Taking to stages up and down the U.K. like they were stagecoaches to be hijacked by highwaymen, Motörhead’s profile on home soil was something to be celebrated. And what better way to toast Motörhead’s unplanned lording over the NWOBHM and the release of their fine fourth record than with some beer drinkers and hell raisers?
There was no better way, in the opinion of Chiswick Records boss Ted Carroll, who raided his vaults for some extra recordings from his 1977 sessions to come up with the Beer Drinkers EP set for release on November 22, 1980. Lemmy, for his part, was fine with the idea, indicating that without Ted’s interest, Motörhead would not have gotten off the ground, so fair game.
“That was just pure drinking,” laughs Eddie, when asked about the band’s cover of ZZ Top mid-classic “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers,” one of that band’s heaviest songs and one of the key biker anthems in the catalog of the bearded ones. “We always liked to listen to a little bit of ZZ Top. And my drinking at that time had only really just begun. I was a bit like, ‘Oh, the song’s got beer drinkers in it,’ so Lemmy said, ‘You could fucking sing it then.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know about that,’ but after another beer I did. It was fun just for the sake of it.”
And so Eddie does, singing both parts, where on the original, the vocal is shared by Billy Gibbons and bassist Dusty Hill. Lemmy is added in subtly as a second vocal track, but it is Eddie who we hear prominently. Eddie also sings a raucous version of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers’ “I’m Your Witchdoctor,” which contains just enough heavy metal licks and speed to overcome the ’60s chorus. All told, it’s an intriguing choice, and a track that was part of the band’s early sets when they had little of their own material. There’s also the instrumental “Instro” and a small, punky version of “On Parole,” a charmer of an original that evokes images of pub rockers gone punk, sort of Eddie and the Hot Rods meets Vibrators. All told, an interesting curio, given its prompting of armchair conjecture as to how the Motörhead album could have changed in complexion if some of these tracks were swapped in for others—say “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” or “Witchdoctor” (or another original, but an almost poppy and rock ’n’ rollsy one, “On Parole”) for the more pedestrian and old-news “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” for example.
But Motörhead were not done with the EPs. Like Beer Drinkers, the St. Valentines Day Massacre EP, issued two and a half months hence, February 1, 1981, served as comic relief of sorts, to the serious business of the Motörhead albums. As touched upon, the idea of the band letting their hair down as it were, for these bits and bobs of new (and affordable) material now and again helped endear Motörhead to the punters while keeping them in the NWOBHM game, one in which the lifeblood was a steady stream of seven-inch singles.
The St. Valentines Day Massacre EP was a novel collaboration between Motörhead and impressive NWOBHMers Girlschool (named on the cover as Motor Headgirl School), punk-rocking their way through Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Please Don’t Touch,” while Girlschool covered “Bomber” and Motörhead covered Girlschool’s “Emergency.” Lemmy says that “Please Don’t Touch” was Vic Maile’s idea, but originally, the idea was for Girlschool to cover it in the conventional sense, that is on their own. Sealing the deal for the collaboration, Lemmy copped to the fact that it was one of his favorite songs growing up.
It was natural that Lemmy would relish covering a track like “Please Don’t Touch.” As we’ve discussed, Lemmy loved the old rock ’n’ roll, and indeed his iconic look, as it became honed and focused and quite standardized over the years, was a mixture of biker, Wild West, Civil War and rockabilly or Teddy Boy. Johnny Kidd and “Please Don’t Touch” was perfect for Lem, in fact, the most autobiographical or intrinsic choice the band ever collared for a cover.
“I don’t want to break out of the genre,” Lemmy would say, referring to the type of heavy metal Motörhead played (although that’s my shorthand for it, not his). “Because the genre is our music and we must be doing it right because so many people stuck with us. But within our musical form, we still bend the envelope quite a bit. We did a lot of different sound effect things on different albums. I think we’ve kept pretty well adventurous within what we do. I don’t see any reason to stray from what we do because what we did in the beginning and what we do now is good music. And you can’t get it anywhere else. I mean, I’ve listened to everything from Little Richard to Art Blakey; I understand music. I know what I’m fucking doing. I come from a very diverse background. I remember Elvis’s first record coming out. And ever since then I’ve been influenced by him. So I’d like to do a country album, I’d like to do a blues album, and even, given the money, I’d like to do a disco album.”
But true to character, there’s even a sad side to Lemmy’s fandom of the rich nascent rock history he got to experience first-hand. His voice dripping with cynicism, stoicism, and just a sense of “there you are—that’s the state of mankind,” he once told me, “I had my entire music collection stolen when I was living in London. I had a thousand albums and six hundred singles stolen. And they were all original singles. I had shit like Roy Head doing ‘Apple of My Eye’ on Back Beat Records, all very exotic. All of them were stolen. I’ve got a good selection again, but I wouldn’t say I’m a collector. I never really got into collecting records again.”
