White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography
Read White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography Online
Authors: Lemmy Kilmister
Lemmy Kilmister was born in Stoke-on-Trent. Having been a member of the Rocking Vicars, Opal Butterflies and Hawkwind, Lemmy formed his own band, Motörhead. The band recently celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary in the business. Lemmy currently lives in Los Angeles, just a short walk away from the Rainbow, the oldest rock ’n’ roll bar in Hollywood.
Since 1987, Janiss Garza has been writing about very loud rock and alternative music. From 1989 to1996 she was senior editor at
RIP
, at the time the World’s premier hard music magazine. She has also written for
Los Angeles Times
,
Entertainment Weekly
, and
New York Times, Los Angeles
.
‘From heaving burning caravans into lakes at 1970s Finnish festivals to passing out in Stafford after three consecutive blowjobs, the Motörhead man proves a mean raconteur as he gabbles through his addled heavy metal career résumé’
Guardian
‘As a rock autobiography,
White Line Fever
is a keeper’
Big Issue
‘White Line Fever
really is the ultimate rock & roll autobiography . . . Turn it up to 11 and read on!’
Skin Deep Magazine
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2002
This edition first published by Pocket, 2003
An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
A Viacom Company
Copyright © Ian Kilmister and Janiss Garza, 2002
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Ian Kilmister to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
Africa House
64-78 Kingsway
London WC2B 6AH
Simon & Schuster Australia
Sydney
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from British Library
Paperback ISBN 0-671-03331-X
eBook ISBN 978-1-47111-271-3
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks
PICTURE CREDITS
The publishers have used their best endeavours to contact all copyright holders. They will be glad to hear from anyone who recognises their photographs. Cover photograph of Lemmy by Nicola Rübenberg ©; Hawkwind photograph by Michael Odis Archives © Referns; Motorcycle Irene, Phil Taylor and Lemmy photograph by Ray Stevenson © Retna Pictures Ltd; Motörhead at Bloomsfield Terrace © Redferns; Motörhead photograph by Fin Costello © Referns; Motörhead photograph © Corbis; Motörhead photograph by Paul Slattery © Retna Pictures Ltd; Motörhead photograph by Fin Costello © Redferns; Bishop Lemmy photograph by Fin Costello © Redferns; Macho Lemmy © Henri Clausel; Motörhead photograph by Glenn Laferman ©; Motörhead’s 10 year anniversary party photograph by Tony Mottram ©; Lemmy photograph by Mick Hutson © Redferns; Lemmy photograph by Mitran Kaul © Redferns
This book is dedicated to Susan Bennett,
who might have been the one.
7 Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers
10 (Don’t Let ’Em) Grind Ya Down
I
was born Ian Fraser Kilmister on Christmas Eve, 1945, some five weeks premature, with beautiful golden hair which, to the delight of my quirky mother, fell out five days later. No fingernails, no eyebrows, and I was bright red. My earliest memory is shouting: at what and for what reason, I don’t know. Probably a tantrum; or I may have been rehearsing. I was always an early starter.
My father was not pleased. I suppose you could say me and my father didn’t hit it off – he left three months later. Perhaps it was the hair falling out; perhaps he thought I was already taking after him.
My father had been a padre in the RAF during the war, and my mother was a very pretty young librarian with no idea of the duplicity of the clergy – I mean, you teach people that the Messiah was the offspring of a vagabond’s wife (who is a
virgin
) and a
ghost
? And
this
is a basis for a worldwide religion? I’m not
so sure. I figured if Joseph believed
that
one, he deserved to sleep in stables!
So anyway, I didn’t really miss my father, ’cause I didn’t even remember him. And on top of that, my mum and my gran spoiled me rotten.
I met him twenty-five years later, in a pizza place on Earls Court Road, since he had apparently worked himself into a frenzy of remorse and wanted to ‘help me’. My mum and I figured, ‘Maybe we can get some loot out of the son-of-a-bitch!’ So I meandered off up there to meet the sorry blighter – I thought it was iffy, and I was right.
I recognized him right away – he looked smaller, but I was bigger, right? He was a crouched little wretch with glasses and a bald spot all over his head.
I suppose it was awkward for him – having walked out on someone for whom you were supposed to be the breadwinner, and then not a word for twenty-five years . . . awkward, sure. But it had been bloody awkward for my mum, bringing me up on her own and providing for my gran as well!
So he said, ‘I’d like to help you in your career, to try and make up for not being a proper father to you.’ Ha!
I said, ‘Look, I’ll make it easy for you. I’m in a rock ’n’ roll band and I need some equipment’ – amp on the fritz again! – ‘so if you can buy me an amplifier and a couple of cabinets we’ll call it quits, okay?’
There was a pause. ‘Ah,’ he said.
I could tell he wasn’t a hundred per cent into this scenario.
‘The music business is awfully precarious,’ he said. (He’d apparently been an excellent concert pianist in his day. But his day was gone.)
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I know, but I’m earning my living at it.’ (Lie . . . at least at the time!)
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what I had in mind was paying for some lessons – driving lessons, and sales technique. I thought you might become a sales rep or . . .’ He trailed off.
