White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (17 page)

The disillusionment hadn’t really set in yet, however, and we began our UK tour with high hopes – the dates were very good. Our manager, Douglas, had come up with the idea of the Bomber lighting rig, and since that worked out so well he now fancied himself as A Man Who Knows About Stage Shows. So he had to outdo himself for our
Iron Fist
tour. We didn’t even know what kind of marvel he’d cooked up until something like three days before we hit the road – ‘We made it and you can’t change it now.’ It was quite dramatic, really. The curtains would open up and the stage would be absolutely empty – nothing, not even the red lights on the amps. We were up on the ceiling, see. We had a stage that was on four gantries, with all the equipment on it – the drums, the amplifiers, the lights, the whole stage, was in the roof. Then the music would start and we’d come down, out of clouds of smoke and coloured lights, and as we were making our descent, this huge fist would open up and there were searchlights at the tips of its fingers.

Naturally enough, the fist didn’t work properly the first night, and we got stuck going back up as well. The stage rose about halfway and stopped moving and the curtains caught on the stage. People could see us milling about, going, ‘What the fuck are we gonna do now?’ and ‘How do we get down off of here?’ Philthy, of course, nearly stepped from his kit into oblivion – Eddie caught him just in time. But after the first couple of days, it worked great. We never used the fist again, though. That went straight back to the shop and it stayed there.

Tank, a band Eddie had produced, opened for us on those dates. That was our friend, Algy Ward’s band. He had been in the Damned but got fired, and then he formed Tank. He was bass player and leader of his band, as was I, and he felt very good about that. They’d done very well on tour with us in Europe, but in England, they had wife trouble. The wives wanted to come on the road and, of course, they were only new boys so they let them, and that’s death for any band. I’m not coming off chauvinistic by saying this but wives separate the band, plain and simple. Let’s say you have three guys in a band – maybe they go to three hotel rooms after the gig, but they’re the only ones in their rooms. But if your old lady’s along, you get off stage and you have to hang out with her. You don’t discuss the gig with the rest of the group and you don’t go back to the hotel bar for a drink because you’re with your old lady, right? She’s standing there and there are a lot of things you won’t say in front of her because you think she’ll be bored or you’ve got to pay attention to her. So that completely fucks up the communication within
the band. And also, a lot of wives are in their husband’s ears – ‘The other guys would be nothing without you. You don’t get enough credit,’ and the rest. It causes a lot of grumbling and dissension and can destroy a band. I’ve seen it happen many times – it’s happened within my band! So as a result, Tank wound up doing very badly with us in the UK.

Since we were still big rock stars, we were pulling all sort of
Spinal Tap
shit. (Incidentally,
Spinal Tap
was a very accurate film. Whoever wrote it must have spent some time on the road with rock bands.) We were bad boys in those days . . . but then, we still are today, only everyone’s used to it now! People get horrified by Motörhead – ‘The fuckin’ cheese isn’t here! Where’s the cheese!’ ‘Sorry, man, we couldn’t get it.’ ‘OH YEAH? CAN’T GET ANY FUCKING CHEESE IN A BIG TOWN ON A WEDNESDAY AT FUCKING SIX O’CLOCK?! GET OUT AND GET THE FUCKING CHEESE!’ ’Cause it’s not the cheese that matters, is it? It’s the principle that they didn’t bother, that’s what pisses me off. I’d send the promoters and their minions on all kind of errands – ‘Get out there and get me this shit!’ If it’s on the rider it had better damn well be there. If the drum roadie wanted Twiglets (and ours did), he got them. Our present guitarist, Phil Campbell, sent out for Chinese food at one show, and he told the guy to get a portion of Ben-Wa balls, too – and the guy came back with them! But here’s one thing that has always puzzled me, and it happens in every country in the world. Your rider says you get so many towels, right? And they give you these tiny, foot-square pieces of cloth. What the fuck is that?

We took no shit from anybody. At one point we were scheduled to play at this radio station, Radio Clyde, in Glasgow. We were supposed to be doing a soundcheck, but the guy was a real dick and he kept us waiting for ages. Radio people are notoriously unsympathetic to anything you’re doing, because they’re so self-important. So after sitting there for a while, I said to Eddie, ‘Fuck this. Let’s do ’em.’ So we unwound the firehose from the wall, stuck it through the door of the studio, jammed the door shut and turned it on. And we left. They didn’t ask us back – rather unsporting of them, really.

