White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (21 page)

Orgasmatron
really should have brought us back up to speed – our new record with the new line-up and all – but nobody bought it. Or I should say nobody was able to buy it. GWR farmed the album out to various distributors around the world, most of whom
did a shoddy job of getting it in the stores. But we played all the usual places – Europe, the Castle Donnington festival, England and the States. We started off the US tour with Megadeth opening up for us, but they were a very new band then and they blew it. The first night, in Oakland, they had their stage banner stretched out on the floor across our dressing-room doorway, and since we’re no respecters of tradition, we walked straight across it. The band’s manager dashed in, freaking out – ‘You walked on our banner!’ And I said to him, ‘Look, there was no way of getting into our dressing room without walking on your banner. Why didn’t you put it some fucking place else!’ We were running late at soundcheck that night – it was the Kaiser Auditorium, I recall. The first show is always fraught; we had new guys in the crew and people were still setting shit up and learning. And that manager stormed up to our soundman’s desk just he was finishing up the drums and said, ‘You guys have to get off stage now. It says in my contract that my band has a soundcheck now.’ Dave, our sound guy, turned around and stared at him.

‘I’m sorry?’ he said.

‘Tell your guys to get off the stage,’ this idiot commanded.

So Dave pulled out the copper’s truncheon that he keeps behind the sound desk.

‘If you don’t go away, I’m going to hit you very hard between the eyes with this.’

So the guy went away, ranting and screaming backstage. Meanwhile, Megadeth’s frontman, Dave Mustaine, came in to apologize and he crashed out in our room! Poor Dave was a bit
out of it at the time – he’s since cleaned up. And there was the fucking manager, stalking around outside, unaware that his star was possibly dying on our couch! But to be fair to the band, although we threw them off the tour the next day because of all the shit with the manager, it wasn’t really their fault. It was the manager – we should have just thrown
him
off the tour, really. Years later, at the NAAM show, Dave Mustaine came up and apologized to me for it. That was really big of him, because he didn’t have to. We could have just gone on leading parallel lives and it would have been all right. More power to him. He’s a smart man, Mustaine; he’s got freckles, but he’s a smart man.

Overall, that wasn’t our most stellar tour through the US. In New Orleans the audience was spitting at me (punks, you know!) and I warned them that I would leave if they didn’t stop. And they didn’t stop, so I left, and there was a riot with firehoses and all kinds of shit. Then in Aurora, Illinois, Graham, my roadie for years, smashed my favourite bass – it sounded great and I played nothing else from the time I got it till he broke it. He didn’t do it on purpose, but he came to me with the two ends of it hanging around his neck, laughing. It was still repairable after he broke it, but he took it into the parking lot and smashed it to smithereens in a fit of pique, so I fired him.

During the short breaks in between all these various tours, I made all sorts of cameo appearances. I played an outlaw (typecasting, don’t you think?) in a video for this song, ‘I Wanna Be a Cowboy’ by the band Boys Don’t Cry. I got up at Hawkwind’s gig at the Reading Festival and sang ‘Silver Machine’. Then
there was Boss Goodman’s testimonial at Dingwalls. Boss was a roadie, then a manager for the Pink Fairies and then he ran Dingwalls. He became one of those mover-and-shaker types. A nice guy, and he was having this testimonial because he was retiring, which in fact turned out to be true – I haven’t seen him since. Anyhow, Wurzel and I played some numbers with Rat Scabies of the Damned and Mick Green from the Pirates. Larry Wallis was supposed to play with us as well, but he was also playing in two other bands that night (including his own Love Pirates of Doom) and he refused to come and rehearse with us. He was such a drag that Mick Green finally told him, ‘Look Larry, we’ll be all right, you know what I mean? Thanks anyway.’ We didn’t need Larry anyhow – Mick’s a great guitar player, and we did a good show. Also in the midst of all this Motörhead did the inevitable BBC ‘Peel Sessions’ recording, and I appeared briefly in a Doctor and the Medics video.
Orgasmatron
sales may have been disappointing, but our visibility factor was certainly high in 1986!

Early in ’87, I had a featured role in the film
Eat the Rich
, and Motörhead did the soundtrack – mostly songs from
Orgasmatron
, plus the title track. The movie was made by the Comic Strip people, who were also responsible for
The Young Ones
TV show, and a few other projects. One of their earlier shows, called
Bad News
, had been about a mythical heavy metal rock band – a bit like
Spinal Tap
, but better, actually (and I’m one to know!). Bad News, the band from the show, had opened for us at Donnington, and we were all chatting at the gig and eventually
Peter Richardson, who was the film’s director, rang me up and asked me if I wanted to be in a movie. I got the part as simply as that.