Lemmy’s tastes even ran towards the original country greats, which would be an influence, along with the rockabilly, on a side project he would have with Slim Jim Phantom of Stray Cats and Danny B. Harvey of the Rockats called Headcat. Note the similarity of nomenclature with “Headgirl,” one of the shorthand names of the collaboration with Girlschool.
“I mean, that was a surprise to me,” chuckles Phil, remembering the original rock ’n’ roll Lemmy, Slim Jim and Danny B. album of 2000. “I went to see him when he first played a gig here in L.A. with Slim Jim, and I’ve never been a country fan, and to be honest, I thought . . . I walked out basically. Because I thought what the fuck is this?! It wasn’t Stray Cats and it wasn’t Motörhead—I mean Lemmy singing and playing acoustic guitar? I think he was going through this period in his life where, in his own mind, he was thinking, I want to be recognized as a great musician, not just Lemmy, the speed freak. It’s that kind of thing. But unfortunately he’d chosen the wrong genre to get that across. Because he doesn’t have a powerful voice. He has a very guttural voice but it’s not very powerful. It certainly doesn’t lend itself to that kind of country and western or whatever you want to call it. Although I don’t think he had any vocal influences at all, not really. Maybe John Lennon. I think secretly he always wanted to sound like John Lennon, because he’s got that kind of a voice; he always tried to sing in a similar meter that Lennon sang in. Yeah, John Lennon was one of his favorite vocalists.”
“I mean, obviously he must like it,” continues Phil, back on the roots of rock. “I know that his favorite artist—and not a lot of people know this—has always been Buddy Holly. He always admired Buddy Holly; God knows why. I mean, I could never stand any of that sort of twangy twangy stuff. But Lemmy looks at it from a different point of view. I guess it’s because he was a teenager, and him being ten years older than me, he was a teenager when all those Buddy Holly–type bands came out. That was the music that was being played on the radio when he was 14, 15 and dating. So I guess it holds a lot of memories for him. I certainly don’t think it suits him at all. But he seems happy with it.”
It’s an interesting point Phil makes about Lemmy and what happens when he tries to “sing.” Lemmy, does in fact, sound wheezy and asthmatic when he’s not pushing much air, and his ear for staying in tune starts to fail him. The effect points to another reason fans love the guy—although it might be something subconscious, something they don’t think about much—there’s a vulnerability in his voice, except it’s not the emotional vulnerability one usually talks about around vocalists, but rather a physical one, a reminder of all the hard living Lem’s packed into his head. The effect is that if he’s not screaming full-throttle at the dying of the raging inferno that is his life, his own pilot light is likely to go out.
On the strength of the catchiness of “Please Don’t Touch,” not to mention the obvious mutual love and admiration and energy in the performance of it, the EP vaulted to No. 5 in the U.K. charts. And no surprise either, given the spirited harmonies laid down wobbly by all these punk metal friends. “You’ve got to remember,” reminds Lemmy, “I was doing all these influences before I did Motörhead, because I was in bands doing harmony songs. And I used to do the high harmonies in Hawkwind, so it’s not much of an adaptation, more of a recollection.”
“Well, it’s one of Lemmy’s old songs when he was in the Rocking Vickers, really,” notes Eddie on the rollicking flagship track. “So it came from Lem. I’d never heard the song. I mean, I knew ‘Shakin’ All Over’ from Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, but that’s about as far as it went with me. But Lemmy came up with that one, and it was kind of like a love duet, because he was very fond of Kelly [Johnson], you know. And of course, the management loved the idea. But of course unfortunately, that little collaboration meant that the management thought collaborations were great, and then later insisted we did the Wendy O. Williams one, which destroyed the band. So, in hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t have done the St. Valentines Day Massacre.
“Oh, they were fucking great,” continues Eddie, remembering the Girlschool gals, good for one classic NWOBHM album by this point and months away from another. “They supported us on the Overkill tour. They really were a good little outfit. Kelly was a great guitarist, and, I’ve got to say, Kim was a great vocalist/rhythm guitarist. In fact, they were just a great little band. Don’t get me wrong, in those days, it wasn’t that common for girls. Of course there was the Runaways, which I never gave a lot of time for. But Girlschool could kick ass and we really liked them. So when this came up, of course, Lemmy had this thing with Kelly. He was very close to Kelly. He loved her to bits. And of course Lemmy jumped at the idea, and we thought, you know, why not? We were kind of in between things at the time.”
“Basically people were fed up with what was going on,” figures Girlschool guitarist and vocalist Kim McAuliffe, on how she ended up in the NWOBHM’s first all-girl band. “At that point, we were missing heavy metal bands coming out. Obviously you had all your great ones, didn’t you? You had all your greats, but there wasn’t any more coming out, so we decided to do it ourselves. And obviously Motörhead, really; that’s the main influence. Right in the beginning we were just writing our own stuff and it was influenced by Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Obviously we were into heavy metal when we were young, but then later it was punk and Motörhead.