The cops really got on our ass around this time. They went through everybody’s house, the roadies’ hotel, even our manager’s house. I was in a hotel in Swiss Cottage, so they missed me. They had this serious operation going: dogs, door smashers and all, and out of everybody – twenty-five crew, three band-members, the manager and his wife and their staff – the cops came up with all of a half gramme of cocaine, I believe, a little bit of dope and one Mandrax. We went down to the nick and I asked, ‘What reason did you have for mounting this massive operation?’ ‘It was an anonymous tip off,’ the magistrate said. ‘We heard you were selling acid to the audience from the stage.’ Jesus, what idiocy! I’m singing and playing bass – when am I going to have time to go down front and say, ‘Anybody want any acid?’ Not to mention handing out change – I would have needed a change belt instead of a bullet belt! Fucking assholes – as if the cops don’t have real drug pushers to chase. Or why aren’t they out catching the Yorkshire Ripper, people like that, instead of fucking
around with a band who’s just playing gigs and taking a few drugs on their own? Of course, telling them this never goes down well with the cops.

I imagine that my comments on wives still have you radical feminists out there fuming (but then, if you get pissed off that easily, what are you doing reading this book?). But fair’s fair – as I’ve mentioned before, I’m more than happy to work with female performers. Before Motörhead began its American tour, I popped in at a studio in London to visit this all-girl band from France, Speed Queen, who were making an album. The singer, Stevie, was great – she sounded kind of like a singer that’s around now (and, incidentally, getting far less attention than she deserves), Nina C. Alice from a band called Skew Siskin. They both have real rough voices – like Edith Piaf, only with guitars. I even added some backing vocals to one of their songs. The album was in French, though, so it never got heard anywhere but France. A few days after that, Motörhead flew to Toronto so that we could record an EP with Wendy O. Williams. That session resulted in the demise of what many Motörhead fans call our ‘classic line-up’ (although those who think that way probably haven’t heard the band in the last few years).

Wendy O. and her band, the Plasmatics, have been pretty much forgotten nowadays, but she was a completely outrageous punk rock agitator. She sawed guitars in half with a chainsaw and blew up police cars on stage. Once she drove a car into a pile of explosives on a New York harbour and jumped out at the last minute. After she did that, she went straight to Florida to wrestle
alligators. I thought, ‘This chick’s fucking excellent!’ Plus, I’d seen pictures of her, and she did take a good picture. After our EP with Girlschool hit, people were always on us to collaborate on records, especially with girls. And I really enjoy making records with birds. Eight geezers in the studio can really be a drag – recording with girls usually produces better results, because it causes an interesting kind of friction, and also the scenery is a bit better! Abrasiveness and scenery – I’m all for both, and it was clear I’d get that from Wendy O. It was touted as this extraordinary combination of punk and heavy metal – two warring factions at the time. The songs we were going to do were a Motörhead tune, ‘No Class’, ‘Masterplan’, which was a Plasmatics number, and as the single, ‘Stand By Your Man’ – yes, the country song.

Eddie was supposed to produce the tracks for us, and unfortunately he had Will Reid Dick – whom I generally refer to as Evil Red Dick – in tow again. The session was problematic to say the least. Wendy took a long time to get in tune, and it wound Eddie up. She tried her parts a few times and she sounded terrible, I will say that. You’d think she was never going to get it, but I knew she would if I just worked with her. In addition to this, Eddie wasn’t playing guitar – he was only working as producer. We were using Wendy’s guitarist from the Plasmatics, with me and Phil on bass and drums. Eddie just wasn’t acting terribly thrilled with the whole scenario and finally he said he was going out to eat, but we found him in the other room, sulking with Evil Red. It was bullshit. We could have worked through our problems if Will Reid Dick hadn’t been there, because Eddie would have had nobody to
go off with, away from the band. He would have had to stay in and lump it, then it would have been done and forgotten. But we ended up exchanging a few words and Eddie left the studio. Later, Phil and I went back to the hotel. Phil went ahead of me, and he came up and told me, ‘Eddie’s left the band.’

