White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  Pete was something of an odd character. He was drinking when he first joined us and he’s one of the funniest cunts in the world when he’s been drinking. But then he stopped drinking and became this born-again jogger, and he was kind of difficult after that. He wasn’t really jogging anyway. He only used to go down to the caff and have breakfast, then jog back, as if he’d been jogging the whole time. I know this because we followed him one day! He started to do some really strange things, Pete. He used to take his clothes off at odd moments. The first gig we ever played with him, there was a power-cut in the middle of the show, and he jumped up and dropped his trousers, which I thought was a very unusual reaction. Sometimes he’d just pull his dick out. Like, we’d be on an airplane and as the stewardess walked by, he’d pull it out and wave it behind her back. Then if she turned around, he’d put his paper over it. It really got to be a drag. Motörhead is nothing if not democratic, but I don’t think it’s fair to be waving your dick around when people are minding their own business and might not want to see it. Then there were the items he had sitting in the back window of his car – a riding crop, a hard hat and this colourful umbrella. I don’t pretend to know what was going on in Pete’s head, but later on I heard he came out of the closet and admitted he was gay. That made some small sense out of a few of his actions. One thing that never made any sense was the black notebook he kept with him at all times. Phil Campbell found it after Pete had been with us for two years. He peeked in it, and it was some sort of diary or ledger or something. Ten days after he had joined the band, Pete had written down, ‘Phil Campbell owes me fifty pence.’ Jesus, talk about wasting your time! But of course, all this was in the future.

  At the time, having a completely new bunch of geezers to play with was brilliant. It took ten years off me, easy, ’cause they were so excited. First off, we did six dates in Finland to warm up, and we had an hysterical good time. All the way through Finland, we were dissolved in fits of laughter. We were playing really well and we were out of it with joy. In fact, it was probably the best time we ever had with Wurzel. One night, he was so drunk, he was lying in bed and the roadies were pouring beer over him. And I nicked his bird, which was only fair play because he already had mine! Man, those Finnish gigs were like Fellini’s Satyricon backstage. It was so horrifying, it was great! I got some wonderful chicks on that tour. One place, I remember, we had to drive through four miles of quarry to get to this hut where the gig was, and it was packed. I don’t know where the fuck those people came from! But I pulled this incredible chick that night – sixteen years old, just beautiful. She took her clothes off and I fell to my knees in tears and thanked God.

  At another show, the Finnish lighting guy wound up in a wardrobe with this chick – he couldn’t go anyplace else because we were in the crew room and we wouldn’t let him in the band room, of course. So he took this bird into the wardrobe so she could suck him off, but we turned it round so the doors were facing the wall. They were in pitch darkness and the chick started gurgling and threw up in his jeans. There he was, stuck with this sick bird moaning around the floor, surrounded by this terrible stench! Finally he broke through the back of the wardrobe. Those shows were great fun.

  Back in London, we did a gig at Hammersmith Odeon straight away – it was 7 May 1984. At that show, Pete Gill and Rat Scabies ran upstairs and smashed a sink off the wall of the men’s room. We got fined for that by Hammersmith Odeon, but no matter. We murdered the audience that night – it was a complete triumph. We’d just had a new Bomber rig made – half of the old one had been stolen by gypsies. They’d broken into the compound and absconded with various bits of it for scrap metal. That second Bomber rig was nearly lethal. After one show we did with it, we found a split in the metal in the back of the wing, so the rig was liable to collapse at any second. And had it fallen, believe me, we would have been thoroughly crushed. As it was, I got hit on the head by the thing regularly. Still, it was a great prop.

  Obviously, Motörhead was ready to take the world by storm once again. Our fans were ready for it, and we certainly were ready for it. Our record company, however, had lost it, as far as we were concerned. We had bitched a lot about Bronze during the time we were working with them, but looking back on it now – especially considering the subsequent labels we went through – the people there were really great. But by 1984, Gerry Bron had stopped being interested in us personally, and that rankled us a bit because Motörhead was his star turn. Bronze signed a lot of people off of our reputation – Girlschool, Tank. They even got Hawkwind.

