White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  We were also quite popular with the cops back home – they were always trying to bust us in those days. It was very different from what it is now: we couldn’t go out of the house – the cops were just waiting outside the front door or failing that, they’d bust you on the street. Around this time – August of ’81 – they caught Phil with about £5 worth of pot, and he ended up in court being fined £40. Stupid, petty shit, isn’t it? But it wound up making news because we were these famous, bad-ass rock stars. Motorcycle Irene was with Phil when he got busted and they found pot on her too. But she only got fined £20 – maybe because she had bigger tits than him!

  Minor hassles aside, we had a lot of fun with our fleeting time at the top. One very satisfying moment was when we played the Summernight Festival in Nuremberg, Germany and we were billed over Blue Oyster Cult, who had so soundly screwed us over at our first Hammersmith Odeon gig. We didn’t do anything particularly nasty to them, though – after all, they were old news. We just didn’t lend them the PA, that’s all.

  It was also around that time that I made a record with the Nolan Sisters. It was just a one-day gig – I got a phone call and did it for a giggle. It was a song called ‘Don’t Do That’, and the band included me on bass, Cozy Powell on drums and ex-Whitesnake guitarist Micky Moody. Colleen and Linda Nolan sang, and Status Quo’s road manager Bob Young also added some vocals and harp. We called ourselves the Young and Moody Band, and made a video for the tune, too. The Nolan Sisters were great fun – we used to run across them quite a bit because they were on the charts at the same time Motörhead was. Everybody thought they were soppy little popster virgins but they weren’t. They’d been around – they’d played with Sinatra at the Sands in Vegas. They were tough chicks, managed by their father, but they were really great. And funny as shit. Once our manager, Douglas, was talking to Linda Nolan in the Top of the Pops bar, and he dropped some money on the floor. When he bent down to pick it up, Linda smirked and said, ‘While you’re down there . . .’ That was the last thing he expected out of a Nolan Sister! Maybe wishful thinking and he dreamt it up, but it shocked the shit out of him.

  I don’t understand why people want to think that women don’t like sex, or that the ones that do are terrible and depraved. Everybody likes to fuck. We should have grown up to that extent by now, where we recognize sex for what it is – fun and recreation. I’ve said many a time that sex is the most fun you can have without laughing. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this book, part of the reason I got into rock ’n’ roll was for the chicks, and everyone in Motörhead has always had as many as they could get their hands on . . . or who could get their hands on us. One time at Bolton Casino, I was sitting at this table and this girl came up and blew me right there. Eddie swung by to say, ‘We’re ready to leave, lad.’

  ‘Could you hang on a minute?’ I asked, very strained-like.

  Then he saw the high heels protruding from underneath the tablecloth and got the idea. So he left us alone and I drifted back into the ecstasy.

  Pleasant interludes like that happened all the time. When it came to chicks, we weren’t really worried about quality in my band. And, actually, quality is certainly in the eye of the beholder. What people call quality is usually better dressed, which doesn’t cut any ass with me. I’ve met chicks who look like bad ladies who have more brains, better conversation and are just all-around sexier than the best dressed models in the world. It’s true. Those model types are like fuckin’ thoroughbred horses – they look good but they’re dumb as shit. I’ve had a lot of what people would call slutty chicks around, and I like them because they’re honest and up front. They’re like me – they say, ‘I like fucking! Let’s go!’ And, really, that’s the way it should be.

  Obviously, rock stardom has its ups (and you can take that several different ways!), but there was the occasional downside. At the beginning of Motörhead’s career, we used to hang out in the bar with the fans before the gig, but eventually it got to be too much. You start getting fans who think they’re in the band – they dress up as me and after a while when they look in the mirror, they see me instead of themselves. That can get very weird. There were guys all over the place called Lemmy, and loads of kids called Lemmy, too, poor little fuckers – one is a girl! Another guy gave his son Kilmister as a first name. And there’s cats and rats and dogs and fucking parakeets, all named after me. We were inundated with adoring fans, not to mention the occasional nut, so eventually we had to stop being as accessible as we once were. That was a shame; I always missed that, because when you hang out with the kids you get an idea of what’s really going on out on the street.

