White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  Looking back – and I must say, hindsight is 20/20 – it was good for us that we fell when we did. We wouldn’t have been going now if we had carried on getting more and more famous. We would have wound up a bunch of twats with houses in the country and gotten divorced from each other. So it was just as well, I think, for Motörhead’s moral overall. It’s important for a band to be hungry because that is the motivation that makes all bands work. And if anyone knows about being hungry for long periods of time, it’s me.

  But back to Robbo. I’d known him for years – we met under a table at Dingwalls. There was a fight going on and all us cowards were hiding. Yellow streak aside, he was one of Phil’s heroes, because Phil is a complete Thin Lizzy freak. And Brian was great on stage with them. He used to wear a white cord suit – quite striking with his curly, longish hair. He was available so we flew him out immediately, and he arrived in Toronto with reddish-dyed short hair. I was fucking horror-stricken, but I thought to myself, ‘Well, he’s enough of a trouper.’ It turned out he wasn’t, though. He wound up being just a pain in the ass. He was the only person in any of my bands that I threatened with physical violence – he was threatening me back, to be fair. We both had a chair in our hands and we were going to hit each other with them. But that happened months later: when he first got in Motörhead, the only hint of impending doom was the fucking red hair.

  Gradually, we got more clues. When Brian first came into the band, I said to him, ‘Remember when you were in Thin Lizzy, you had that thing with Scott Gorham, where he’d wear the black cord outfit and you’d wear the white one and you each used to flash over to the sides of the stage? That’d be great. I wear black. Why don’t you get that white outfit back out?’ ‘Oh no, I couldn’t do that, Lemmy,’ he said. And there was other shit, like he wanted a contract with us for only one album at a time. Basically, he wanted an out beforehand in case Motörhead didn’t happen for him. All this was easy to ignore in the beginning because for a while he was dead on. After he hooked up with us in Toronto, he only had a few hours of rehearsal before our first gig with him at Harpo’s in Detroit, but he played like a demon. We finished the American tour in June and then went off to Japan – our first trip there – and he was great the whole time.

  Japan loved Motörhead from the start. Brian had already been there with his band after Thin Lizzy, Wild Horses, and he told me with all confidence (and with his broad Scottish accent), ‘Don’t think you’re gonna get all this acclaim like you’re used to here in Japan. You won’t because they don’t do nothing. They just sit there and clap their wee hands.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be too sure about that, Brian,’ I said. ‘You’re in Motörhead now,’ which probably irked him like shit.

  So we got there and sure enough, the first time the curtains opened across the stage, it was all, ‘AHHHH! REMMY!’ Blian got a bit upset by that. ‘Blian Lobertson’ – that’s rather unfortunate, isn’t it?

  I loved Japan as much as they loved us. It’s a complete culture shock because nothing there is like it is in the West. The girls go out in bunches over there, but they don’t mind a bit of adventure. A big group of them will come into your hotel room and all take their clothes off – it’s very much a bonding thing with them. It’s because they don’t have this guilt we do, courtesy of our stiff Christian upbringing. In Japan, they have Buddha, which is much more civilized. Most Japanese girls are very, very pretty, and everyone’s polite, which I like. Good manners cost nothing, and most people in America, England and in many parts of Europe are mainly arrogant, brutal, stupid assholes who don’t give a fuck about anybody. They push you to one side and elbow you out of the way. They don’t do that in Japan. But make no mistake, they’re very horny as well.

  There are places we wound up visiting every time we went back – Pip’s bar was one of them (unfortunately, it closed down a while back; now it’s a karaoke bar!). They were very friendly there, and they didn’t care if you fell on the floor. Plus they had a couple of pin tables, which was great drunken entertainment for me. But that’s nothing compared to the amusement arcades. The amusement arcades are unbelievable – it’s like being in the Starship Enterprise. The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in Japan, however, was about twenty Japanese rockabilly fans walking down the street. They had it down – the quiffs, the leather jackets, the walk. Japanese teddy boys, that took some getting used to.