To be honest, I don’t like making movies – I’ve been in several of them now. It’s dead boring. They tell you to show up on the set at four o’clock in the morning and then at three that afternoon they say they don’t need you. So it’s just waiting around all day, basically, with a bunch of fucking actors.
Eat the Rich
wasn’t so bad, though. I spent a lot of time drinking with Nosher Powell, who had the lead role as the Home Secretary. He has a club now in south London, frequented by villains and gangsters of all shapes and sizes. My character was called Spider, and I was supposed to be working for this Soviet double agent, Captain Fortune, played by Ronald Allen, who was in
A Night to Remember
, the Titanic movie from the fifties. I won’t get into the plot of
Eat the Rich
here too much – it’s a black comedy involving cannibalism in a smart restaurant, with lots of political overtones. Quite a few people did cameos – Paul and Linda McCartney, Bill Wyman, Koo Stark, Angela Bowie (not that she’s any big deal – her claim to fame is that she was married to David Bowie). It’s a very English film, really. A lot of Americans don’t get it, but I think it’s quite good.

My part didn’t require any major sort of acting; I just played myself – I even used my own clothes. The director’s instructions for me pretty much consisted of ‘Walk over here and say this’. If you happen to rent the video, look closely at the scene where I’m riding a motorcycle – it’s not really me. They shot that when I was
off touring America with Motörhead, and I had to leave a set of my clothes behind. They ended up having a girl double for me . . . a big girl. Good, eh, trivia fans!

The director ended up having all of Motörhead in the film: we replaced the band in the ballroom scene. It was a secondary idea he had halfway through shooting. If you watch very closely during that scene, you’ll notice that the band changes all the way through it. First there’s none of our mob in it, then there’s just me playing and the rest of the band are straight guys, and then Phil appears and then Wurzel and Phil Taylor appear (I had just fired Pete Gill that morning and Philthy shot down real quick in his car to do the scene). So much for continuity!

The sacking of Pete Gill was a long time coming. Peter was his own worst enemy, he was another one who wouldn’t just be content to be in the band. He went up against me on a couple of decisions, and he was making Phil and Wurzel upset too. I got tired of him moaning, so when he kept us waiting while he hung around in the lobby of his hotel for twenty minutes while he read the paper or something, that was the proverbial last straw. I know it sounds trivial, but most flare-ups in families are, aren’t they? And a band
is
a family. I let him stay for a couple more months, but it wasn’t the same. I mean, enough’s enough. I already knew Phil Taylor wanted to come back. He’d been playing with Frankie Miller, along with Brian Robertson, and it wasn’t working out very well. One time Motörhead was flying home from a tour of the States, and Frankie Miller, Philthy and Robbo were on the same plane. That was very weird to begin with, and then the three
of them started fighting amongst themselves in mid-flight. Some time after that Phil came round and asked for his job back, but we told him, ‘Well, we’ve got to keep Pete at the moment,’ not yet knowing all the conniving that was to ensue. I’m too honourable for my own fucking good – Brian Downey from Thin Lizzy asked for the gig around the same time and I turned him down!!

So the situation with Pete came to a head the day of the shoot. He took so long to do everything, and we were always having to wait for him. It was just getting up my nose, because after all, I’m a speedfreak and I don’t like waiting. That morning, we got in the car and went down to the hotel to pick him and Phil Campbell up. Phil came bopping out of the hotel immediately, but Pete was still in his room, not dressed and we sat there for half an hour while he fucked around. Then he was saying goodbye to people in the lobby, and we were supposed to be at this shoot! Film people were sitting with their cameras on idle. So finally he came out, but I was fed up. I rolled down the car window and said, ‘Fuck you! You’re fired!’ and we drove off. And that was it. Last I heard about Pete, I believe he was touring with some alternative version of Saxon. It’s got three original members of the band who had all been fired, so they were calling themselves Son of a Bitch, which was Saxon’s original name.

Anyhow, with Pete gone, we gave Phil Taylor his job back. It was a mistake in retrospect, but then everything is easy in retrospect, isn’t it? The situation worked all right for a while, but things weren’t the same, and I should have known they wouldn’t
be. But by June, we were back in the studio, recording a new album, which would be
Rock and Roll
.

