At the end of June, Motörhead was coming up on our ten-year anniversary, and we did a couple of shows at Hammersmith to celebrate. Those were fun gigs. The first night, everybody who’d ever been in Motörhead showed up on stage, which was amazing. Wendy O. Williams and Girlschool were there, too. The second night, everybody showed up again, except for Larry Wallis. Even Lucas Fox was there, and he’d only been in the band a few months. Since we couldn’t get three drum kits on stage, we hung a guitar around Lucas, but he wasn’t supposed to be plugged in. Of course, he was plugged in, while Brian Robertson wasn’t. Typical. And Phil Lynott came on stage because he just couldn’t resist it. We were doing ‘Motörhead’, but he had no idea what he was playing (Eddie Clarke was over there, going ‘E!’ – he didn’t remember, either)! Phil was a good friend of mine, but he’d never heard our signature tune. We were recording those shows, and Vic Maile did a special mix of it with Phil’s bass up front and gave it to him, just to embarrass him. He had his revenge posthumously, though, when I went on stage with Duff McKagen’s band a couple of years back at the Hollywood Palladium. They started playing ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ and I didn’t know it! I was supposed to do a different song with them, but they switched on me.
Anyhow, the second gig ended with a huge birthday cake being rolled out, and this little bird jumped out of it with these big balloons under her T-shirt. I took her home that night – actually I was going out with her at the time. Katie, her name was . . . what a little beauty! We released a video of that gig, called The Birthday Party. Our manager also wanted to release it as an album, but we said no. I thought it would damage video sales, and I also thought it was a con, another cash-in thing. We didn’t think it was good enough as an album, either – after all, we hadn’t played for five months before those two shows. It became an issue between us and Doug Smith. That went on for years, fighting and bitching. He finally won. It’s hard to think now why we were so adamant, but at the time it seemed real important.
After the Hammersmith Odeon gigs, we toured Scandinavia for a month. We played just about everywhere there was to play – above the Arctic Circle, every shit-ass town. They have fairs in the summer in Sweden, so we did all of them, all of Norway and a couple of dates in Finland (our last gig was in Gothenburg, Sweden – our present drummer, Mikkey Dee, was living there and we never knew!). We called it the ‘It Never Gets Dark Tour’ because it doesn’t get dark there in the summer. The sun just gets low on the horizon, then comes up again. In Norway, we had the promoter from hell. He kept telling us the wrong distances from gig to gig so we kept missing the ferries – Norway’s all fiords, and you have to keep catching ferries and we missed about half of them and had to take speedboats. It was really annoying, not to mention expensive, and we were constantly late for gigs. Once when we got to the show really late, we walked into the dressing room to find a bowl of cold water with, like, one fucking beer in it, three yoghurts, a few biscuits and fruit and nuts – you know, bear food. So I said to the promoter, ‘Hey! Come here a minute!’ and I hit him with the three yoghurts before he got out the door. A bit later on the door opened a crack and a bottle of vodka was rolled across the floor to us. Finally in Trondheim we got totally fed up with him and covered him with squirty cheese. It was the fifth time we’d had to take a speedboat and we were two hours late for the show and we were really pissed off. Kids always think it’s the band’s fault when the gig starts late. So there we were on stage at last, and this cunt of a promoter was leaning against the PA like he was some Big Deal because it was in his hometown. And our roadies came up behind him and grabbed him, handcuffed him, dragged him out on stage and pulled his trousers down. Then they squirted him with the squeezy cheese and mayonnaise and anything else they could get their hands on. Our tour manager at the time, Graham Mitchell, walked up to the mic and said to the audience, ‘See this asshole? That’s why we’re late tonight!’ And, per-doom!, we pushed him off the stage. The guy wound up going to the police station – like that! Covered in slop, and in a taxi! After the gig, in the dressing room, we got the inevitable loud thump-thump-thump on the door, and it was this giant fucking cop – the Norwegians are real tall – who looked like the super-Gestapo.
‘I sink you haff done somezing very awful to this person,’ he informed us.
‘Yeah? Well, he told us all the wrong fucking directions,’ and all: we told him the story.