  It was back in England that Brian started getting very strange. He did fine on our first show there, which was at Wrexham Football Club. We were headlining, and down near the bottom of the bill was a new band from America called Twisted Sister. It wasn’t long after this gig that Twisted Sister became huge MTV sensations – keep in mind, MTV was just starting up in 1982 – but this was the band’s first time in England, ever, and they were terrified, the poor bastards. I ran into them backstage – here was this group of big geezers, all dressed like women, and they were so nervous they were spitting teeth. I could see that they were going to just fall to bits, so I said, ‘Listen, I’ll go out and introduce you if you want.’ And they were all, ‘Oh yeah, please!’ So I went out there and said, ‘These are some friends of mine, so give them a fucking break – Twisted Sister.’ That made sure they wouldn’t get bottled off, at least. And they went on and blew the place down. I introduced them again when they played the Marquee – I mean, I would expect them to do the same thing for us, and the band’s singer, Dee Schneider, did so a couple of times. He also got us on MTV, when he had his own show. We had some good times with Twisted Sister. Later on in the year, they were on The Tube, a TV programme that recorded in Newcastle, and we went up and jammed on ‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll’ at the end of the broadcast. I ran around one side and as I was putting on my bass, Brian suddenly appeared on the other side and – BANG! – he fell straight on his face. It was funny as shit. You could always rely on Brian for some unintentional entertainment.

  He was less than entertaining at our show after Wrexham, however. It was a stadium gig at Hackney Speedway in London that the Hell’s Angels put on. Everybody who worked on that show – the crew, everyone – were Hell’s Angels. They lost a fucking fortune putting it on, and they never promoted another show after that. I remember one of the guys, Goat, was telling me, ‘I know where I can steal a generator. Up the motorway, they’ve got loads of them. Nobody’ll miss it.’ ‘I think they’ll miss it,’ I said, ‘and I think they’ll catch you doing it.’ Somehow they got a generator, though. So here we were, surrounded by these massive, tough bikers, and Brian comes out on stage with his red hair, wearing these green satin shorts. A lot of muttering was going on: ‘Who’s that cunt with the fucking shorts on?’ ‘That’s Motörhead’s new guitar player.’ ‘Ah. Let’s kill him.’ You could feel the terrible undercurrent. Brian doesn’t know how close he came – I stopped them, but they really were going to kill him. After all, he was reflecting badly on them. The Angels are aggressively masculine, and they don’t like shit like that! There he was, poking it right in their eye. Whereas that’s laudable in a sociological sense, he really could have picked a better place to make a statement.

  Brian’s fashion sense continued to shock and horrify fans throughout our tour of Europe at the end of the year. Let’s face it, ballet shoes and Motörhead do not mix! He stood out like a sore thumb, and I guess that’s what he wanted. He was trying so hard to proclaim to everybody that he wasn’t actually in Motörhead, and he was just a guest artist. Our record label didn’t like him, either. I think Bronze would have preferred us to break up at this point, really. The Stand By Your Man EP didn’t get much promotion. But we did go into the studio in March of ’83 to make an album.

  Another Perfect Day shows a lot of Brian’s influence, which musically, wasn’t a bad thing. Even the producer, Tony Platt, was Brian’s boy, but he did a very good job so I have no complaints about that. Brian, of course, was his usual pain-in-the-ass self, but we dealt with it. The only thing I didn’t like about the record was there was a bit too much gu
itar – some of those solos didn’t have to be that long, God knows! But other than that, I thought it was excellent. Our fans hated it, though. They thought we were ‘going commercial’ – there’s that word again! It got up to about No. 20, and that was it, so it wasn’t as ‘commercial’ as people claimed it was. But Another Perfect Day has stood the test of time – a lot of fans have recanted now and come to like it. But that didn’t help us back then.

