White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (3 page)

‘You were seen by two Holyhead boys, when the train turned around,’ he told me.

‘It wasn’t me, sir,’ I’d insist. ‘I was never there.’

That’s when I learned to lie. Another thing discipline teaches you is lying, because if you don’t lie, you’re in the shit. Anyway, to cut a long story in half the length it would have been, he was going to give me the cane, two on each hand. This was right after my accident with the flick-knife in Paris, remember. It had taken ages for that to start healing. I mean, you might know how you bleed from a cut like that – every time your heart beats,
berdoom
, blood straight across the fucking room! I must have lost a pint at the time. So I asked the headmaster, ‘Could I have four on one hand because of my finger?’

But no, that wouldn’t do for him. He stood there impassive, urging my hand up and –
whap
! Fucking blood all over the place. And as if nothing had happened, he said, ‘Put your other hand up.’

‘You bastard!’ I thought. So when the cane came down on my hand, I grabbed it from him and whacked him around the head with it.

‘I think you’ll find that we don’t need your presence here anymore,’ he glowered.

‘I wasn’t coming back anyway,’ I told him, and with that, I was out the door.

But he was right, I stayed away and they never came after me for truancy. There were only six months left to go anyway. I didn’t tell my parents about it: I would leave like I was going to school every morning and then come back every night. I just used to go up to the riding school and work up there on the beach with the horses but eventually I got a couple of jobs. One was as a house painter with this gay guy, Mr Brownsword (what a name for a queer, absolutely perfect!). All the same, he never hit on me. He was after my good-looking friend, Colin Purvis, which I was quite pleased about. I left him to it, you know – ‘Colin will paint in here, Mr Brownsword. I’ll go upstairs, shall I?’ And Colin would be muttering ‘Bastard!’ under his breath.

Then we moved off the island to a farm in Conwy, along the Wales coast, right up in the mountains. That’s where I learned to be alone and not mind it. I used to wander around the fields with the sheepdogs. I really don’t mind being alone now. People think it’s weird, but I think it’s great.

About that time, my stepfather got me into a factory that made Hotpoint washing machines. Everyone worked on just one piece of them. I was one of the first in line: I had to take four small brass nuts and bolt them on this thing and then a machine came down and knocked a ridge across the sides of them. Then you took the pieces off and threw them in a huge box. There were 15,000 of them to do, and when you were done with that batch, and really garnered a sense of achievement, they’d come and steal them and give you an empty basket. You can’t be smart and do that job, man. It’s impossible because it would fucking drive
you out of your mind. I don’t know how those people did it. I suppose they submerged their intelligence because they had responsibilities.

Everybody I knew who left home in search of something better wound up coming back. I had other plans for my life. So I grew my hair till the factory fired me. And I stayed out. I would rather fucking starve to death than go back to that. I’m very lucky and privileged that I escaped.

I
needed a companion, and one was right there – a guy called Ming, after the emperor in
Flash Gordon
. Ming had long hair and that kind of a long, droopy moustache. We began to hang out in coffee bars and dancehalls and pull other blokes’ birds and generally appal everybody!

After a bit of this it seemed to us that we should take drugs (not that we knew what the fuck they were), so we got in touch with a friend of mine from when I lived in Anglesey, Robbie Watson of Beaumaris (famous also for its well-preserved castle). Robbie had lived in Manchester and had very long hair, which we thought was a Very Big Thing. We started smoking a bit of dope and then one night, in the Venezia Coffee Bar in Llandudno, Rob gave me an ampoule of speed – methyl amphetamine hydrochloride – with a little skull and crossbones on it. You were supposed to shoot it into your arm.

I never fancied fixing anything, and I never have, even to this
day. You get into the ritual. I’ve seen people do weird shit around needles: shooting water just to have an excuse for getting the needle in their arms. That’s what Rob was doing, and he thoroughly recommended that I should try it, too. But I put it in a cup of something – chocolate, I think – and drank it.

There was a poor little girl behind the counter at this coffee bar, and I talked to her non-stop for about four or five hours. I kept saying to Robbie how it was having no effect on me, and then back I went to this poor devil who was in a kind of alphabetic shock from my babbling – but I felt great, you know, King of the World! Trouble is, it wears off. (By the way Robbie Watson, who was my best friend for a long time and had a brilliant dry, ironic sense of humour, has been dead these twenty years – one needle too many. Any questions?) But back to me and Ming – or the Ming and I!