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ he said. ‘But zis is no reason to cover a man viz cheese!’
It was the cheese that seemed to bother him, not the assault. It was a cheese thing. Strange.
When we got back to London, we did a few things around town before heading back to the States. Hawkwind was doing an anti-heroin gig at Crystal Palace, and I got up and did a couple of numbers with them. At this juncture I would like to mention that I think these anti-drug gigs are a joke. They’re generally set up by people who are smashed out of their minds, which already defeats the object. And what do you do with the money you get from an anti-heroin gig, anyway? Not buy drugs with it?! They just set up clean-up centres or rehabs that really don’t work. No drug taker worth his fucking name is ever going to listen to the people who are in charge at those places because they run them like youth clubs, which is the very reason you started taking the stuff in the first place, as a mark against your parents’ generation. You don’t want to be herded somewhere and told you’re a bad boy. That isn’t the way to do it: you lock ’em in a fuckin’ room until they’re clean and then let ’em out and see if they stay clean. That’s all you can do. And actually, it’s not even much use doing that, because a smack addict has to want to be clean. They’ve got to come to you. You don’t do things like offer them rehab instead of jail, either – obviously, who’s going to choose jail, for fuck’s sake? They go to rehab to get the heat off ’em and maybe get rid of the annoying girlfriend. Then they get clean and it’s cheaper for them for a couple of months afterwards ’cause they only have to take a fraction of what they were doing before. From my vantage point, the whole ‘Drug War’ is a fucking mess.
Anyway, enough of that. Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics were playing at Camden Palace, so me and Wurzel got up and did a couple of our own songs with them – ‘Jailbait’ and ‘No Class’. They released a video of that show, if you can find it now. The next month, November, we were in the US, and I finished up the tour by appearing on MTV with Dee Schneider. By then we’d had very good news: our litigation problems with Bronze were over and we could begin 1986 by making a new record.
CHAPTER TEN
(don’t let ’em) grind ya down
Of course, Motörhead didn’t wind up on just any record label. Our manager, Douglas Smith, had convinced us that it would be best if we went with his company, GWR (an acronym for Great Western Road, where his offices were located). So our manager and record label were under the same roof. Plus Doug and his wife were handling our merchandising, too. Anyone could probably have told us this was a very unhealthy situation, giving our management this much power, but no one did. So, ignorant of business affairs as always, we forged ahead with the recording of Orgasmatron.
Orgasmatron was our first full studio album in three years and the line-up, except for me, was completely different from Another Perfect Day, but that didn’t faze us any. Between the recording sessions for No Remorse and all the touring we did, the four of us were rather used to each other by then! We made the record in eleven days, which as you might have figured by now, was no big deal for Motörhead. It was very easy, in fact, because the guys were so glad to be there. We gave our producer, Bill Laswell, a bit of a fright the first day, however. Me and Paul Hadwen, the fan club secretary at the time, had been drinking in this boozer when we saw an advert in the paper for Fat-O-Grams. We immediately thought, ‘This is just the thing for Phil Campbell!’ so we booked one. Then we went in the studio with Bill Laswell and his engineer, Jason Corsaro. They’d just come over from the States and they didn’t know us at all – I’d met B
ill for half an hour before this and, of course, nothing had been mentioned about Fat-O-Grams and such. So Bill and Jason were being all gung-ho American – ‘Let’s get it on, boys. It’s gonna be great!’ etcetera. But there was this large lady standing around the lobby (Phil later said he thought she was somebody’s mother), and she came into the studio after us, asking, ‘Which one’s Phil?’ And Phil said, ‘I am.’ WHAM! She tore off her dress and there she was, this huge woman in a little, skimpy outfit with the tits cut out, singing ‘Happy birthday to you – !’ (I suppose it may not have been his birthday – but we told her it was!) And she grabbed Phil and stuck his head between her tits – all we could see was just this little tuft of hair sticking out between ’em! Then she started slapping him with them! Nearly knocked him out. It was fucking great, and Laswell and Cosaro were edging behind the desk, going, ‘What the fuck is this?’ That was their introduction into the world of Motörhead.