  A lot of bands divorce themselves from that as soon as possible and I think that’s a big mistake. Some bands never even meet their fans, don’t even know who they are or what they look like. They just see the spotlights shining in their eyes, then they go offstage into their own little world. Musicians who do that are missing out on a lot. I still like talking to fans today . . . except for the occasional drunk fucker who insists on singing ‘Ace of Spades’ in my ear nonstop! We have made a few albums since the Ace of Spades days, after all – if he’s drunk and starts singing something from one of our last couple of records, I might not mind so much!

  Another problem with being very popular is that some people claim that you’ve sold out. But really, that’s more their problem, not mine. Commercial is whatever people are buying, that’s all. That doesn’t mean the music changes. For example, our first album didn’t sell very well, so we were still street credible. Then Overkill was a minor hit, and some of our fans left us because they thought we were ‘going commercial’. That was really stupid – couldn’t they tell the music was basically the same, just a little better because we were a tighter unit after playing together for a few years? By the time No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith came around, there was a small backlash going on with the requisite cries of ‘Sell out!’ Since that was a live album of songs from when we weren’t ‘commercial’, it looked like they needed a damn good thrashing for being elitist, overfed snobs! We knew we were doing just what we wanted to musically, so that was easy to ignore.

  It was Motörhead’s best year ever, 1981, but it ended on a very bad note. We spent the last part of the year touring Europe, and my flatmate, Andy Elsmore, got murdered. He was a little gay guy who used to run a porno cinema. Somebody came into my house while I was away and stabbed him fifty-two times in his face, neck and chest, then put a knife through his asshole and pulled it through to the front. And they cut his dick off, and shoved it up his ass. Then they set the place on fire in an attempt to disguise the murder. Still, poor Andy managed to crawl all the way down the corridor to the TV room before he died. That’s where they found him. It was a terrible fucking thing.

  The media, of course, didn’t get it right – the headlines said things like, ‘Motörhead involved in drug slaying’, or some fucking bullshit. It had nothing to do with us, and I’d been gone a month so I didn’t know who Andy was mixing with. It was obviously some gay hate killing, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered sticking his dick up his ass. That’s definitely an anti-gay thing. A tragedy.

  But back to the band. At this point in our career, unfortunately but perhaps inevitably, we started getting complacent. Everything we’d done up to that point had turned to gold. We thought it was just going to carry on magically. But Iron Fist was not the record to follow up an album that went straight in at No. 1. To be honest, we were screwed anyway. No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith was live, and you can’t follow up a live album that sold the way No Sleep did. We wound up getting a lot of mixed reviews, which didn’t surprise me in the least. It did surprise Eddie, who produced it with Will Reid Dick, and I think it broke his heart in a way. But the record didn’t do too badly sales-wise. It peaked at No. 4 – not as good as our previous couple of releases, but still quite respectable.

  The disillusionment hadn’t really set in yet, however, and we began our UK tour with high hopes – the dates w
ere very good. Our manager, Douglas, had come up with the idea of the Bomber lighting rig, and since that worked out so well he now fancied himself as A Man Who Knows About Stage Shows. So he had to outdo himself for our Iron Fist tour. We didn’t even know what kind of marvel he’d cooked up until something like three days before we hit the road – ‘We made it and you can’t change it now.’ It was quite dramatic, really. The curtains would open up and the stage would be absolutely empty – nothing, not even the red lights on the amps. We were up on the ceiling, see. We had a stage that was on four gantries, with all the equipment on it – the drums, the amplifiers, the lights, the whole stage, was in the roof. Then the music would start and we’d come down, out of clouds of smoke and coloured lights, and as we were making our descent, this huge fist would open up and there were searchlights at the tips of its fingers.

  Naturally enough, the fist didn’t work properly the first night, and we got stuck going back up as well. The stage rose about halfway and stopped moving and the curtains caught on the stage. People could see us milling about, going, ‘What the fuck are we gonna do now?’ and ‘How do we get down off of here?’ Philthy, of course, nearly stepped from his kit into oblivion – Eddie caught him just in time. But after the first couple of days, it worked great. We never used the fist again, though. That went straight back to the shop and it stayed there.