  I think Another Perfect Day was a good change for us, and maybe it was a mistake that we didn’t experiment more earlier. Maybe we should have carried on in that direction . . . but not with Brian! After the album came out, we toured with him through England and America (that was a loony tour – they didn’t know what to do with us so they kept billing us with bands like the Outlaws!), and the audiences just hated him. For one thing, he refused to play any of the old songs we were known for – ‘Ace of Spades’, ‘Overkill’, ‘Bomber’ and ‘Motörhead’. He didn’t want to be associated with the past. Actually, Phil was in agreement with him on that, and I could see their point, but let’s face it, the kids want to hear the old stuff. I mean, if I go to see Little Richard, I want to hear ‘Long Tall Sally’, and if I don’t I’m gonna be thoroughly pissed off. Even though I’m sick to death of it, Motörhead should do ‘Ace of Spades’ – people want to hear ‘Ace of Spades’ and you can’t fight that. To refuse to play it – or those other tunes – is very bad news. And then there was Brian’s clothing thing, too. On our last tour with him, he was wearing what looked like sweat pants, only they were made out of gabardine, and he had them tied up at the bottom with two strips of old, white towel. Plus the blazing red hair. He was just being awkward for the sake of it.

  But I didn’t fire Brian for any of those reasons. I would have kept him in the band forever if he was playing all right. It was just when he started fucking up that he became unbearable. We were part way through a European tour, in the fall of ’83, when it just got ridiculous. We were playing at the Rotation Club in Hanover, Germany, and we had just done ‘Another Perfect Day’ and he started playing it again. So I stalked over to him and said, ‘You cunt! We just played that!’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said, and he started it again a third time.

  At that point it was, ‘Good night from him, good night from me and thank you very much’ time. We cancelled the rest of the tour because we knew we couldn’t go on like that. Brian was a mess. Once in Spain, I found him in a hotel lobby in front of a display of those knick-knacks hotels have – crystal teddy bears and shit like that. He was leaning with his head against the glass like he was looking into it, but I went over to him and he was asleep, with his bag over one shoulder and a bottle of Cointreau in his hand. We got him into the car and took him to the airport, and propped him up in one of the chairs in the waiting room. He laid there unconscious with his head thrown back and his mouth open and little kids were putting cigarettes out in his mouth, ’cause they don’t care in Spain. He wasn’t much livelier on stage, so he had to go.

  After we got back from the aborted European tour, Phil and I went down to Brian’s house in Richmond and fired him. It was fairly amicable, really – he was expecting it.

  So Motörhead was down one guitar player once again. I finished up the year by singing and playing bass on ‘Night of the Hawks’, for Hawkwind’s EP Earth Ritual Preview. By then, the only person from my time who was still in Hawkwind was Dave Brock – but of course, it’s his band. As Motörhead is mine. I knew my band was going to carry on, regardless. I just didn’t know who was going to be in it next.

  CHAPTER NINE

  back at the funny farm

  Finding a new guitar player wasn’t a difficult process, really. I just did an interview in Melody Maker in which I mentioned that we were going to get somebody unknown this time around, and the applications flocked in. It was so simple, in fact, that we wound up choosing two guitarists.

  After trying out about seven or eight guys, Phil and I narrowed it down to two contenders. Some of the others were good, but they just weren’t right for Motörhead. In the end, Phil Campbell and Mick ‘Wurzel’ Burston were the only ones I would have gone near. I had never heard of Phil Campbell’s prior band, Persian Risk, but apparently they had recorded a couple of singles. He was in London, playing with his band when we were trying out people, and on their way out of town in the van he said, ‘Let me off here, lads. I’ve just got to go and see somebody about a dog,’ or some such lie – you can’t really tell them you’re going for an audition, can you? After all, you might not get it. Phil was quite nervous, but he was so sure of his ability that he practically walked in as if he was just showing up for a rehearsal. He laid a couple of lines out and went zapping back out, rushing around, speeding out of his head. If this gives you the impression that he was something of a maniac, you’re right. I only found out just how much of one later on. He’s definitely added to the Motörhead legend over the years.

  Wurzel, on the other hand, was nearly a basketcase when he came in. But I was already favourably inclined towards him from the letter he sent me. He’d enclosed a silly looking photo of himself and a note that read, ‘I hear you’re looking for an unknown guitarist. Well, there’s nobody more unknown than me.’ That warmed my heart immediately. When he came in to audition, however, he was shaking from fear. On top of that, he had walked all the way from the station carrying his guitar and his bag of pedals. No doubt his arms were killing him.