  Our trouble with Bronze really began after Eddie Clarke left the band. They didn’t like Brian Robertson, and they didn’t seem to have much faith in the new line-up, either. For our next album, they wanted to do a compilation of our old songs – that was an indication. When people start putting together compilations of a band’s prior shit, you know they’re readying the death knell. Bronze seemed to think we were finished, and anything more that we did would fail miserably (boy, did we have news for them!). No doubt they would have preferred for us to break up. There was no way that was going to happen, though, and I insisted that if they wanted a compilation, they were damn well going to add some new songs by Motörhead’s new line-up. I also took charge of selecting the old tracks that appeared on the record, and wrote a commentary about each song. So that wound up being No Remorse.

  During the latter part of May, we recorded six songs. Four of them – ‘Killed by Death’, ‘Steal Your Face’, ‘Snaggletooth’ and ‘Locomotive’ – ended up on No Remorse. The other two tracks we did went on the flipside of the ‘Killed by Death’ single and were both called ‘Under the Knife’ – they were two completely different songs, however. Maybe that sounds confusing, and it was meant to be. That’s what’s missing from record companies – that kind of lunacy for its own sake. That’s the great British legacy to the world, humour like The Goon Show, The Young Ones and Monty Python. Some people don’t get it, which is too bad for them. You’re supposed to laugh in life. Laughing exercises all the facial muscles and keeps you from getting old. Looking stern gives you terrible wrinkles. I also advise drinking heavily – it helps the sense of humour! Smoking pot helps the sense of humour no end, but after a while you lose it altogether and all you can do is talk about the cosmos and shit, which is really boring.

  But like I was saying earlier, our problems with Bronze were no laughing matter. They did promote No Remorse and the single very well – I will give them that. But it had the aura of a last hurrah. They advertised the record on television; it wasn’t all that great, really – just a live shot of us making a racket and touting us as ‘the loudest band in the world’, and all the usual schmear. Nothing to write home about there. We did a photo shoot for the single that was funny as fuck, though. Each of us in the band were supposed to illustrate the different ways to be killed by death – they put me in an electric chair, Wurzel was shown being crucified, Phil was being burnt at the stake and Pete faced a firing squad. For that last shot we were dressed up as Mexican revolutionaries with rifles and all, and we took a break to buy Cornish pasties at the supermarket next door. It made the shoppers rather nervous. They backed themselves up against the wall, in fact, but we told them, ‘It’s all right. Robbers don’t look like this. Too obvious.’

  We also went to Arizona to film a video for ‘Killed by Death’ – I don’t remember who paid for that, I don’t think Bronze did; no doubt we probably did. MTV banned it for a really stupid reason. I was riding a motorcycle in it with this girl and I put my hand on her leg and slid it up behind me. You didn’t see me grabbing the offending public hair, but nevertheless they didn’t like that. It was bullshit – that was when they were playing the hell out of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video, which had people coming out of the ground with shit pouring out of their nose, but they didn’t seem to have a problem with that!

  Anyhow, photo shoots and TV commercials aside, things just weren’t the same with Bronze, and we decided we
wanted off the label. What ensued was nearly two years of legal shit which kept us from recording an album that whole time. We also had other annoyances to deal with, too. Phil Campbell was still tied up with Persian Risk’s old label, and Pete Gill was in litigation over some money Saxon apparently owed him. So while the whole band wrote the music for the new songs we recorded, only Wurzel and I were able to take credit. Things were just ten times more complicated than they should have been all around.

  Since we couldn’t put any records out for the time being, we just did what came naturally – we spent all our time on the road. Our first gig after the No Remorse sessions was for the annual TT motorcycle race on the Isle of Man. We drank lots of free Pernod that day and later I woke up in bed thinking it was really fucking warm in the hotel room. Then I noticed my feet were on fire! I’d fallen asleep holding a lit cigarette and the bed was in flames. I had to scoop up all the sheets and chuck them in the bath. Shit like that used to happen to us all the time – once, at the place where I used to live, I woke up and the whole mattress, except where I was lying, was red. The cigarette had burned through the bedclothes into the mattress, and it was about to blow up. I hurled myself off the bed, fast, and just as I did, it exploded – fire up to the fucking ceiling! That scared the shit out of me.