Rock and Roll
is a fair album, but it isn’t one of our best. There were problems in the studio – nothing truly disastrous, just a series of little annoyances. Our biggest mistake was choosing Guy Bidmead to produce it. He was an engineer, really, so we were pretty much producing ourselves. Guy had looked like a good idea, though. He had worked a bit with Vic Maile, who helped on our two most successful albums and he had engineered the tracks we recorded for
No Remorse
. But the chemistry wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t Guy’s fault, really – it was us, too. We were calling all the shots and whoever was nearest the desk would generally be the loudest! There was quite a bit of confusion when we were making that album. And Wurzel was having a bad time personally. His old lady kept coming up to the studio and chasing him around, causing all manner of family arguments while we were supposed to be working. That certainly didn’t help. A lot of times the way a record turns out depends on what the band members are going through while they’re in the studio. If a guy’s getting harassed at home or he’s got some money problems or whatever, it affects his performance ’cause his mind won’t be on the job one hundred per cent. In addition to all of this, we didn’t have enough time to do the songs properly and when that happens you’re pretty much wasting your time.

That said, we did have some amusing moments. One of the studios we used to make
Rock and Roll
was Redwood, which was co-owned by Michael Palin, and it turned out that the
engineer had worked on all of the Monty Python records. He played us some great outtakes that Python never put out. We also asked Michael Palin to come down and do a recitation to put on the album. He showed up, dressed in this perfect 1940s-cricketer outfit – the striped blazer, the duck trousers, the fucking white pumps, a V-necked sweater, with his hair all brushed over to one side. A complete vision. And he walked in saying, ‘Hello, what sort of thing are we going to do now, then?’ I said, ‘Well, you know in
The Meaning of Life
, there was this speech that began “Oh Lord –”’

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Give me some cathedral.’ And he went in and he did it. It was great.

Even though we’ve done better records, both before and since,
Rock and Roll
did have some great songs, like ‘Dogs’ and ‘Boogieman’. We played ‘Traitor’ for years. And Michael Palin’s ‘Oh Lord, look down upon these people from Motörhead’ speech at the end is classic. But overall it just didn’t seemed to work. Still, it’s not a
bad
album – I don’t think we’ve made a bad one.

Anyway, with a new record done, there was the usual promotional stuff. MTV Europe had an ‘International Lemmy Day’, which frankly, I remember nothing about. And of course we spent the rest of the year touring through England and then Europe. We were supposed to begin 1988 by touring through the US with Alice Cooper, but we missed a month of it because the fucking American immigration department took so long to give us our work permits. It was just a lot of bureaucratic bullshit. I mean, we bring foreign money to America and they don’t give a fuck about
that. They’d rather give amnesty to all illegal immigrants. Actually, I missed out on that by one year – I had been living in America for six months when the amnesty was granted in 1991. If I’d known it was coming I could have stayed out beyond my work permit and then got amnesty and a green card. I can’t get a green card because I got busted there for two sleeping pills in 1971, so obviously they have to watch out – dangerous drug fiend, right? Brilliant thinking, that.

Anyhow, the Alice Cooper tour, once we finally got on it, was a pain in the ass. It wasn’t Alice’s fault – he had no idea what we were being put through by his tour manager. That guy was a complete cunt. He made everything really difficult for us – since he was working for the top star, somebody else had to suffer and be made to look bad. We couldn’t do this and we couldn’t do that: fucking arrogant sons of bitches – how important do they think they are? It’s only a band, not the Houses of Parliament – not that
that’s
that important either. Finally, this idiot took away our ‘all-access’ passes and replace them with passes where we could only go backstage up to when we played; so after we finished our set, we couldn’t get in. Naturally, I wouldn’t stand for that kind of shit, so I went around the crew and said, ‘Give me them fucking passes!’ and gathered ’em all up. Then I walked straight into the production office, threw them down and said, ‘There, look! We’re out of here.’ And as I was leaving, Toby, Alice’s accountant – who had a brain – came and spoke to us and gave us our passes back. Toby still works for Alice; the other guy doesn’t. Need I say more? I talked to Alice years later, and he never knew any of this
happened, that his people were doing things in his name that made him look like an asshole – something he definitely isn’t. One thing, though – I’ve never understood his fixation with golf. I mean, what is the deal with that? You hit a ball with a stick and then you walk after it and you hit it again! I say if you hit it and then you find it, you got fucking lucky, pal! Put it in your pocket and go home. (Thanks, George.)