“As for getting signed to Bronze,” continues Kim, “what happened was obviously they had Motörhead at the time. It was Lemmy, basically, that came along and saw us at rehearsal. We were literally touring around ourselves, doing everything ourselves. We got our own little single out, ‘Take It All Away,’ which, because of the punk era, everybody at that point could actually do what they wanted. What happened was me and Enid, since we were little, we used to play at this little club, and so we started off there and we got to know this guy at the new club and he started his own little record label with a punk band called U.K. Subs, who were fantastic and great mates of ours. So of course we started out with them for the first single. And then Lemmy heard about us, and then they wanted to get out with our band, support them on their very first major tour. And of course they thought, oh yeah, girls, a bit of a laugh, whatever. So he came down to see us play at rehearsal, and we were all really frightened. He looked really scary. Of course he came down and he was lovely.”
The idea for the EP came from Vic Maile, who had been with Girlschool in December of ’80 into ’81 at Jackson’s in Rickmansworth recording Hit and Run, their second album with him. Vic had produced Ace of Spades just before, and Girlschool’s debut album Demolition just before that.
“Vic was our first producer,” answers Kim, offering a profile of Vic. “That was at a time when we were really stubborn and pigheaded and we didn’t think we needed a producer. We thought we knew it all, at the tender age of 18 or whatever we were. The first time we met him we didn’t get along at all! We thought we were a bunch of God knows what and we didn’t like him at all. But when we were going to record ‘Emergency,’ our very first single for Bronze Records, nonetheless they made us work together, Bronze Records did. Of course, as it turns out, we struck up a great friendship with him and obviously used him quite a bit over the years. And of course, so did Motörhead—he did one of their best albums for them, which went straight to No. 1. So it was so funny that after that first meeting, that we got to be great friends afterwards and really liked his work. He was a lovely bloke as well. He was really funny. He was very quiet and had this really dry sense of humor. At each recording session—we should have twigged, I know, by now—but at each recording session he would be taping us without us realizing, and then he would give us a tape and we obviously sounded like twats at the time arguing and doing what we used to do; it was usually quite hilarious, really. We had some great times, great fun. Sadly, he died in ’89, and he was only 40-something.”
~
Work on the proposed St. Valentines Day Massacre EP didn’t go exactly as planned, with Phil Taylor having to settle for an “insults and inspiration” credit due to injury. As well, but not impinging on his being able to perform, during that same month, Phil and girlfriend Motorcycle Irene got caught in a drug sweep of houses associated with the band all across London (deemed the Great Motörhead Police Bust) and were charged with possession; two roadies, Graham Reynolds and Geoffrey Lucas, were also nabbed in the operation, which found cannabis residue, methaqualone and cocaine.
“I know them all in West London,” snorted Lem, when asked about the coppers in 1982. “They can’t surprise me anymore. It’s usually, ‘Hi Lemmy. Phil, what have you got on you? It’s just a quick search. You aren’t doing anything for a few minutes. Are you?’” Added Phil, when asked if he’d ever done time, “I have. Three weeks in a mental and psychiatric ward for getting busted with 1.9 grams of absolutely useless grass. They couldn’t find enough to test.”
So coppers and jail couldn’t stop Phil—he had to do himself in. “That’s correct,” affirms Eddie, on what would be Phil’s most grave physical miscue. “We were in Ireland. We used to go to Northern Ireland. Not many bands would go to Northern Ireland because back in those days it was a trouble spot. Because the IRA, they had sort of a semi-war going on. But we always wanted to go because the fans are starved for music. Because a lot of bands were scared to go there. And of course, we said, we fucking ain’t, we’ll go. So it was one of our main places we used to love playing. And of course they treated us like bloody gods over there. We used to stay at the most bombed hotel in Europe, which was the Europa. And it was a wonderful hotel; we used to party all fucking night. It was a wonderful place.
“So we partied all night and Phil, about five in the morning, he’s having a weightlifting contest with one of the guys that loaded out the equipment. Not one of our crew, but it was sort of a fan that we had working on setting up the equipment in Belfast. And they were playing pick each other up, hauling each other above their heads. And so Phil picked him up, you know, like a dumbbell and pushed him above his head. And then the guy picks Phil up, and he lost his balance, fell over backward with Phil up in the air, sideways on, like if he was pushing iron, and he’s tipped over, and as he’s gone down, he’s tipped down onto Phil’s head. So Phil’s head hit the ground, but of course, it shattered his neck.