  ‘I’ve got a list of songs – ’ he said, and the paper was rattling in his hand.

  ‘Give me that, for fuck’s sake!’ I said, snatching it away from him. ‘Don’t worry. Sit down, have a couple of vodkas, man. You’ll be all right.’

  So he had a couple of drinks, after which he played for us and he was all right. Usually at auditions, they fly you in for ten minutes and send you flying back out again, but I don’t see any sense in that. If you want a good guitar player, let him play his best. Wurzel later said in the press that that was the fairest audition he ever did. And it worked, obviously, because he wound up getting the gig.

  We liked both Phil and Wurzel immensely (incidentally, both of them lied about their ages – Wurzel said he was younger and Phil said he was older. I’m the only one who never seems to lie about his age). We couldn’t decide between the two of them, so we had them both come back. The plan was to hold a battle of the guitarists to see which of ’em came out on top. Then, the morning of the final audition, Philthy left the band.

  Our manager, Douglas, called me up early, at nine that morning and said, ‘I’m coming to pick you up in five minutes.’

  ‘What for?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve got to see Phil Taylor,’ he told me, and I knew right then what was up.

  I hadn’t been seeing much of Phil but I had been getting the impression that he wasn’t really keen any more. Although we didn’t discuss his reasons for leaving the band, I think part of it was because he wanted to become a serious musician, or whatever it is that people think heavy metal isn’t which, if you ask me, is total bullshit. To this day, metal is one of the bestselling types of rock – in fact, it is true rock ’n’ roll. And it takes as much talent and determination to get anywhere as just about any other form of music. And it’s fun – so what more could you ask for? Anyhow, I believe that was one of his reasons. And our troubles with Brian Robertson aside, Philthy was one of the biggest Thin Lizzy fans in existence. Although he fired Brian from Motörhead along with me, he still believed that Brian was a loftier pinnacle to reach for than Motörhead was – he must have thought that because he wound up doing a band with Brian for a while. Or who knows – maybe he just wanted to get away from me!

  Anyway, Douglas and I went round to his house and he told us, ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘Man, your timing is great!’ I said. There we were with auditions to do that day with two guitarists who had travelled from Cheltenham and Wales. Now I didn’t have a drummer. But I have to admit, Phil was a gentleman about the whole
thing. The band was committed to appear on a Young Ones show not long after he left, and he came back and did that with us. He did leave decently, unlike some of Motörhead’s former members.

  That was small comfort, however, when I had to face Wurzel and Phil Campbell that afternoon. For a timeframe of a few hours, I was the only member of Motörhead. I really didn’t know what to do, so when I got to the rehearsal room, I said to them, ‘Look, Phil’s a bit late. You guys talk amongst yourselves a minute, have a drink. I’ve just got to go across the road.’ Then I went out and played one-armed bandit in the boozer for a quarter of an hour. When I came back, I caught a bit of their discussion.

  ‘If I played this, then you could play that part –’ I could hear.

  They were already talking over how to persuade me to take them both. But they didn’t have to try because I’d been thinking along the same lines. A four-piece is a lot more capable of playing different stuff – with two guitar players you’re bound to get that. Obviously I had to take a reduction in money, but it proved worth it for the next decade.

  Once that was decided, I broke the news about Philthy’s leaving. Things were a bit downcast, but only momentarily. Phil Campbell suggested Pete Gill as a replacement, and that seemed like a good choice to me. I remembered him as being a real attacker from the tour he did with us in 1979, when he was with Saxon. Later I heard that Brian Downey, Thin Lizzy’s old drummer, was interested in the gig – I wish I’d have known about that (and wouldn’t it have burned Philthy!). But Pete did all right for us for a few years. We asked him down to a rehearsal and he was all for it. He came and we played about two songs and then we all stood there with stupid smiles on our faces because it sounded so great.