White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (30 page)

Snake Bite Love
came together like our albums usually do – six weeks before we recorded it, we didn’t even have one song. But when it came time, we put it together very quickly. Unfortunately, I was sick for some of the rehearsals, and when you leave two guys together who aren’t singers, you end up with some weird arrangements. So a couple of songs, ‘Desperate for You’ and ‘Night Side’, have odd structures. It’s really tricky getting it all to sort of fit together. And of course a lot of things can get changed around in the studio. The title track started life as a completely different song. Mikkey put the drum track on with a totally different set of chords. Then he went back to Sweden and Phil came in one day and said, ‘I’m sick of this one. I don’t like it already.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ So he went in and came up with a completely new riff and the whole thing changed! That album is also a prime example of me writing the words at the last minute – you know, lazy son of a bitch one more time, right? But we got it done, and I think it’s a very good album. The only problem any of us have with it is Mikkey hates the title. Homophobe that he is, he
thinks it’s gay. He called me from Sweden – ‘I don’t like this “Love” in the title. Don’t want the “Love”.
Bite the Snake
or something like that would be all right.’ ‘Ah, fuck off Mikkey,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Then he called me up again! ‘Hey, Lemmy, about this title . . .’ But I had to let him have his say.

So while we were on tour for
Snake Bite Love
, we finally got around to making the live record, which turned out to be a double album – we decided to get the whole gig in for once. There wasn’t enough room on the previous ones for the whole gig – they were made back in the days of vinyl, see. There was some debate about what to include, like whether we should do ‘Overkill’ again – after all, it had been on the other live records. But then, this was a different line-up, so we figured it was valid. Besides, our fans are diehard archivists, many of them, and they love shit like that. I know a couple of them who’ve got five different versions of most of our albums from all over the world – a Japanese copy, Argentinian, German, etc. They’re never going to play them, though, or even take them out of their wrappers. It’s rather odd, if you ask me – why collect them if you’re not gonna play them? But then, I collect knives and I’m not going to stab anybody, so I’m one to talk!

Incidentally, I have to say that some of the Japanese translations of my lyrics are incredible. On our first record, one song has the lyric, ‘We came across a bad vibe/ Naked, grinding fear’. Their version of it was, ‘We came across a pipeline and they kept trying to interfere’ – fantastic! It’s better than the original! It’s wonderful stuff, like fucking Shakespeare. Almost.

Anyhow, we’re nearly at the end of this resumé and still I digress. The live album: we recorded it during May, 1998 in Hamburg, Germany, at The Docks (a club, not a wharf!), and I’m proud to say it is completely overdub free (in fact, I said it on the liner notes). We chose Germany because the Germans have been such loyal fans of ours. They always rescued our ass when we were going down for the third time. They stuck with us, and we knew Hamburg would be a great audience. It’s like Liverpool – a seafaring town, and you know where you are with a sailor! The record’s called
Everything Louder Than Everyone Else
and was released in spring of 1999.

Our last album of the twentieth century,
We Are Motörhead
, opened up the new millennium for us. We went on the usual yearlong tour, which was uneventful – or, rather, no more eventful than usual, other than touring Ireland, which we hadn’t done in many years – until the end. We went back to Russia and our schedule was brutal – two eighteen-hour drives back-to-back and no days off for about a week. Then it took us forever to get out of Russia to Poland. We didn’t get to Warsaw until eleven o’clock at night – our crew were loading into the venue at one in the morning! But the audience stuck around because it was the first time we’d been there. Then we had to drive all the way down to Austria . . . finally I collapsed. Touring is second nature for me, but a person’s body can only take so much. It was the end of the tour anyway, so it didn’t really matter.

After taking a month off, we began working on the new album,
Hammered
. Phil and Mikkey flew out to LA on 10 September
2001 – the best possible time anyone could have scheduled a plane flight considering what happened the next day! The guys wouldn’t have been in danger, of course – the flight was nonstop from England to Los Angeles – but who knows when they would have arrived in town?

I suppose I should have my say about the terrorist attacks. I don’t suppose it’ll be a popular point of view, but they need to be put into some sort of perspective. They
were
a horrible tragedy, but also what happened in New York and Washington is the same thing that England and America did to Berlin every day for three years during World War II – and Germany did the same thing to England. And it happened in every other city in Germany and lots of cities in France and Poland, too. But most Americans don’t think about that. They think everything starts and finishes with America. It is the first time this has ever happened to America, so you would expect them to overreact a bit. So let’s not panic too much – it can be got over.
Anything
can be got over.

But back to
Hammered
. We recorded it in the Hollywood Hills at Chuck Reid’s house (he was doing rap stuff before, and I think he’s still getting over it!), with Thom Pannunzio producing. It was released in April of 2002. Within a month it had already sold more than the last two records combined and the tour has started off great. We’re getting more money, we’re getting in bigger places, so we’re in excellent shape.

