White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (11 page)

At first I was going to call the band Bastard, a name which pretty much summed up the way I felt. But the guy who was managing us at the time, Doug Smith (he’d been managing Hawkwind – that’s how I knew him), didn’t think it was a good idea. ‘It’s very unlikely that we’re gonna get on
Top of the Pops
with a name like Bastard,’ he pointed out. I figured he was probably right, so I decided to call the band Motörhead. It made sense: ‘Motorhead’ was the last song I wrote for Hawkwind, and it was also the American slang for speedfreak, so all the pieces fitted. And it was a one-word name; I believe in one-word names for bands – they’re easy to remember.

So I took my psychedelic-coloured amps, painted them flat black, and Motörhead got under way. The press was having a field day with us – my firing from Hawkwind had been in all the British music papers, and everyone wanted to know what I was up to. That was when I came up with the famous quote that first appeared in
Sounds
: ‘It’ll be the dirtiest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. If we moved in next door your lawn would die!’ Actually, I stole that line from Dr Hook, but it quickly became the first of Motörhead’s many catchphrases.

Our first show was on 20 July 1975 at the Roundhouse. That was fast, considering I’d left Hawkwind in May. We opened for Greenslade, a kind of pomp-rock band formed by this guy, Dave Greenslade, who’d been somebody’s keyboardist. All the bands in
those days had intro tapes, and since I’ve always been a World War II fanatic, we used a recording from Germany of marching feet and people yelling ‘
Sieg Heil!
’ It just sounded really powerful and incredibly cold, all those feet smashing on the German cobblestones, that
bromp, bromp!
tromping sound. That was our outro tape, too. I had a silver-painted human skull on stage, on the top of my stack. But in spite of these theatrical touches, I have to admit we weren’t very good (bloody awful, let’s face it!). Undaunted, we proceeded to go on a trek of England through most of August. After all, that’s the only way you get better – you keep playing.

We were already attracting fans, though – punks, old Hawkwind fans and a horde of nasty characters were coming to see us. And some of them were really getting into it. One young kid showed up at our first show in white boots and a bullet belt, just like mine – and I’d only gotten the boots two weeks before, so he was really early. From the start, we were inspiring slavish fucking loyalty in people – that’s the funny thing about Motörhead: our fans and our crews really latch on to us. The soundman we have now has been with us since around 1977. He made a bunch of money when he was working for Black Sabbath. The tour we asked him to do was only going to make him a third of the money, but there he was on the plane with Sabbath’s crew, plotting all
our
sound and lights. Somebody told him, ‘You should be doing Black Sabbath’s stuff,’ and he replied, ‘Yeah, man, but these are my boys!’ And he left that tour to come and do us. We’ve always had people like that. It’s
some sort of disease people catch from the ultimate underdog band.

And we were definitely underdogs at our next London gig, which was at the Hammersmith Odeon on 19 October 1975. We were supporting Blue Oyster Cult, but we certainly didn’t get any help from them! In fact, they sabotaged us completely. They gave us no soundcheck, and the Odeon is notorious for its bad sound. I’ve noticed that a lot of American bands treat their openers poorly, like they want to destroy the competition before it even has a chance to compete! British bands don’t do that – at least mostly they don’t – nor does Motörhead.

That show earned us a new reputation and our own category in the
Sounds
poll for that year! We were voted ‘Best Worst Band in the World’! Nevertheless, we had a record deal with United Artists – they were Hawkwind’s label and they decided to hang on to me, at least for the time being. That was good . . . or so we thought at the time. So late in the year, we went down to Rockfield Studios, which is located on a farm in Monmouth, south Wales, to make a record. Dave Edmunds was going to produce it. Dave is one of my heroes. He became famous with Rockpile, and as a solo artist, but I knew him from Love Sculpture, which was his first band. They did an instrumental version of ‘Sabre Dance’, which was the fastest thing you’ve ever heard in your fucking life! It’s some of the best guitar, too, because everybody was on pills then, and Dave was fast already.