As it turned out, Bill was good for getting sounds, but he fucked everything up in the mix. It was a much better album when he took it to New York than when he brought it back. A bunch of us – our people, Laswell’s people – got together for the grand, first-time playing and our publicist brought a case of champagne to ring in the occasion properly. It was dreadful. Orgasmatron was mud. There was supposed to be a four-part harmony on ‘Ain’t My Crime’, but he wiped three of them out! I won’t bore you with the rest of the ‘highlights’. Suffice it to say that our publicist was edging the crate of champagne back under the desk with her foot, while Laswell’s manager was standing by the door, bopping determinedly. It was hopeless. I tried to remix some of the record, but Bill and Jason weren’t being particularly helpful because ‘it was our mix and we liked it and that’s the way it was and this difficult musician was coming over trying to teach us our own job’ – well, I suppose I am difficult, if you consider wanting to get the job done right ‘difficult’!
I didn’t come up with the title Orgasmatron right off the bat. The album’s working title was Riding with the Driver (each Motörhead studio album, except Bastards, which we made in 1993, is named after one of its songs), but that track didn’t turn out as good as we’d hoped. I didn’t even know at the time that an ‘Orgasmatron’ was a contraption in some Woody Allen film – I never saw the movie – but I’ve been told about it quite often since! However, I made up the word on my own. A lot of our fans consider this album one of our ‘classics’, and there are some great songs on it – the title track and ‘Deaf Forever’, for example. I’ll always have problems with the way it was mixed, though. As far as I’m concerned it was only half the album it should have been. I do want to note, however, that there’s a great picture of Lars Ulrich on the original album sleeve. He had come up to see us at the Beverly Sunset a couple of years before while we were in Los Angeles, and he got a bit ill. He was still a youngster in those days, but it’s a fallacy to say I taught him how to drink – I actually taught him to throw up, and that’s what he did, all over himself – that’s what he got for trying to keep up with older people’s habits! A photo of that classic moment in rock history appears on Orgasmatron.
With a new album to promote, we were on the road again, and Douglas had to outdo himself once more with the stage set-up – hence the Orgasmatron train, to go with the record’s cover art. The drums went on the front of the train, and it came out on rails in the middle of the stage – basically Pete was riding out to the front on the train. But it never fucking worked. You couldn’t get the rails on the stage properly and things like that. Douglas did have some great ideas – the Bomber rig was brilliant – but this one was a very botched job. That and the infernal Iron Fist. But the train came with us through most of Europe.
Orgasmatron really should have brought us back up to speed – our new record with the new line-up and all – but nobody bought it. Or I should say nobody was able to buy it. GWR farmed the album out to various distributors around the world, most of whom did a shoddy job of getting it in the stores. But we played all the usual places – Europe, the Castle Donnington festival, England and the States. We started off the US tour with Megadeth opening up for us, but they were a very new band then and they blew it. The first night, in Oakland, they had their stage banner stretched out on the floor across our dressing-room doorway, and since we’re no respecters of tradition, we walked straight across it. The band’s manager dashed in, freaking out – ‘You walked on our banner!’ And I said to him, ‘Look, there was no way of getting into our dressing room without walking on your banner. Why didn’t you put it some fucking place else!’ We were running late at soundcheck that night – it was the Kaiser Auditorium, I recall. The first show is always fraught; we had new guys in the crew and people were still setting shit up and learning. And that manager stormed up to our soundman’s desk just he was finishing up the drums and said, ‘You guys have to get off stage now. It says in my contract that my band has a soundcheck now.’ Dave, our sound guy, turned around and stared at him.
‘I’m sorry?’ he said.
‘Tell your guys to get off the stage,’ this idiot commanded.
So Dave pulled out the copper’s truncheon that he keeps behind the sound desk.
‘If you don’t go away, I’m going to hit you very hard between the eyes with this.’