Actually, Eddie used to leave the band about every two months, but this time it just so happened that we didn’t ask him back. We didn’t try to persuade him, which is why he stayed away – that surprised him a bit, I think. But we were just tired of him because he was always freaking out and he was drinking a lot back then. He’s become very much better now since he stopped. So Eddie did our first two American dates, Toronto (there’s a video of that gig, but Eddie was terrible and so was I – I got cramp halfway through the show and couldn’t play), and New York. We had to get another guitar player fast so we could continue the tour, and we chose Brian Robertson, who had been in Thin Lizzy. Technically, he was a better guitarist than Eddie, but ultimately he wasn’t right for Motörhead. With Robbo our slide downwards began to pick up speed, which was unfair really, because the record we made with him,
Another Perfect Day
, was very good.

Looking back – and I must say, hindsight is 20/20 – it was good for us that we fell when we did. We wouldn’t have been going now if we had carried on getting more and more famous. We would have wound up a bunch of twats with houses in the country and gotten divorced from each other. So it was just as well, I think, for Motörhead’s moral overall. It’s important for a
band to be hungry because that is the motivation that makes all bands work. And if anyone knows about being hungry for long periods of time, it’s me.

But back to Robbo. I’d known him for years – we met under a table at Dingwalls. There was a fight going on and all us cowards were hiding. Yellow streak aside, he was one of Phil’s heroes, because Phil is a complete Thin Lizzy freak. And Brian was great on stage with them. He used to wear a white cord suit – quite striking with his curly, longish hair. He was available so we flew him out immediately, and he arrived in Toronto with reddish-dyed short hair. I was fucking horror-stricken, but I thought to myself, ‘Well, he’s enough of a trouper.’ It turned out he wasn’t, though. He wound up being just a pain in the ass. He was the only person in any of my bands that I threatened with physical violence – he was threatening me back, to be fair. We both had a chair in our hands and we were going to hit each other with them. But that happened months later: when he first got in Motörhead, the only hint of impending doom was the fucking red hair.

Gradually, we got more clues. When Brian first came into the band, I said to him, ‘Remember when you were in Thin Lizzy, you had that thing with Scott Gorham, where he’d wear the black cord outfit and you’d wear the white one and you each used to flash over to the sides of the stage? That’d be great. I wear black. Why don’t you get that white outfit back out?’ ‘Oh no, I couldn’t do that, Lemmy,’ he said. And there was other shit, like he wanted a contract with us for only one album at a time. Basically, he
wanted an out beforehand in case Motörhead didn’t happen for him. All this was easy to ignore in the beginning because for a while he was dead on. After he hooked up with us in Toronto, he only had a few hours of rehearsal before our first gig with him at Harpo’s in Detroit, but he played like a demon. We finished the American tour in June and then went off to Japan – our first trip there – and he was great the whole time.

Japan loved Motörhead from the start. Brian had already been there with his band after Thin Lizzy, Wild Horses, and he told me with all confidence (and with his broad Scottish accent), ‘Don’t think you’re gonna get all this acclaim like you’re used to here in Japan. You won’t because they don’t do nothing. They just sit there and clap their wee hands.’

‘Oh, don’t be too sure about that, Brian,’ I said. ‘You’re in Motörhead now,’ which probably irked him like shit.

So we got there and sure enough, the first time the curtains opened across the stage, it was all, ‘AHHHH! REMMY!’ Blian got a bit upset by that. ‘Blian Lobertson’ – that’s rather unfortunate, isn’t it?

I loved Japan as much as they loved us. It’s a complete culture shock because nothing there is like it is in the West. The girls go out in bunches over there, but they don’t mind a bit of adventure. A big group of them will come into your hotel room and all take their clothes off – it’s very much a bonding thing with them. It’s because they don’t have this guilt we do, courtesy of our stiff Christian upbringing. In Japan, they have Buddha, which is much more civilized. Most Japanese girls are very, very pretty, and
everyone’s polite, which I like. Good manners cost nothing, and most people in America, England and in many parts of Europe are mainly arrogant, brutal, stupid assholes who don’t give a fuck about anybody. They push you to one side and elbow you out of the way. They don’t do that in Japan. But make no mistake, they’re very horny as well.

There are places we wound up visiting every time we went back – Pip’s bar was one of them (unfortunately, it closed down a while back; now it’s a karaoke bar!). They were very friendly there, and they didn’t care if you fell on the floor. Plus they had a couple of pin tables, which was great drunken entertainment for me. But that’s nothing compared to the amusement arcades. The amusement arcades are unbelievable – it’s like being in the Starship Enterprise. The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in Japan, however, was about twenty Japanese rockabilly fans walking down the street. They had it down – the quiffs, the leather jackets, the walk. Japanese teddy boys, that took some getting used to.