  After the Isle of Man, we headlined the Heavy Sound Festival in Belgium. That was a classic line-up for the era – on the bill with us were Twisted Sister, Metallica (by then I’d gotten to know them fairly well and to this day, they’re amongst our biggest fans), Mercyful Fate and Lita Ford (who I knew from her time in the Runaways), plus a few smaller, long-lost bands. A little over a month later, we toured Australia and New Zealand for the first time.

  Travelling from England to New Zealand is a real pain in the ass, by the way. It took us a nightmare flight of thirty-two hours to get there – three-hour layover in Sydney and propeller plane to the island included. Then we got to the hotel and discovered that, yes, the tap water does go round the sink in a different direction! I turned on the TV to find a two-year-old episode of Coronation Street. It was a bit of a culture shock – things are very weird down there. We died a death in Dunedin, our first gig. Then a few days later, in Palmerston North, they had a riot. The audience was freaking out and running around – some guy got stabbed in the buttocks and the theatre was fucking destroyed. It got better, though – Wellington and Auckland were good. Then we went to Australia and that was very good indeed. Australia is great, because it’s like the old American frontier. When you get away from the big cities and drive to the small towns, it’s all verandahs and old sidewalks. You go into the bar and the fan’s going round and there are flies everywhere and the town drunk is slumped over the counter, just like you see in old saloons in the movies.

  They really loved us in Australia and especially Melbourne, where our main fan-base is. They gave us new guitars at one gig. Wurzel got a blue one, and before we went on stage, we could hear the audience singing, ‘Who’s the man with the blue guitar? Wurzel, Wurzel!’ One guy followed us all over the continent – he pawned his VCR to do it. He beat us to town on the trek from Adelaide to Melbourne, which is a long fucking way. His car was dead, ’cause that’s not a hospitable climate! But apparently it was worth it to him, and he wrote about the experience later.

  We stopped home in September just long enough to work up a couple of new tunes that later wound up on Orgasmatron, and then we did a few dates in Hungary – this was before the Communist thing went down. It was a very weird experience. No customs at all to deal with – we went straight through into the VIP lounge with all these Russians looking bemusedly at us. Obviously, if you’re going to be a promoter in Communist Hungary, you’re going to know the border guards, right? No doubt about that! There was a car on the tarmac and we were whisked straight through with top-notch treatment, went right to the venue in Budapest, soundchecked and were taken back to the hotel. The next day we went to the gig to find a whole army lined up around the site, and these Hungarian freaks just ran right through them. They were excited because I think we were the first band to play there for a long time. What a sight – thousands of people storming the Hungarian army! We performed in front of an audience of 27,000. Great show. The killer was it was in Hungary so nobody heard about it. I always find that when you play in these depressed, so-called Third World countries, the people are much more trusting and kind. They’re more enthusiastic about everything. Considering that, what has civilization done for us? Blunted our sensibilities and made us less open and tolerant. Civilization is apparently a curse – God bless the open market!

  Back in England, before starting off on our tour to promote No Remorse (it had come out in the UK the month before), we made an appearance on ITV’s Saturday Starship (a kids’ Saturday morning show – the successor to TisWas). Apparently some people complained because we were rehearsing early in the morning for the show in the station’s parking lot. I don’t know what the problem was – 8:30 AM was the time they gave us to rehearse and they put the stage up in the parking lot for us. Then we did the ‘Wooaarrggh Weekender’ festival in Norfolk, which was put on by the magazine Kerrang! That was a terrible show, and as is typical in the world of Motörhead, it was broadcast.

  Halfway through our British tour, Wurzel had to go to hospital because he had kidney stones, so we finished up the dates as a three-piece. Our last gig at Hammersmith Odeon, he was allowed to play on a few songs. They put him in a wheelchair and two porno-‘nurses’ rolled him out on to the stage. The whole place was cheering for him – keep in mind that at this point he’d been in the band for less than a year! Plus, we got a silver disc that night for No Remorse. For a band that was supposed to be finished, I’d say that was a rather impressive showing.