I was sixteen when Ming and I left Wales and headed east to Manchester. Actually, we were chasing after a couple of girls, whom we’d met while they were on holiday in Colwyn Bay. We were going to marry them and all kinds of shit. But of course, it ended up just being sex, as usual. They are much better off than if we had married them, I assure you of that.

I don’t remember Ming’s girl’s name, but mine was called Cathy. She was a great girl, all of fifteen years old, and a curious, enthusiastic fifteen at that. So when they went back to Stockport, Ming and I followed them. We got a flat in Heaton Moor Road and we kept meeting people, and they would have nowhere to stay, so we’d let them sleep on the floor, or the sofa or
somewhere, and within a month there were thirty-six of us in one room! The only one I remember was Moses (whom he resembled very closely, if all those Charlton Heston films are to be believed).

Then Cathy got pregnant . . . I mean, she was wonderful, but she was also fifteen – visions of prison bars! Her father was writing letters to my stepfather calling me an exiled Welsh beatnik. The two of them worked out one of those ‘convenient’ solutions and the baby, Sean, was adopted at birth. I remember Cathy was taking her O-levels at the maternity home and I used to go and visit her. She got really big and I used to fall off the bus, laughing – ‘Hello, porky!’ and she’d crack up laughing, too. She was a great girl, my first love. I didn’t see Cathy again, I don’t know why. Funnily enough, she got back in touch with me two or three years ago, just in time for this book . . . She said she’d found Sean, but I won’t go into it here – let him have his life.

As for my living situation, we (the thirty-six roommates) obviously got flung out pretty quick – the landlord probably wondered why the gas bill was for £200,000. Since Ming the Fearless Adventurer had gone back to Wales (eventually to become a clerk at a social security office – and you tell me there’s a grand pattern and a meaning to life . . .), I was alone again.

During the time I knew Cathy, and for a couple of years after, I was a ‘dosser’, which then was a particular occupation among kids in the country. We all used to wear US Army jackets, the waterproof ones with a double lining. You could get them really cheap secondhand, and the thing was to get everyone that you knew to write their names on your jacket in felt-tip pen, so you
were covered in these weird autographs. And we’d hitchhike around the country, staying with girls or staying in parked railway carriages or caves or whatever, just visiting women of local persuasion. In those days, it was a great thing to be ‘on the road’. It was the time of Bob Dylan, with the guitar on the back and the bedroll. A lot of girls like the transient thing. It’s a tradition, if you think about it: the circus, the Army, pirates, rock bands on tour – the girls always find them. I think women see something romantic in a geezer’s being here today and gone tomorrow. I like it too – but being a geezer, I would like it, wouldn’t I? Those days in the early sixties were great. We’d grow our hair down to our assholes and just bum around and live off women wherever we found ourselves. Chicks used to steal food out of the fridge from their parents to feed us and shit – kind of like bringing a meal to the convicted prisoner on the run. They liked the drama of it, and we liked the food.

It wasn’t all fun and good times, however. Sometimes, when I was hitchhiking, guys would stop their trucks to come and beat me up. Or you would wind up getting a lift with some huge, homosexual trucker.

‘Hello, son. How far are you going?’

‘Manchester.’

‘Manchester, right. I’d like to suck your dick.’

‘I’ll get out here, then.’

The flat in Heaton Moor was like a forerunner to the commune, I guess. If one of you had a chick, it was murder. You’d be surrounded by very big eyes in the darkness, and you knew their
night vision was getting better all the time! Sex was a lot more fun then – there weren’t dire things attached to it like there are now. And sex should be fun, instead of all this stigma – ‘Oh, you only want one thing!’ Well, of course I do, don’t you?! When it stops being fun, then don’t do it any more, for Christ’s sake.

All of us used to go out begging on Mersey Square and if you got anything, you’d come back and share it. I think we lived mainly on Ambrosia Creamed Rice. You used to have a beer can puncher and you’d sort of suck it out of the can. It was a great delicacy at the time, much better cold. I believe that is when I acquired my taste for cold food, which I have to this day – I can eat cold steak, cold spaghetti, even cold french fries, and that takes some doing! But if you’ve got enough salt on them, they’re all right.

