. We kept finding him flat on his face, passed out on the floor everywhere at the beginning of the tour. Finally his girlfriend (and later, wife) Sharon took over and pulled him out of it, and that was great. I’ve had some ups and downs doing business with Sharon since then, but I’ve got to give her that. You wouldn’t have any more Ozzy Osbourne records if it wasn’t for Sharon, and I think Ozzy would be the first to acknowledge that.

  The Americans didn’t quite know what to make of Motörhead at first. We had quite a few jaws dropping to the floor during the Ozzy tour. Some places understood what we were about – we got a rousing response on the coasts, New York and LA. They also liked us in Detroit and Chicago, which are still a couple of our main areas today. Ohio was good, too, and we’ve won over Texas since then. But apart from that, we might as well not have bothered that first time around – they were baffled by us completely. I think a good portion of the Midwest was rather frightened by us; most of the audiences didn’t know who we were. An American label, Mercury, had picked up Ace of Spades, but nobody seemed to know about that. The label did absolutely nothing to promote the record (and what else is new?). So we were this strange, unknown entity every time we hit the stage.

  We did have our few fan
s, though. One of them was Lars Ulrich. He wasn’t Metallica’s drummer then – he was just this little teenaged kid living in LA. He loved us. As a matter of fact, he was in charge of the American Motörhead fan club, which, I assume, consisted of guys like him, who owned tons of import records. Those kids were big supporters of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement, which took off around this time. The NWOBHM was great for some bands – it sent Iron Maiden over the top. It didn’t do us much good, though. We came along a bit too early for it . . . and then our popularity resurged just a bit too late for the big metal and hard rock boom of the late eighties.

  So our first American tour was a mixed bag, but the ironic thing is that when we got back to England, we headlined a huge show at Port Vale Football Club in front of 40,000 people, over Ozzy Osbourne; so that gives you an idea of how massive we were at the time in Britain. That was probably our loudest show ever, and by then we’d already earned a reputation for the sheer volume of our gigs. (Admittedly, we did like it loud – we couldn’t hear it otherwise because we were deaf!) At Port Vale, we built the entire stage out of PA – I mean everything: it was all speakers, everywhere, to the tune of 117,000 watts. At soundcheck, a guy rang up from four miles away to complain that he couldn’t hear his TV . . . and that was just Eddie’s guitar! Plus, there was the requisite spectacular publicity stunt that night. During our show, this plane flew low over the field and dropped these guys with Motörhead parachutes. Six of them landed smack in the middle of the field, but unfortunately one of them missed and went into the allotments next door. This one old geezer witnessed the whole thing – he’d been standing there with a shovel, guarding his allotment from the hippies, you know. And he said, ‘Ay, that last lad came down like a sack of shit – phoom! On the ground. They took him away in a Dormobile.’ I assume that wayward paratrooper recovered from his injuries, because we didn’t hear any more about it.