  Tank, a band Eddie had produced, opened for us on those dates. That was our friend, Algy Ward’s band. He had been in the Damned but got fired, and then he formed Tank. He was bass player and leader of his band, as was I, and he felt very good about that. They’d done very well on tour with us in Europe, but in England, they had wife trouble. The wives wanted to come on the road and, of course, they were only new boys so they let them, and that’s death for any band. I’m not coming off chauvinistic by saying this but wives separate the band, plain and simple. Let’s say you have three guys in a band – maybe they go to three hotel rooms after the gig, but they’re the only ones in their rooms. But if your old lady’s along, you get off stage and you have to hang out with her. You don’t discuss the gig with the rest of the group and you don’t go back to the hotel bar for a drink because you’re with your old lady, right? She’s standing there and there are a lot of things you won’t say in front of her because you think she’ll be bored or you’ve got to pay attention to her. So that completely fucks up the communication within the band. And also, a lot of wives are in their husband’s ears – ‘The other guys would be nothing without you. You don’t get enough credit,’ and the rest. It causes a lot of grumbling and dissension and can destroy a band. I’ve seen it happen many times – it’s happened within my band! So as a result, Tank wound up doing very badly with us in the UK.

  Since we were still big rock stars, we were pulling all sort of Spinal Tap shit. (Incidentally, Spinal Tap was a very accurate film. Whoever wrote it must have spent some time on the road with rock bands.) We were bad boys in those days . . . but then, we still are today, only everyone’s used to it now! People get horrified by Motörhead – ‘The fuckin’ cheese isn’t here! Where’s the cheese!’ ‘Sorry, man, we couldn’t get it.’ ‘OH YEAH? CAN’T GET ANY FUCKING CHEESE IN A BIG TOWN ON A WEDNESDAY AT FUCKING SIX O’CLOCK?! GET OUT AND GET THE FUCKING CHEESE!’ ’Cause it’s not the cheese that matters, is it? It’s the principle that they didn’t bother, that’s what pisses me off. I’d send the promoters and their minions on all kind of errands – ‘Get out there and get me this shit!’ If it’s on the rider it had better damn well be there. If the drum roadie wanted Twiglets (and ours did), he got them. Our present guitarist, Phil Campbell, sent out for Chinese food at one show, and he told the guy to get a portion of Ben-Wa balls, too – and the guy came back with them! But here’s one thing that has always puzzled me, and it happens in every country in the world. Your rider says you get so many towels, right? And they give you these tiny, foot-square pieces of cloth. What the fuck is that?

  We took no shit from anybody. At one point we were scheduled to play at this radio station, Radio Clyde, in Glasgow. We were supposed to be doing a soundcheck, but the guy was a real dick and he kept us waiting for ages. Radio people are notoriously unsympathetic to anything you’re doing, because they’re so self-important. So after sitting there for a while, I said to Eddie, ‘Fuck this. Let’s do ’em.’ So we unwound the firehose from the wall, stuck it through the door of the studio, jammed the door shut and turned it on. And we left. They didn’t ask us back – rather unsporting of them, really.

  The cops really got on our ass around this time. They went through everybody’s house, the roadies’ hotel, even our manager’s house. I was in a hotel in Swiss Cottage, so they missed me. They had this serious operation going: dogs, door smashers and all, and out of everybody – twenty-five crew, three band-members, the manager and his wife and their staff – the cops came up with all of a half gramme of cocaine, I believe, a little bit of dope and one Mandrax. We went down to the nick and I asked, ‘What reason did you have for mounting this massive operation?’ ‘It was an anonymous tip off,’ the magistrate said. ‘We heard you were selling acid to the audience from the stage.’ Jesus, what idiocy! I’m singing and playing bass – when am I going to have time to go down front and say, ‘Anybody want any acid?’ Not to mention handing out change – I would have needed a change belt instead of a bullet belt! Fucking assholes – as if the cops don’t have real drug pushers to chase. Or why aren’t they out catching the Yorkshire Ripper, people like that, instead of fucking around with a band who’s just playing gigs and taking a few drugs on their own? Of course, telling them this never goes down well with the cops.