Unfortunately, Edmunds only recorded four tracks with us:
‘Lost Johnny’, ‘Motörhead’ (two of the songs I wrote while in Hawkwind), ‘Leaving Here’ (an excellent Eddie Holland song – I used to see the Birds play in my Manchester days), and ‘City Kids’ (a Pink Fairies number that Larry wrote). Then Dave got signed to Led Zeppelin’s label, Swan Song, and they took him away. That was too bad, because I really liked working with him – he was just like one of us. I recall one night, when we were listening back to a track, Dave stood up and said, ‘Excuse me.’ He went out of the door and threw up, then he simply came back, sat down and carried on. We used to find him slumped over the board with white noise howling out of the speakers. He also helped me fix a guitar. One of my strings kept jumping out of the nut – that thing that your strings go on at the top of the neck. So he told me, ‘All you need on there is a bracket above it. Come with me.’ And we broke through a window of this toolshed on the farm to get a drill. Then he smashed this old guitar, took the bracket off it, drilled holes on my guitar and put it on. It’s still on there to this day. Good man, Edmunds, great spur-of-the-moment guy. And he’s made some great records. He produced the Everly Brothers comeback album with Jeff Lynne, and the Stray Cats, among many others. After Dave, we wound up with Fritz Fryer as producer. He was in a sixties band called the Four Pennies who had a couple of No. 1s in England. A very good band, but they were a bit soppy. So Fritz finished up our record, which was a shame, really. He was all right, but he wasn’t the man Edmunds was, which is not surprising, since he was the man Fryer was!

It was around the time Edmunds left that we changed drummers. We decided that Lucas had to go, because he was starting to get very weird. He was trying to keep up with my speed habit, and of course you can’t! In fact, I don’t especially recommend my lifestyle – it will slaughter the average person. This is no joke, and I’ll tell you how I know: around 1980, I decided to have my blood changed – you know, the same process Keith Richards is rumoured to have gone through. It is a good idea, logically, because instantly you get untainted, fresh blood and your body doesn’t have to go through all the stress of detoxing. So my manager and I went to the doctor, who took some blood tests and came back with the bad news.

‘I’ve got to tell you this,’ he said. ‘Pure blood will kill you.’

‘What?’

‘You don’t have human blood any more. And you can’t give blood, either. Forget it, you’d kill the average person because you’re so toxic.’

In other words, what’s normal for me is deadly to another human – and what’s normal for other humans is deadly to me, which is okay with me. I suppose that means I’ve made medical history of some sort. I’m gonna leave my body to medical science fiction! Me and Stephen Wright.

So keeping up with my habit was getting Lucas very tense. The veins on his head would stand out and he’d stare at you very intently for long periods of time without speaking. He’d be doing this, and the rest of us would look at each other, thinking, ‘Well, he’s obviously gone over the fucking top.’ We were in the studio
once listening to a playback and Lucas was leaning against the console. The top part was hinged a certain way so it could be cleaned, and somebody hadn’t put the catches back right. And there was all this stuff on it, half-finished drinks and ashtrays and shit. So when Lucas leaned on it, the whole fucking console flipped open and everything fell in. Sparks flew – the whole fucking thing blew up! So he screamed and stepped back and knocked the phone off the wall, then he shot out the door. And Larry opened the door and called after him, ‘Hey Lucas, don’t walk past my fucking stacks – they’ll burst into fucking flames!’ So it was clear that Lucas was on his way out. I ran into him, funnily enough, a couple of years ago in Paris. He was dressed like a Frenchman, with a handkerchief hanging out of his pocket. Looking at him, I thought maybe he’d turned gay, but he said he was living with a girl over there. Lucas was a good enough geezer, really, and a good friend to me, but he just didn’t have the bite.

Meanwhile, Phil Taylor had been hanging around. I met him about six months prior at this guy’s flat – Paul, a guitar player. Paul’s a great anti-heroin advertisement. He fell asleep, passed out on smack, with his arm leaning against an iron bedstand and his hand died. He’d cut all the tendons in his arm. I saved Paul’s life – he was fucking dead, he was blue, and I beat him on the chest till his heart started again. He wasn’t the first one I saved, and he certainly wasn’t the last. But back to Phil.

He had a car, so he was able to give me a lift down to the studio, which was about two hundred miles from London. And he had mentioned to me that he was in the habit of banging on drums
now and again, so we thought we’d give him a go. We played a couple of numbers down at the studio, and Larry in particular was taken with him.

‘What a horrible little fucker!’ he chortled. ‘He’s fucking perfect!’

