being totally obnoxious, having to be carried
home. I never get like that. How can I? I’m a speed
freak. I’m up twenty-four hours a day.”
Miller’s limited participation notwithstanding,
the band powered through the sessions, working
mostly on material they’d only just written,
including the face-slapping opening track Dead Men
Tell No Tales, a virulently anti-heroin song, clearly
about Lemmy’s disgust at their errant producer.
Over one of the best finger-jabbing riffs on the
album, Lemmy spat: ‘Cos if you’re doing smack, you
won’t be coming back/I ain’t the one to make your bail,
dead men tell no tales...’
The fact that Lemmy
was himself a virtual
walking pharmacy, his
battered leather jacket
containing all manner of
chemical sustenance in
its many zippered
pockets, didn’t make
him a hypocrite, he
explained. Nor the fact
that he had been unfairly sacked from Hawkwind
for, as he once put it to me, “taking the wrong
drugs”. “I don’t care what drugs people do,” he said.
“That’s not my business. It only becomes my
business if it causes them to start fucking me up.
Which is what happened with Jimmy Miller.”
Lemmy chose speed over all other drugs, he said,
because speed was “the only drug I’ve found that
I can work on, and it’s helped me to be good. Not
made me good – it doesn’t do that – but it’s helped
sustain me being good when ordinarily I’d have
been knackered and below par.”
But speed killed too, didn’t it? Or at least sent
people doolally?“Well, it does a lot of people. I seem to be lucky.
I’ve got a nervous system that just eats it and goes:
‘Wah! Give me some more!’ So far I’ve got a mental
and physical constitution like a rock – touch wood.”
The real problem with the album, Lemmy later
admitted, was not which drugs the various
principals were on, but the lack of space and time
in which they had to work on the new material,
some of which was being written on the spot.
“The difference this time was we’d never had
a chance to play the new stuff live, like we had done
on Overkill. If we’d had a couple of months of
playing them live, that album would have been
a whole better, less slick,
more raw. Compared to
how we play them live,
the album sounds thin.”
Despite these
drawbacks, the
subsequent album,
named after its best
track, Bomber, remains
one of the best-known
that Motörhead would ever make. Built around
more soon-to-be Motörhead classics like the
ballistic opener Dead Men Tell No Tales, the slash-
and-burn groove of the marvelous Stone Dead
Forever, or, best of all, the anthemic title track,
inspired by Len Deighton’s 1970 novel Bomber,
with its fire-engine riff and double-fisted drums,
Lemmy gurgling like a blocked drain over the top:
‘Ain’t a hope in hell, nothin’ gonna bring us down...’
That said, the rest of the Bomber tracks were of
a more variable quality. As Lemmy later admitted:
“There are a couple of really naff tracks on it,” citing
Talking Head as his least favourite. A shame, as
Talking Head boasted some of Lemmy’s best lyricsyet – an indictment of the pernicious power of
television – but subverted by a tired, first-thought
riff and underpowered production.
The album also featured one track, Step Down,
with ‘Fast’ Eddie on completely unnecessary lead
vocals. It’s a decent enough mid-placed blues, with
some actually quite soulful guitar, heavily diluted
by some dreadful lyrics (‘I ain’t no beauty, but I’m
a secret fox’) and Eddie’s plain-Jane vocals.
Lemmy told me: “I got sick of Eddie moaning all
the time about how I was the one getting all the
limelight – me, the singer who formed the band
and hired Eddie. How unfair! So I threw it back at
him, saying: ‘Fine. You can sing this one.’ He was
not happy. But he never asked again. Not that it
stopped him moaning anyway...”L
emmy would later accurately characterise
Bomber as “a transitional album”. Tracks like
the swaggering Lawman – Lemmy’s angry
tirade against police harassment (from the Toronto
drug bust that precipitated his firing from
Hawkwind, to the most recent incarceration in
Helsinki, via various police raids on his home and,
most recently, the Motörhead office) – came with
brilliant lyrics but music that only hints at the steel-
trap snap it would later attain when played live.
Similarly other plainly autobiographical tracks,
like the ominous sounding Sweet Revenge or the
scab-picking Sharp Shooter, both little-black-book
entries of what Lemmy intended to do to all those
who had wronged him (hello, Hawkmen); Poison,
about his anger still at the way his father left his
mother in the lurch when Lemmy was still a child,
“horrible bald little fucker”; and All The Aces, about
constantly being ripped off in the music business
by ‘people who ain’t got faces’. The lyrics are properAN
DREW (^) P
HIL
LIP
S
“[The label and
promoters] are worried
we’re a flash in the pan.
F**k them.” Lemmy
“I think we might have
got to the cinema a bit
early, Lem...”
30 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
MOTÖRHEAD