  I imagine that my comments on wives still have you radical feminists out there fuming (but then, if you get pissed off that easily, what are you doing reading this book?). But fair’s fair – as I’ve mentioned before, I’m more than happy to work with female performers. Before Motörhead began its American tour, I popped in at a studio in London to visit this all-girl band from France, Speed Queen, who were making an album. The singer, Stevie, was great – she sounded kind of like a singer that’s around now (and, incidentally, getting far less attention than she deserves), Nina C. Alice from a band called Skew Siskin. They both have real rough voices – like Edith Piaf, only with guitars. I even added some backing vocals to one of their songs. The album was in French, though, so it never got heard anywhere but France. A few days after that, Motörhead flew to Toronto so that we could record an EP with Wendy O. Williams. That session resulted in the demise of what many Motörhead fans call our ‘classic line-up’ (although those who think that way probably haven’t heard the band in the last few years).

  Wendy O. and her band, the Plasmatics, have been pretty much forgotten nowadays, but she was a completely outrageous punk rock agitator. She sawed guitars in half with a chainsaw and blew up police cars on stage. Once she drove a car into a pile of explosives on a New York harbour and jumped out at the last minute. After she did that, she went straight to Florida to wrestle alligators. I thought, ‘This chick’s fucking excellent!’ Plus, I’d seen pictures of her, and she did take a good picture. After our EP with Girlschool hit, people were always on us to collaborate on records, especially with girls. And I really enjoy making records with birds. Eight geezers in the studio can really be a drag – recording with girls usually produces better results, because it causes an interesting kind of friction, and also the scenery is a bit better! Abrasiveness and scenery – I’m all for both, and it was clear I’d get that from Wendy O. It was touted as this extraordinary combination of punk and heavy metal – two warring factions at the time. The songs we were going to do were a Motörhead tune, ‘No Class’, ‘Masterplan’, which was a Plasmatics number, and as the single, ‘Stand By Your Man’ – yes, the country song.

  Eddie was supposed to produce the tracks for us, and unfortunately he had Will Reid Dick – whom I generally refer to as Evil Red Dick – in tow again. The session was problematic to say the least. Wendy
took a long time to get in tune, and it wound Eddie up. She tried her parts a few times and she sounded terrible, I will say that. You’d think she was never going to get it, but I knew she would if I just worked with her. In addition to this, Eddie wasn’t playing guitar – he was only working as producer. We were using Wendy’s guitarist from the Plasmatics, with me and Phil on bass and drums. Eddie just wasn’t acting terribly thrilled with the whole scenario and finally he said he was going out to eat, but we found him in the other room, sulking with Evil Red. It was bullshit. We could have worked through our problems if Will Reid Dick hadn’t been there, because Eddie would have had nobody to go off with, away from the band. He would have had to stay in and lump it, then it would have been done and forgotten. But we ended up exchanging a few words and Eddie left the studio. Later, Phil and I went back to the hotel. Phil went ahead of me, and he came up and told me, ‘Eddie’s left the band.’

  Actually, Eddie used to leave the band about every two months, but this time it just so happened that we didn’t ask him back. We didn’t try to persuade him, which is why he stayed away – that surprised him a bit, I think. But we were just tired of him because he was always freaking out and he was drinking a lot back then. He’s become very much better now since he stopped. So Eddie did our first two American dates, Toronto (there’s a video of that gig, but Eddie was terrible and so was I – I got cramp halfway through the show and couldn’t play), and New York. We had to get another guitar player fast so we could continue the tour, and we chose Brian Robertson, who had been in Thin Lizzy. Technically, he was a better guitarist than Eddie, but ultimately he wasn’t right for Motörhead. With Robbo our slide downwards began to pick up speed, which was unfair really, because the record we made with him, Another Perfect Day, was very good.