My part didn’t require any major sort of acting; I just played myself – I even used my own clothes. The director’s instructions for me pretty much consisted of ‘Walk over here and say this’. If you happen to rent the video, look closely at the scene where I’m riding a motorcycle – it’s not really me. They shot that when I was off touring America with Motörhead, and I had to leave a set of my clothes behind. They ended up having a girl double for me . . . a big girl. Good, eh, trivia fans!
The director ended up having all of Motörhead in the film: we replaced the band in the ballroom scene. It was a secondary idea he had halfway through shooting. If you watch very closely during that scene, you’ll notice that the band changes all the way through it. First there’s none of our mob in it, then there’s just me playing and the rest of the band are straight guys, and then Phil appears and then Wurzel and Phil Taylor appear (I had just fired Pete Gill that morning and Philthy shot down real quick in his car to do the scene). So much for continuity!
The sacking of Pete Gill was a long time coming. Peter was his own worst enemy, he was another one who wouldn’t just be content to be in the band. He went up against me on a couple of decisions, and he was making Phil and Wurzel upset too. I got tired of him moaning, so when he kept us waiting while he hung around in the lobby of his hotel for twenty minutes while he read the paper or something, that was the proverbial last straw. I know it sounds trivial, but most flare-ups in families are, aren’t they? And a band is a family. I let him stay for a couple more months, but it wasn’t the same. I mean, enough’s enough. I already knew Phil Taylor wanted to come back. He’d been playing with Frankie Miller, along with Brian Robertson, and it wasn’t working out very well. One time Motörhead was flying home from a tour of the States, and Frankie Miller, Philthy and Robbo were on the same plane. That was very weird to begin with, and then the three of them started fighting amongst themselves in mid-flight. Some time after that Phil came round and asked for his job back, but we told him, ‘Well, we’ve got to keep Pete at the moment,’ not yet knowing all the conniving that was to ensue. I’m too honourable for my own fucking good – Brian Downey from Thin Lizzy asked for the gig around the same time and I turned him down!!
So the situation with Pete came to a head the day of the shoot. He took so long to do everything, and we were always having to wait for him. It was just getting up my nose, because after all, I’m a speedfreak and I don’t like waiting. That morning, we got in the car and went down to the hotel to pick him and Phil Campbell up. Phil came bopping out of the hotel immediately, but Pete was still in his room, not dressed and we sat there for half an hour while he fucked around. Then he was saying goodbye to people in the lobby, and we were supposed to be at this shoot! Film people were sitting with their cameras on idle. So finally he came out, but I was fed up. I rolled down the car window and said, ‘Fuck you! You’re fired!’ and we drove off. And that was it. Last I heard about Pete, I believe he was touring with some alternative version of Saxon. It’s got three original members of the band who had all been fired, so they were calling themselves Son of a Bitch, which was Saxon’s original name.
Anyhow, with Pete gone, we gave Phil Taylor his job back. It was a mistake in retrospect, but then everything is easy in retrospect, isn’t it? The situation worked all right for a while, but things weren’t the same, and I should have known they wouldn’t be. But by June, we were back in the studio, recording a new album, which would be Rock and Roll.
Rock and Roll is a fair album, but it isn’t one of our best. There were problems in the studio – nothing truly disastrous, just a series of little annoyances. Our biggest mistake was choosing Guy Bidmead to produce it. He was an engineer, really, so we were pretty much producing ourselves. Guy had looked like a good idea, though. He had worked a bit with Vic Maile, who helped on our two most successful albums and he had engineered the tracks we recorded for No Remorse. But the chemistry wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t Guy’s fault, really – it was us, too. We were calling all the shots and whoever was nearest the desk would generally be the loudest! There was quite a bit of confusion when we were making that album. And Wurzel was having a bad time personally. His old lady kept coming up to the studio and chasing him around, causing all manner of family arguments while we were supposed to be working. That certainly didn’t help. A lot of times the way a record turns out depends on what the band members are going through while they’re in the studio. If a guy’s getting harassed at home or he’s got some money problems or whatever, it affects his performance ’cause his mind won’t be on the job one hundred per cent. In addition to all of this, we didn’t have enough time to do the songs properly and when that happens you’re pretty much wasting your time.