Phil wound up overdubbing the drums on nearly the whole album. The only song he didn’t do was ‘Lost Johnny’, because that track sounded okay as it was. Overdubbing drums is quite a feat, because the drums are what you usually base a song on – it’s kind of like going ass-backwards. But Phil did it great, and for a very long time, he was an asset to Motörhead. One thing he couldn’t do, though, was sing. On this album – which eventually was called
On Parole
– Larry sang on three of the songs: ‘On Parole’ and ‘Fools’, both of which he wrote, and ‘Vibrator’, which he wrote with his roadie, Dez Brown. (Dez also wrote the words for ‘Iron Horse/Born to Lose’). Larry thought it would be good to have Phil sing on one track, so we tried him out on ‘City Kids’. It didn’t work – he sounded like two cats being stapled together. It was so funny that I was outside in the farmyard in the rain, on my knees, I was laughing so hard! So we had to scotch that idea.

We finished up the album, which also included ‘The Watcher’ (another song I wrote while in Hawkwind). Then the assholes at United Artists began hedging about the record’s release. For months they fed us numerous lies, while still keeping us signed to the label. That, of course, kept us from being able to record with any other company. They wound up putting out
On Parole
four
years later, long after we’d finally been released from our contract. They claimed that the UA staff had turned over and the new people had a new attitude towards the record. Strangely enough, their change of heart came just about the time we were starting to become really successful. Coincidence? I fucking think not! That was the beginning of our fucked-up dealings with record companies. Day one, Jack, and that was it!

It was around the time that UA was buggering us about that we also began our sordid history of various management changes. Doug Smith farmed us out to this guy from Belgium, whose name I cannot remember to save my fucking life. He was funny: he tried to talk British slang in a futile attempt to appear hip. In England, one might say, ‘a bunch of cunts’ to describe a group of guys. You never say ‘cunt’ about a woman in England (I discovered the difference in America quite early on, incidentally!). So the Belgian would come into a room and say, ‘Where are my bunches of cunt?’ Belgian translations of English are miraculous. But he was fucking hopeless, and faded out because he ran out of money.

Then for a while, we had this sweaty maniac, Frank Kennington, managing us. He was a friend of our guitarist, who by then was Eddie Clarke (I’ll be getting to Eddie very shortly). Frank’s father had a factory. I don’t know what they were making – small things, I believe, small, indispensable shit . . . Lenses, that’s it, lenses and prisms and things like that for industry. And Frank had taken the factory over from his father, so he had quite a bit of money. We rectified that situation, however, by
bankrupting him completely! We owed the poor bastard some money till the day he died, in fact (although, incidentally, I finally paid him my share in 1996 – twenty years late! Still, better late than never). He eventually moved to America, where he was known (not surprisingly) as English Frank.

After we ruined Frank’s financial affairs, we were managed for quite a while by this guy called Tony Secunda. I believe I met him through Chrissie Hynde, who I’d known for a number of years. Chrissie used to be a journalist for the
New Musical Express
, and I was always very impressed by the fact that though she had no tits to speak of, she could play very good guitar! She was very good indeed. She was squatting in Chelsea when I knew her, and I used to go round there and jam with her all night. Before she had the Pretenders, she was in a band called the Moors Murderers. That was in extremely bad taste. They all wore black, pointed hoods when they played – very bad taste, indeed. Luckily they never had a hit, or we probably would have never seen Chrissie’s face – she would have been in a black hood for the rest of her professional career.

Anyhow, back to Tony Secunda. Tony used to manage the Move and Steeleye Span and he had a label, Wizard Records, in England. He was a very interesting man . . . from an anthropological point of view. A complete fucking lunatic. He went to Peru and came back with this Indian, who went everywhere with him. And he was doing cocaine like nothing on earth – teaspoons of the fucking shit. And he was paranoid about people eavesdropping. He used to mutter, ‘Fucking earwigs! Listening to what
I say, earwigs all over. Fucking bastards!’ And this Indian would be standing behind him, arms folded across his chest. Really very weird.

But Secunda came up with some wild publicity schemes. He did this publicity stunt once where the Move took an atomic bomb to the middle of Piccadilly in Manchester for a photo shoot. And once, on being told that he had a very large tax bill coming up, he changed £20,000 into £1 notes. Then he dropped them through the ceiling at the end of one of Steeleye’s gigs at the Hammersmith Odeon – he figured that since the government would have taken the money away anyhow, he might as well make it a deductible gift. Another Secunda stunt with the Move involved a pornographic postcard with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, but that backfired on him. He had to apologize to the Prime Minister and pay all kinds of money and shit – libel, you know. While he was working with Motörhead, he had our logo painted on the side of this building on the main roundabout coming into London from the west. It only took us an hour to get it up – we put ten art students up on scaffolding and had them paint a square each – but it took the residents three months to get it taken off. So for those three months, we had top-drawer publicity. Free!