  We spent the last part of ’84 touring America. It was the first time for Phil and Wurzel (Pete had already been there with Saxon) and I played tour guide for them. I really enjoyed myself on that trip because the last couple of years with Phil Taylor and Eddie hadn’t been that much fun, and with Brian, it was no fun at all – that was a year and a half of fucking torture, in fact. But like I said, when young guys join the band, it really takes years off you. We finished out the year by filming a video clip for MTV – they opened the door to find us all singing a hideously off-key rendition of ‘Silent Night’. Then we ended December by doing a few dates in Germany.

  Those were actually our last shows for a few months. We spent the first part of ’85 doing TV appearances – most of them for Britain, a couple for Sweden. We were on the debut show of ITV’s Extra Celestial Transmission, or ECT, or ‘Eric Clapton’s Tits’, as I fondly called it. It was this heavy metal show, and they asked the audience to ‘dress outrageously’. In the spirit of the occasion, I had the make-up department do an incredibly realistic double scar down my face, and I dressed all gangster-ish, in a white double-breasted jacket – a favourite of mine – black shirt, white tie and wraparound shades. A couple of Hell’s Angels friends of mine saw our appearance and offered to kill the guy who gave me the scar!

  I also made a few appearances on my own here and there. I flew over to Germany to perform on a TV show with Kirsty MacColl (rest in peace: she was a really great bird). I was on guitar, dressed in shades and a teddy-boy outfit, and I sank to my knees doing a solo – actually I had no idea what I was playing! Frankie Goes to Hollywood was on the same show, and I came up on stage with them, too. They were all very pleased, for some reason, and later, when they had a gig at Hammersmith Odeon, they asked me up for ‘Relax’. I was supposed to play guitar during it, but I didn’t know the chords. Nobody knew who I was anyway – Frankie’s crowd wasn’t exactly Motörhead’s – and they were well bemused.

  They had a party at the Holiday Inn in Chelsea that night, which we went to. Gary Glitter was there with a drink and a cigarette in each hand – he didn’t know whether he was on his ass or his elbow. And there were two girls in basques hanging around who desperately wanted to fuck Frankie’s bass pl
ayer (only Holly Johnson and the other singer were gay). That’s all they wanted, and he was the only guy they didn’t fuck. They had everybody else, including Motörhead! You’d get a blow job and as you were leaving, they’d say, ‘If you see the bass player . . .’ But he’d left with his wife over two hours before. The last time I saw Holly Johnson was at a Frankie show at Wembley, and he had this huge gay geezer as his boyfriend, who was very obstructionist. One of those types that protects people from everyone, even their friends. Holly was leaving the band, and I told him not to. I said, ‘You’re making a terrible mistake,’ and it was a mistake because no one’s heard of him since, or any of the others. And they were huge for a while.

  I also met Samantha Fox that year. We were both judging this spaghetti-eating contest (there were some fucking animals at that thing!). I’d been a fan of hers since she was a Page Three girl, and we were thinking of doing ‘Love Hurts’ as a single together. I did a tape and gave it to her to listen to, but our schedules got in the way and unfortunately it never happened. She’s another one that’s practically disappeared. She was very cute, but I think she was kind of misdirected. Her father was her manager, which is always a mistake, and he managed her right into oblivion. But she seems to have reappeared once again – Motörhead recently did our first-ever shows in Russia, and we went to a club owned by the promoter and there was Sam Fox! We had a great reunion there!

  Even though Motörhead couldn’t make any records for the time being, it didn’t stop us from doing other things, such as benefit records. Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers got a bunch of geezers together to sing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, with the proceeds going to the Bradford City Football Stadium Fire Disaster Fund. Wurzel and I were on it, along with Phil Lynott and Gary Holdon, among others. That song went to No. 1 and earned a gold disc. I also produced a Ramones song along with Guy Bidmead – ‘Go Home Ann’ from their Bonzo Goes to Bitburg EP. I wish it had been one of their faster numbers like ‘Beat on the Brat’ or ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’.