That said, we did have some amusing moments. One of the studios we used to make Rock and Roll was Redwood, which was co-owned by Michael Palin, and it turned out that the engineer had worked on all of the Monty Python records. He played us some great outtakes that Python never put out. We also asked Michael Palin to come down and do a recitation to put on the album. He showed up, dressed in this perfect 1940s-cricketer outfit – the striped blazer, the duck trousers, the fucking white pumps, a V-necked sweater, with his hair all brushed over to one side. A complete vision. And he walked in saying, ‘Hello, what sort of thing are we going to do now, then?’ I said, ‘Well, you know in The Meaning of Life, there was this speech that began “Oh Lord –”’
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Give me some cathedral.’ And he went in and he did it. It was great.
Even though we’ve done better records, both before and since, Rock and Roll did have some great songs, like ‘Dogs’ and ‘Boogieman’. We played ‘Traitor’ for years. And Michael Palin’s ‘Oh Lord, look down upon these people from Motörhead’ speech at the end is classic. But overall it just didn’t seemed to work. Still, it’s not a bad album – I don’t think we’ve made a bad one.
Anyway, with a new record done, there was the usual promotional stuff. MTV Europe had an ‘International Lemmy Day’, which frankly, I remember nothing about. And of course we spent the rest of the year touring through England and then Europe. We were supposed to begin 1988 by touring through the US with Alice Cooper, but we missed a month of it because the fucking American immigration department took so long to give us our work permits. It was just a lot of bureaucratic bullshit. I mean, we bring foreign money to America and they don’t give a fuck about that. They’d rather give amnesty to all illegal immigrants. Actually, I missed out on that by one year – I had been living in America for six months when the amnesty was granted in 1991. If I’d known it was coming I could have stayed out beyond my work permit and then got amnesty and a green card. I can’t get a green card because I got busted there for two sleeping pills in 1971, so obviously they have to watch out – dangerous drug fiend, right? Brilliant thinking, that.
Anyhow, the Alice Cooper tour, once we finally got on it, was a pain in the ass. It wasn’t Alice’s fault – he had no idea what we were being put through by his tour manager. That guy was a complete cunt. He made everything really difficult for us – since he was working for the top star, somebody else had to suffer and be made to look bad. We couldn’t do this and we couldn’t do that: fucking arrogant sons of bitches – how important do they think they are? It’s only a band, not the Houses of Parliament – not that that’s that important either. Finally, this idiot took away our ‘all-access’ passes and replace them with passes where we could only go backstage up to when we played; so after we finished our set, we couldn’t get in. Naturally, I wouldn’t stand for that kind of shit, so I went around the crew and said, ‘Give me them fucking passes!’ and gathered ’em all up. Then I walked straight into the production office, threw them down and said, ‘There, look! We’re out of here.’ And as I was leaving, Toby, Alice’s accountant – who had a brain – came and spoke to us and gave us our passes back. Toby still works for Alice; the other guy doesn’t. Need I say more? I talked to Alice years later, and he n
ever knew any of this happened, that his people were doing things in his name that made him look like an asshole – something he definitely isn’t. One thing, though – I’ve never understood his fixation with golf. I mean, what is the deal with that? You hit a ball with a stick and then you walk after it and you hit it again! I say if you hit it and then you find it, you got fucking lucky, pal! Put it in your pocket and go home. (Thanks, George.)
We had our own kinds of recreation. Phil Campbell pulled one of Alice’s dancers. I never forgave him for that, because she was so beautiful. Gail was a great girl and we still see her when we go through Chicago. And an Alice Cooper show is always an impressive thing to watch. I’m a big Alice fan. On a less pleasant note, it took some effort to get to some of those venues. I remember going up to a gig in St John’s, Newfoundland. We had to load all our stuff on a ferry and it was fucking freezing, so cold that it bit straight through you, and there were icebergs in the water. In the middle of the night, we came out of the cabin to get something out of the bus and I slid all the way across the deck to the railing and nearly went over into the fucking sea. The story of the Titanic has fascinated me for years (well before the film and all the fuss) and the whole time I was thinking, ‘This is what it was like when the Titanic went down!’ ’cause we were at the same latitude. In fact, our next date was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is where they brought all the bodies. Imagine jumping into that water voluntarily! The shock when you hit it must have just fucked you up. So on the metal wall, next to the rail where I’d landed, I wrote, ‘Remember, and be thankful it wasn’t you on the Titanic, 1912, 14th of April.’
