T
he pressure was on in that overheated
summer of 1979. With Motörhead’s
second album, Overkill, having just
become their first UK Top 30 chart
hit, Lemmy should have been
skipping around in his dirty white boots. They had
even been on Top Of The Pops – twice – and
overnight they’d gone from being “the worst band
in the world” (copyright NME, 1978) to the coolest
rock band on the planet. Well, the coolest rock
band in Britain, anyway. But instead of feeling
pleased, Lemmy was fretting more than ever.
We were sitting outside a pub in Notting Hill,
by the canal. A beautiful summer’s evening. But
Lemmy was lost somewhere inside the darkness
of his head.
“It’s not like I’ve got any more money to spend,”
he told me as I lent him another fiver. [He always
paid me back, by the way.] We’re all still on forty
quid a week. Only now they [the label] want
another album out before the end of the year.
They’re worried we’re a flash in the pan,” he
growled. “I’ve been in bands for fifteen years. Had
my first hit with Hawkwind in 1972. But the record
company and the promoters still think it’s all just
luck – and that we’re always about to run out of it.
Fuck them.”
Lemmy always talked a good fight. But the truth
is that he was backed into a corner. The recent
success of the Overkill album and single had
surprised everyone – including Lemmy – and now
he felt that fear that all first-hit heroes feel when
they’re expected to come up with an even better
follow-up.Things would get better once they got into
the studio and started work on a new album in
a couple of weeks, I assured him.
“Well, it will keep us out of trouble, I suppose,”
he said gloomily.
He and the band had just returned from three
days in jail in Finland, he elaborated. They had
been arrested at Helsinki airport, on their way
home from appearing at the Punkaroka Midnight
Sun Festival. The festival promoters had gone to
the cops after being horrified at the damage
Motörhead had done to their stage. Lemmy had
begun the show by offering the sizable crowd
‘peace and good vibes’ in Finnish, only to end the
day by destroying all the equipment on the stage.
The real trouble started, though, said Lemmy,
when drummer Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor had
lobbed a tree into the dressing room – via
a window pane Lemmy had just put his fist
through. The band had then given said tree
“a Viking funeral. “We set fire to it and pushed it
out on the lake. It was dusk, and it looked really
great, you know. Then of course we got on the bus
going back to the airport, and the
driver made the terrible mistake
of saying: ‘You will not make
a mess on my bus’. Immediate
food fight... When we got to
customs, the official said: ‘Step
into this room, please...’”
Having finally released after
72 hours of “being treated like
shit”, and boarded their home-
bound flight, the pilot camestorming down the aisle to inform them: “I’ve
heard about you. You guys are a disgrace to
society! If you do anything on my plane I’ll have
the police waiting for you at Heathrow.”
But as soon as the plane took off, guitarist ‘Fast’
Eddie Clarke somehow managed to pour a very
large vodka and orange down the neck of the
female passenger in the seat in front of him.
“We didn’t think that was too bad, though,” said
Lemmy. “But as soon as we got to Heathrow we
saw all these police lined up on the tarmac! We
thought:, ‘Oh no, we’re fucked here.’ But then they
arrested the captain – he was drunk! Talk about
poetic irony.”T
hat had been late June. With their next
show not until the Reading Festival in
August, the rest of the summer was taken
up with trying as fast as possible to make a follow-
up to Overkill.
As if not to jinx it, recording was arranged, as
with Overkill, at London’s Roundhouse studios,
with producer Jimmy Miller again at the controls.
Only this time Miller – whose heroin habit had
already seen him fired by the Rolling Stones – was
so out of it that Lemmy complained of finding him
nodded off in his chair during playbacks.
“We used to think that we were bad at being
late,” Phil Taylor later recalled, “but he would be,
like, half a day late, or even more late, you know,
and his excuses were marvellous.”
Lemmy, who’d taken to yelling “Is everything
louder than everything else?” mockingly at the
producer before takes, said he always knew
something was up whenever
the hapless Miller failed to
answer. Another time, Lemmy
found Miller passed out in his
car outside.
“I don’t know why I’ve got the
terrible reputation,” Lemmy
said. “I mean, you never see me
completely fucking out of it. You
never see me falling all over the
floor, puking up over everyone,MA
IN:
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“We’re all still on forty
quid a week. Only now
they want another
album out before the
end of the year.”
Lemmy
World Of Leather:
Motörhead in 1978.
28 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
MOTÖRHEAD