Manchester is not many miles from Liverpool, and there was incredible music coming out of both towns during the early sixties. Through both cities runs the River Mersey and so the music scene of that area took the name Merseybeat. There was even a very well-known band from those days called the Merseybeats, as well as the Mersey Squares, named after the place we went begging. There were hundreds of bands coming out of Manchester and Liverpool, and they all played the same twenty songs – ‘Some Other Guy’, ‘Fortune Teller’, ‘Ain’t Nothing Shaking but the Leaves on the Trees’, ‘Shake Sherry Shake’, ‘Do You Love Me’ . . . All the bands from 1961 to 1963 were cover bands, including the Beatles.

There was this terrible one-upmanship rivalry going on, concerning whether you knew the original artist or not. Like the
support band would say, ‘We’re gonna play “Fortune Teller” now by the Merseybeats,’ but then the Merseybeats would come on and say, ‘We’d like to do “Fortune Teller” now by Benny Spellman.’ Of course, that never lasted very long, ’cause they just told the whole audience who the original artist was, right? Another thing that bands would do was take an old standard and rock it up. Rory Storm and the Hurricanes really did a number on ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, I recall, and the Big Three had a go at ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’!

It was a unique time with some truly incredible bands. One of them was Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Johnny Kidd used to wear an eyepatch and a striped shirt and pirate boots. Sometimes he’d wear a white shirt with bouffant sleeves – great get-up. The Pirates had the first strobe light I ever saw, created by the simple expedient of the roadie getting his hands on the club’s main switches and turning them all on and off very fast. Their guitar player was Mick Green, who was excellent – I used to carry his guitars to get into their shows for free. Years later, I made a record with Mick. Loners like him never made a reputation then. Eric Clapton got lucky – being an isolationist worked for him, because people sought him out. All the other isolationists, people didn’t bother with ’em!

Another great band was the Birds – nothing like the American Byrds who were happening around the same time. This Birds had Ronnie Wood, who later joined the Rolling Stones, playing guitar. The Birds were magic, fucking excellent, far ahead of their time. They only had three singles and they were gone. I used to follow
them all over the place, even slept in their van. The band I was in at the time – the Motown Sect, of whom you will hear more in a bit – had the honour of doing a gig with them. I still remember the Birds’ line-up: Ali McKenzie singing, Ron and Tony Munroe on guitar, Pete McDaniels on drums and Kim Gardner on bass. Kim now has a pub/restaurant in Hollywood called Cat and the Fiddle. He was a great bassist, but he hardly plays any more. A very good-looking band, the Birds were and Ronnie especially in those days was a very charismatic boy. He used to wear a brown herringbone tweed suit, two-tone shoes and he had a white Telecaster – that was very cool. They were like Mods with long hair, which I liked, ’cause I would never have my hair cut.

See, England has always been very fashion-oriented. Fads came and went very fast. The Mods were a very odd sort, as least in my estimation. They had very short hair, combed over to one side – kind of like John Kennedy but with a rooster-tail-like swatch at the back. And they wore trousers made of this very thin cord material with these bright print, tropical-style jackets, and two-tone shoes. The nearest American equivalent would be the Beach Boys, but we didn’t have the surf thing – it was really more in-town, as far as England was concerned. And the Mods used to wear eye make-up too, especially the boys. The crowd of people I was in disliked them, but in retrospect, it was no worse than what we were doing. I mean, we thought they were sissies, and they thought we were yobs – and you know, we were both right.

I got to meet a lot of great musicians at the start of our careers. Jon Lord was one. Jon Lord was, and is, a consummate musician.
He later on played with Deep Purple, Whitesnake and Rainbow, but when I met him, he was playing for the Artwoods who, funnily enough, were fronted by Art Wood! Even funnier, Art Wood was Ron Wood’s brother, but hold on a moment.

There was this huge, great palace of a boozer called the Washington on the seafront at Llandudno, and they had rock shows in the upstairs ballroom. Then they started having jazz and blues nights. They had Graham Bond, with Ginger Baker and Dick Heckstall–Smith; they had the Downliners Sect, jazzman Alan Skidmore and them one night, the Artwoods.