We spent a good portion of 1988 on the road. It had been our natural habitat for a long time and it’s still that way today. It’s funny – the metabolism you need to tour is unlike anything any doctor has come across. Ever. Forget the Elephant Man – at least he was all in one piece and working in the same direction, deformed as he was. We are deformed. Not that much, just slightly deformed . . . correct that – we’re very deformed! The physical requirements for touring are unique (we’re no good for anything else). You’ve got to get up on stage every night and suddenly be energetic within minutes or everybody in the world is gonna die! They’re going to go home and shoot themselves because you didn’t go on stage that night. We’ve gone on stage in all kinds of conditions. Once, in April of 1988 in Paris, Phil Campbell broke his ankle – he was fighting with Phil Taylor and they fell under a table and only one of them got up. He did the gigs we had scheduled after that in a cast. And I’ve already enlightened you on the various states of Philthy’s health (both physical and mental). We have missed a gig here and there because of injuries or illness, but those have been very, very rare occasions. I can’t understand any other way of being alive than playing in a rock band all over the world. For two years we were home for one month in each year. It was great fun, though. Kind of blurred, but fun!
Occasionally during the brief periods of time we spent at home, we’d attend some really stellar event. That spring we saw the Rolling Stones play a surprise show at the 100 Club, an old jazz club on Oxford Street that turned to rock and blues. That was an extremely good evening. Everyone – Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and the like – showed up with their guitars and jammed, so it obviously wasn’t that much of a surprise. The real surprise was Wurzel. I think he was even a surprise to himself!
We got to attend the after party at Keith’s suite at the Savoy because a friend of ours, Simon Sesler, had an uncle who worked for Keith. But Wurzel had already begun his evening of terror at the 100 Club by knocking Bill Wyman flat on his back! He was flying down the stairs and Wyman just happened to be in his path. We managed to arrive at the party without any further mishaps, but there were more to come. For a while, we were sitting and talking with Simon when Kirsty MacColl came by with her new husband, producer Steve Lillywhite. Kirsty was a great old friend of mine – I was in a video of hers once – so I gave her a big hug, and Wurzel turned to Steve Lillywhite and said, ‘Who’s that old boiler that Lemmy’s got a hold of?’ Steve gave him this look and replied, ‘That’s my wife, actually.’ ‘Ah!’ said Wurzel. ‘Could I have some more coffee, please?’ Then about a half hour later, he was standing by the bar next to Ronnie Wood. Jo Howard, Ron’s stunning wife, walked past, and everything was moving, you know what I mean? And Wurzel leered, ‘Eh, I’d like to fuck her, wouldn’t you?’ And Ron said, ‘I do, actually. She’s my wife.’ Talk about putting your foot in your mouth – Wurzel had both feet in up to the knees! Luckily, it wasn’t catching, because I was standing around when I heard this voice behind me say, ‘Hello, Lemmy. I’ve always wanted to meet you.’ I turned around and it was Eric Clapton. This was big news for me because I remembered him well from the Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds. So I managed to say hello without grovelling – I mean, Eric!