It was my turn to be unenthusiastic.
‘Bugger off,’ I said, and rose from the table. He was pretty lucky the vast reunion pizza hadn’t arrived, or it would have become his new hat. I strode back into the fatherless street. It was clean out there – and that was the Earls Court Road!
Talking of two-faced bastards – my band, Motörhead, got nominated for a Grammy in 1991. The music industry doing us yet another favour, you know. So I got on the plane in Los Angeles – New York’s a long walk. I had a pint of Jack Daniels in my pocket: I always find it helps with the sobering up. As we taxied elegantly out on to the sun-drenched tarmac, I took a sip and mused pleasantly on this and that.
A voice: ‘Give me that bottle!’
I looked up; a stewardess with concrete hair and a mouth like an asshole repeated herself, as history will – ‘Give me that bottle!’
Well, I don’t know what you might have done, honoured reader, but the fucking thing was bought and paid for. No chance. I volunteered this information. The reply: ‘If you don’t give me that bottle, I shall put you off the plane!’
This was becoming interesting; we were about fifth in the queue for take-off, were already late, and this boneheaded bitch was going to take us out of the line for one pint of Jack Daniels?
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Put my ass off this fucking plane right now,’ or words to that effect. And can you believe it, the stupid cretin did it! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! She made all those people late and miss their connections in New York, all for a pint of the amber pick-me-up . . . So what? Fuck her! And the horse she rode in on! Come to think of it, perhaps she
was
the horse she rode in on! I got another flight an hour and a half later.
It was an inauspicious start to the festivities, and it carried on like it began. When we got to the fabled Radio City (Home of the Stars!), everyone was dressed in hired penguin tuxedos, trying to look as much as possible like the motherfuckers who were stealing their money! I don’t wear tuxes – I don’t think it’s really me, you know? And I don’t think the ushers liked the Iron Cross.
Anyway, having been nominated for a Grammy for our first album for Sony, I had foolishly entertained the idea that the company might be pleased. I don’t think they even noticed! I have still, to this day, not been lucky enough to gaze, enthralled, upon the splendour that is Tommy Mottola – that night, I think he was probably too busy chasing Mariah Carey around her dressing room. I’m not an overly ambitious man: ‘Hello’ or just ‘Glad to have you aboard’ or even ‘Hey, dude’ would have sufficed. Nothing.
Nada
. Fuck all. So I went to Sire’s party. Better. Got laid.
So fuck ’em. And the horse they rode in on!
capricorn
I
started life in Stoke-on-Trent, in the West Midlands of England. Stoke consists of about six towns clustered together. Burslem was the nastiest, so it’s only fitting that I was born there. The area is called the Potteries, and the countryside used to be black with slag from the coal used in the kilns that produced all kinds of pottery, including the famous Wedgwood. The ugly slagheaps stretched over the landscape wherever you looked, and the air was dirty with the chimneys’ smoke.
By the time my wayward father took off, we had moved to Newcastle, my mum, my gran and I – Newcastle-under-Lyme, that is, which is not too far from Stoke. We lived there until I was six months old, and then we moved to Madeley, a village nearby that was really nice. We lived opposite a big pond – nearly a lake – where there were swans. It was beautiful, but definitely amongst the hoi polloi.
My mum had it rough, trying to support us on her own. The
first job she had was as a TB nurse, which was rotten fucking work, because in those days it was like being on a terminal cancer ward – so she was more or less just seeing the patients on their way. And she saw TB babies being born – apparently there were some real horrors. TB does something weird to the chromosomes: she saw newborn babies with rudimentary feathers on ’em, and another one born with scales. Eventually she left that job and worked for a time as a librarian but then she stopped working for a while. I didn’t quite understand the pressures she was under and I figured we’d be all right. Later on, she was a bartender, but that was after she married my stepfather.
I had problems at school right from the start. The teachers and I didn’t see eye-to-eye: they wanted me to learn, and I didn’t want to. I was always like a fuckin’ black hole when it came to maths. You might as well have spoken Swahili to me as try to teach me algebra, so I gave up on it early. I figured I wasn’t going to be a mathematician so I might as well fuck off. I played truant constantly, and that was it from day one, really.
The first episode in my difficult schooling that I remember clearly was at primary school. This stupid woman wanted to teach the boys knitting; she was probably a feminist, right? I must have been about seven, so really it was a bit pointless. And this woman was a real brute, too – she quite enjoyed hitting kids. I wouldn’t knit because it was sissy. In those days, we still had sissies, see. They weren’t running the country, like they are now. I told her I couldn’t do it, and she hit me. Then I said I couldn’t do it again, and after a while she stopped hitting me.
Honestly though, I think hitting a kid’s good for him if he’s a bad kid – not if he gets hit indiscriminately, but when he does something wrong. It’ll stop him from being bad early if he’s fucking terrified of a teacher. I used to get it regular: I got the board rule, the T-square that hung near the blackboard. The teacher would stand behind us and he’d whop it in the back of your head. Later on, the physics teacher would hit us with the leg of a chemistry stool. That was a good one but I never got it ’cause I was pretty good at physics. That is, until I left school, by mutual agreement.