Things have been pretty good for me, and for Motörhead, over the past several years. I bet you thought I was going to say ‘so I can’t complain’ but you should know me better than that by now!
There will always be a few things eating away at me. If you’ve gotten this far with the book, you may have noticed that over the past twenty-five or so years, Motörhead have made quite a few albums. So one thing that will always puzzle me are those people who, for some bizarre reason, think our career ended with
Ace of Spades
. Since I’ve moved to America, we’ve made our best records ever. They far surpass the ones that everybody remembers. Anyone I’ve played our latest records to has been astounded. But most people seem to have gone deaf, as far as we’re concerned, somewhere around 1979 or 1980. ‘Yo, dude, “Ace of Spades”,’ – that’s the famous cry that has come to plague me. Occasionally I get really pissed off. It’d be nice if instead I heard someone say, ‘Have you got anything new out? I’d like to hear it.’ That would be much better. But no, they come up to me and say, ‘You guys were so great!’ And I say, ‘Yeah? If we were so great, how come you stopped listening to us after 1980?’ That’s what I don’t understand – the usual reply is, ‘Oh, I got married.’ People are fucking weird.

If you think you’re too old for rock ’n’ roll, then you are. And it even happens to musicians – you see them on stage and they sound great and everything, but it’s almost like you can tell they’re looking at their watch. ‘Have we finished yet? Let’s go back to the wife and poodle.’ The reason that rock ’n’ roll is such a young thing is . . . because it started with young people, obviously. But then they grew older and their attitude changed – they became more anxious to be accepted by the rank and file. I don’t have any trouble with that myself because I know I’m not gonna
be accepted by the rank and file, even in rock ’n’ roll! So I was an outsider from Day One. But it’s all right by me – somebody’s gotta do it.

Like I was saying before, we’ve been making the best records of our career but hardly anybody seems to hear them. I keep waiting for us to be rediscovered, but it hasn’t happened quite yet. But as long as I can keep making records and touring, I can soldier on. Not being a huge success doesn’t bother me – after all, I have been there and done that. Sometimes people ask, ‘What about these bands that you inspired making it over you?’ They’re not making it over us: they’re just making it, and you get inspired by anything you listen to. It doesn’t matter. It’s just that kids are getting in bands and making it, like they always have. I don’t have any problem with that. It’s great that we inspired them – it proves we were right!

One thing I am very glad of is that I went through the sixties. People who didn’t really don’t know what they missed. We pushed a certain consciousness, a way of life and it was exciting – no AIDS, people weren’t dying so much from drug abuse and it was truly a time of freedom and change. The only time I’ve seen any rebellion was in the fifties, sixties and early seventies. The rest of it you can keep. The kids now have attitudes more like the parents we were all trying to fight! They’ll probably raise a bunch of fucking freaks. We raised a bunch of estate agents, a bunch of fucking accountants. God knows how we did it. I guess it’s because most people give up. As I pointed out earlier, a lot of people say, ‘I used to listen to Motörhead,’ implying that when
you grow up, you can’t. Well, I’m glad they say that, man, ’cause I don’t want no grown-ups listening to
me
. Grown-ups are the ones who fuck everything up. Since I was about twenty-five, nothing changed, except I got smarter and wiser and things have an effect on you. But I never thought I was any older, really. It was just a very long twenty-five! I can’t imagine being fifty. If I’d lost all my hair or something, I might believe it, but I haven’t.

I lost my father a couple of years ago – rather careless of me, don’t you think? Actually, I lost both of them, my biological father and my stepfather. They died within seven months of each other. It was kind of sudden. You would think they had conspired just to piss us off! My stepfather, who saved us from the difficulties put on us by my real father, left me debts, and my real father left me money, so there you go. I didn’t like either one of them, actually, and as far as I’m concerned, my biological dad will always be an asshole – he left a young girl on her own to bring up a child and she had her mother living with us as well! Fuck this ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead’ shit! People don’t become better when they’re dead; you just talk about them as if they are. But it’s not true! People are still assholes, they’re just
dead
assholes!

Anyhow, I’m very much alive, and this is certainly not the last you will be hearing from me!

W
hat did I tell you?

Hello and welcome to the end of the book. As we are well past the deadline, I’ll keep it short (about five foot two).

In my life so far, I have discovered that there are really only two kinds of people: those who are for you, and those who are against you. Learn to recognize them, for they are often and easily mistaken for each other.

Also, it seems that our brave new world is becoming less tolerant, spiritual and educated than it ever was when I was young; of course we are all susceptible to the ‘good old days’ syndrome, but this is not an example of it . . . Inherited hatred (i.e. hatred your parents schooled you in) is not only stupid, it is destructive –
why make your only driving force hate? Seems
really
fucking dumb to me.

Finally (and this is good advice), buy our albums. You won’t be sorry!

Love,

Lem

March, 2003

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