I also wrote some songs that year for people other than Motörhead. We were rehearsing in the same area as Girlschool and we all went to a pub, and I wrote ‘Head Over Heels’ there for them. I scribbled it down on the back of a beer mat or something and Kim took it away with her. I also wrote a song, ‘Can’t Catch Me’, for Lita Ford’s record, Lita, which turned out to be her most successful album. We were in LA at that time and she came down to our hotel, the Park Sunset, and told me she needed songs. Once again, I wrote it right there and gave it to her – I wrote it as a twelve-bar, but she didn’t record it that way. I’d known Lita since 1975, when she was in the Runaways – at their first gig in London, Joan Jett wore my bullet belt. I thought Lita was the best thing in the band: she had great tits and played mean guitar, but Joan looked meaner – probably because she was! Lita made a great solo record but then I think she let the people around her have too much of a say in her career – for a start, she was too dressed up, and it looked like she was being pushed way too hard to try to be the ‘next big thing’. It just didn’t work for her. She was a real rock ’n’ roller, not the glossy chick they made her out to be. Then her mother died, and she was really devastated by that. Last time I saw her was a few years ago at a music convention in LA. We were on a panel together, but she was quite short – just ‘Hi, Lem’ and a quick squeeze and she was gone. She didn’t hang around at all, which I thought was very strange. So, Miss Ford, give me a call – we’ll talk!
A lot of performers from the eighties haven’t fared very well – that’s obvious from watching The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years. Where are all those people now? That film probably helped kill their careers – it made everyone who liked heavy metal look like morons. I was filmed for a segment of that, but I came off okay – no thanks to the director, Penelope Spheeris. She took me up to Mulholland Boulevard, in the Hollywood Hills and the camera crew was about twenty yards away from me. Penelope had to shout her questions at me.
I said, ‘Can you ask me questions from a bit closer?’
‘I don’t want to be in the shot,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to be in the shot!’
‘Nah, I’m going to read them from here.’
Fucking idiots – they could have come closer, used a different lens or something, but no! It was a stupid movie, anyhow. Everybody always says I’m the best thing in it and I tell them, ‘The only reason I was good is because all the rest of them are so terrible!’
I’ve had to do a lot of strange appearances. I was interviewed on the radio by some TV psychiatrist – that guy used to reduce a lot of people to tears on his show (Room 13, I think it was called) but not me, as you might imagine. I was also on a programme with The Joan Collins Fan Club, which was just one guy, Julian Clary, who’s famous now under his own name. He’s gay, so I guess as far as Joan Collins was concerned he was both the Bitch and the Stud. He was all right – very bitchy and camply sarcastic, and I love that kind of humour. I think Julian’s going to end up as a modern-day Noël Coward. But him and me together on a TV show certainly made an odd combination. A couple of years ago I – along with a lot of othe
r heavy rock performers – did a video for Pat Boone because of the album he made covering metal tunes. This is not as weird as you might think. I thought he was an excellent performer in his day.
Anyhow, back to my day (or with this particular period of time, you might call it ‘dog days’). In 1988 we also did another live record, No Sleep At All. We figured we might as well, since we had this relatively new line-up and all. It was recorded at the Giants of Rock Festival in Hameenlinna, Finland in July. But it was a mistake and failed miserably sales-wise. The record itself is all right. It could have been better no doubt, but we had Guy Bidmead mix it because we wanted to give him another try, mainly because he had been Vic Maile’s boy and Vic was a great live mixer. After that, I think we finally figured out that Guy just wasn’t Vic Maile. Don’t get me wrong, though – after all I’ve said about Guy, it was only ’cause he was taking orders from us. He was too nice! Vic knew when to tell us to shut the fuck up!
Of course, we went on the road and toured behind No Sleep – nothing new there! When we went through the States we opened for Slayer. Tom Araya is a really nice guy (plus he plays bass and sings, as I do!), but I’m not so sure about the band’s philosophy of terror and gore. They don’t realize what they’re doing. Like, in the middle of their show, Tom would say something to the effect of, ‘Do you want to see blood?’ One day I told him, ‘You don’t want to be saying that, Tommy. Someday that’s gonna backfire on you.’ And he insisted, ‘Oh, these are my people, man. I understand them and they understand me.’ Then the very next night, in Austin, Texas, there he was – ‘Do you want to see blood?’ – and half a chair went past his head, missing him by about an inch. He lost it altogether! He got on the mic and gave the audience a fucking sermon, waving his finger about and stomping up and down. He was beside himself with fury, and when he came off the stage, I was standing there, going, ‘Uh-huh, your people, eh?’ I enjoyed that tour quite a bit, actually. On the last night during Slayer’s set I went behind guitarist Jeff Hanneman and just stood there – dressed up as Adolf Hitler.
White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography Page 17