So the guy went away, ranting and screaming backstage. Meanwhile, Megadeth’s frontman, Dave Mustaine, came in to apologize and he crashed out in our room! Poor Dave was a bit out of it at the time – he’s since cleaned up. And there was the fucking manager, stalking around outside, unaware that his star was possibly dying on our couch! But to be fair to the band, although we threw them off the tour the next day because of all the shit with the manager, it wasn’t really their fault. It was the manager – we should have just thrown him off the tour, really. Years later, at the NAAM show, Dave Mustaine came up and apologized to me for it. That was really big of him, because he didn’t have to. We could have just gone on leading parallel lives and it would have been all right. More power to him. He’s a smart man, Mustaine; he’s got freckles, but he’s a smart man.
Overall, that wasn’t our most stellar tour through the US. In New Orleans the audience was spitting at me (punks, you know!) and I warned them that I would leave if they didn’t stop. And they didn’t stop, so I left, and there was a riot with firehoses and all kinds of shit. Then in Aurora, Illinois, Graham, my roadie for years, smashed my favourite bass – it sounded great and I played nothing else from the time I got it till he broke it. He didn’t do it on purpose, but he came to me with the two ends of it hanging around his neck, laughing. It was still repairable after he broke it, but he took it into the parking lot and smashed it to smithereens in a fit of pique, so I fired him.
During the short breaks in between all these various tours, I made all sorts of cameo appearances. I played an outlaw (typecasting, don’t you think?) in a video for this song, ‘I Wanna Be a Cowboy’ by the band Boys Don’t Cry. I got up at Hawkwind’s gig at the Reading Festival and sang ‘Silver Machine’. Then there was Boss Goodman’s testimonial at Dingwalls. Boss was a roadie, then a manager for the Pink Fairies and then he ran Dingwalls. He became one of those mover-and-shaker types. A nice guy, and he was having this testimonial because he was retiring, which in fact turned out to be true – I haven’t seen him since. Anyhow, Wurzel and I played some numbers with Rat Scabies of the Damned and Mick Green from the Pirates. Larry Wallis was supposed to play with us as well, but he was also playing in two other bands that night (including his own Love Pirates of Doom) and he refused to come and rehearse with us. He was such a drag that Mick Green finally told him, ‘Look Larry, we’ll be all right, you know what I mean? Thanks anyway.’ We didn’t need Larry anyhow – Mick’s a great guitar player, and we did a good show. Also in the midst of all this Motörhead did the inevitable BBC ‘Peel Sessions’ recording, and I appeared briefly in a Doctor and the Medics video. Orgasmatron sales may have been disappointing, but our visibility factor was certainl
y high in 1986!
Early in ’87, I had a featured role in the film Eat the Rich, and Motörhead did the soundtrack – mostly songs from Orgasmatron, plus the title track. The movie was made by the Comic Strip people, who were also responsible for The Young Ones TV show, and a few other projects. One of their earlier shows, called Bad News, had been about a mythical heavy metal rock band – a bit like Spinal Tap, but better, actually (and I’m one to know!). Bad News, the band from the show, had opened for us at Donnington, and we were all chatting at the gig and eventually Peter Richardson, who was the film’s director, rang me up and asked me if I wanted to be in a movie. I got the part as simply as that.
To be honest, I don’t like making movies – I’ve been in several of them now. It’s dead boring. They tell you to show up on the set at four o’clock in the morning and then at three that afternoon they say they don’t need you. So it’s just waiting around all day, basically, with a bunch of fucking actors. Eat the Rich wasn’t so bad, though. I spent a lot of time drinking with Nosher Powell, who had the lead role as the Home Secretary. He has a club now in south London, frequented by villains and gangsters of all shapes and sizes. My character was called Spider, and I was supposed to be working for this Soviet double agent, Captain Fortune, played by Ronald Allen, who was in A Night to Remember, the Titanic movie from the fifties. I won’t get into the plot of Eat the Rich here too much – it’s a black comedy involving cannibalism in a smart restaurant, with lots of political overtones. Quite a few people did cameos – Paul and Linda McCartney, Bill Wyman, Koo Stark, Angela Bowie (not that she’s any big deal – her claim to fame is that she was married to David Bowie). It’s a very English film, really. A lot of Americans don’t get it, but I think it’s quite good.
White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography Page 16