stories, drawn from real-life escapades. But the
melodies and bang-bang rhythms are never
developed, never arranged properly, never fully
produced. The result is a sludgy sameness that
sounds like a dead body being dragged from a river.
As Eddie recalled for me just a few months
before he died: “The way Lemmy’s lyrics had
improved was amazing. For fuck’s sake, he was
improving all the time. Once we’d cracked the little
formula of how to really work together on Overkill
then we really started to take off. Then Bomber was
fucking... I dunno. Some great tracks, great lyrics,
some good riffs, but the overall thing came over
a bit flat after Overkill.
“None of us in the band were really happy with
it. It didn’t feel quite right, like it wasn’t all there. It
might sound strange coming from a band that
prided itself on the speed with which it made
records, but the whole thing was just done too fast.
I don’t think any of us heard the whole album
properly till we had finished copies in our hands.”
There were, however, two absolute stone-cold
killer Motörhead tracks on Bomber. The first, Stone
Dead Forever, was one of the greatest things the
original three amigos line-up ever did. Built around
the same single-note distorted power drone on
Lemmy’s bass as on the Overkill single, Lemmy
gasping out the lyrics, Eddie bringing everything to
boiling point with the best, most sensual guitar part
he would ever come up with, Stone Dead Forever wasimmense, a monumental classic, part punk, lots of
metal, total Harley-Davidson.
“I mean, Stone Dead Forever,” said Eddie, squinting
at me, still shaking his head in disbelief nearly forty
years later. “Like, fucking hell! Did I really play
that guitar?”
The best, though, they saved until last, almost as
a reward for hanging on in there. Featuring that
now famous air-raid siren riff, bugling lead guitar
and scattershot drums, and
with Lemmy growling like
a sheep-killing dog,
Bomber’s title track would
instantly become one of
the unholy trinity of all-
time Motörhead classics,
along with Overkill and Ace
Of Spades.
Although Lemmy
nicked the title from the
Len Deighton novel, the
lyrics had nothing to do with the original plot in
which an RAF Second World War bombing raid in
Germany goes wrong. Instead, Lemmy used the
imagery of the Lancaster bomber soaring
overhead, releasing its deadly payload, as the
lynchpin for a metaphorical exposition on life on
the road in an outlaw rock’n’roll band. ‘Because you
know we do it right, a mission every night/It’s a bomber,
it’s a bomber...’Cue absolute mayhem. Especially after the band
took the album on the road later that year, and
showed off their new stage-prop: a 40-foot
aluminium-tube ‘bomber’ that appeared to dive-
bomb the audience from the stage. In actuality it
was a specially designed lighting rig with four
‘engines’ that moved backwards and forwards and
from side to side, its guns firing as it swooped
down as though about to crash into the audience.
Eddie always said it was he who came up with
the idea. The way he told it, all three of the band
were sitting in the office one day, across from their
then manager Doug Smith, “talking about a way of
incorporating plane wings into the stage set. But it
was really a bit far-fetched.”
Then their lightning guy Peter Barnes came up
with the lighting truss idea. According to Eddie,
“He said: ‘Why don’t we put the lights on a fucking
bomber truss. And then put it on chains and move
it up and down.’ I thought, steady fucking on! But
we tried it, and it worked. Really worked! The
Bomber set was a step up, definitely.”
In today’s world of computerised stage
productions, where dancers and video screens
provide as much entertainment – often more –
than the music itself, it’s hard to imagine the
excitement and astonishment that greeted
Motörhead’s relatively simple new Bomber stage
show. This was more old-time circus than mod-
cons CGI, but the photographs that now peppered
music magazines all over the world and the column
inches it also helped generate meant the Bomber
show really helped spread the message that
Motörhead were now far
beyond the usual punk-
metal bash. That what they
were doing now was on
another level. Still of the
street, but looking up from
the gutter at the sky. Class
in a distinctly no-class way.
“If you were having a bit
of a bad one,” said Eddie,
“you’d think: ‘Thank god
the Bomber’s coming next
number.’ You knew damn well that once that thing
come down it killed everybody!”T
he first time anybody got to hear any of the
new Bomber songs live was when
Motörhead were third on the bill on the
first night at the Reading festival that August. But
that was only Step Down. However, by the time the
MA official Bomber UK tour began in November the
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“I mean, Stone Dead
Forever. Like, f**king
hell! Did I really
play that guitar?”
‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke
Motörhead at The
Bandwagon, Kingsbury,
October ’79Easy rider: Lemmy with
a Triumph motorbike in
France in 1979.CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 33MOTÖRHEAD