“So yeah, I didn’t know anything about this. At the time I was already in bed shagging or something. I got a phone call in the morning—well in the morning, about lunchtime—and, ‘Listen, man, I’ve got to tell you something.’ ‘Well, what?’ ‘We just . . .’ ‘Well, go on and fucking tell me.’ He says, ‘Phil’s in hospital. He’s broken his neck.’ I went what?! Because when you hear broken neck, you think end, you know what I mean? And so I thought, fucking hell, off we go, we have to go fucking right through no man’s land, which is like bandit country, to get to this fucking hospital, Victorian Hospital, and it’s got all sorts of troops and fucking gunmen and all sorts. Every guy in there’s got a security officer sitting by the bed with a shooter, you know. And there’s Phil being filmed for local telly. His neck in a fucking brace, and he’s lying there, and I’m saying, you little cunt, what have you done now?”
As for the guilty party himself, Phil’s first-hand explanation was, “I was drunk out of my mind at 6 o’clock in the morning waiting for the slowest elevator in the world. I picked a couple of guys up and fell over. Everyone else got up and I couldn’t. I broke my neck.”
“We had more trouble with Phil on the road,” continues Eddie. “We had to cancel two other tours because of Phil. Once because he . . . well, twice, actually, we nearly lost our first break, which was supporting Hawkwind. Only the night before, he punched a bloke. Broke his hand. We got a new drummer in, just to play the gigs, but it was the ex-Hawkwind drummer, Alan Powell. And Hawkwind comes in, and what’s his name, the fuckin’ guitarist, Dave Brock, he saw the drum kit, and he said, ‘If that guy’s drumming for you, you ain’t on the tour.’ Because he had obviously fell out with Alan Powell. So we said, well, what we going to fucking do then? So that’s when we gaffer-taped the stick to Phil’s hand. Well we had to—it was that or no tour. We were desperate in those days for work. That was our first big break, the Hawklords tour. So anyway, we managed to get away with that one.
“Then we got the first album out and we got this big 40-date tour booked with Girlschool supporting. We took off around the country. Well, after the third show, Phil had a fucking punch-up with the tour manager over a bird, broke his hand, and we had to cancel the fucking tour. So it’s all back on the bus, back to London, tour canceled. So fucking, I lost it, you know. And many other occasions when Philip . . . good ol’ Philip, I remember we were in the Pyrenees coming over into Spain from France. He lost it on the bus. The coffee machine didn’t work or something. We were parked. He got the coffee machine and kicked it all over the car park, right? Of course, by the time we get to Madrid, his foot’s swelling up like a fucking football. So of course, we’re looking to cancel the show. But there’s ten thousand angry kids out there. If we cancel the show, we’re not going to get out of there, or our equipment isn’t. So they get a hold of the football guys. You know, they’ve got this magic spray stuff that they put on it and it deadens everything? We got some of that off the trainers from the football team, and they gave us a couple of cans, and the fucking drum roadie had to spray it on his foot every ten minutes. So Phil was an absolute fucking nightmare. So him doing his neck was just another Phil thing. So God bless him. Oh, he was a fucking nightmare, Philip. He was a lot of trouble, Phil.
“But no medical stuff that cost us a lot of money,” chuckles Eddie. “There were a couple of moments . . . he’s a drummer. You know, he could get a bit uptight. But I can only think of really a couple of occasions when anything got damaged, and it was nothing bad. He might break a chair or something. I think that happened in a hotel once in Italy, and there were a couple of incidents, but they were very few and far between. We cared about, you know, not doing that. A lot of bands went out, ‘Oh, let’s do this.’ Especially Rat Scabies and the boys. They used to go, ‘Oh, what can we smash up?’ It was sort of on their list of things to do. Our list of things to do was, let’s chop one up, roll a joint, open a beer and go to the bar, find a chick. You know, we had a totally separate set of things we wanted to do. And you can’t take a chick back to your room if it’s completely destroyed, can you?”
Manager Smith confirms that Phil’s misdeeds didn’t often find the band out of pocket. “No, we were very lucky, because we’re British, and we have something called the National Health Service. I mean, he broke his hand and we had to tape the drum stick to his hand, and he often sprained it. And as you know, broke his neck in Belfast. Being an idiot.”
So the elders of the band, Eddie and Lem, managed to stay out of much trouble. In fact, one looks back on the history—all of it—and Motörhead, by dint of good luck more than anything, remained quite scandal-free. “No, we were pretty good,” muses Eddie. “We were pretty good, I have to say. Lemmy and I managed to sort of get out of there unscathed. We never had to cancel a show because of me or Lemmy. It was only Phil. But Phil’s neck was gone, so we couldn’t do much else anyway. That’s why you look at the cover, he’s got the brace on.”
Plus an old suit, a stylish hat, and a machine gun in his hand. The St. Valentines Day Massacre sleeve was additional fodder, on top of the amusing music enclosed, for those who thought Motörhead was having too much fun away from the menacing main music that the metalheads found manly. As Eddie alluded to, the general concept of the EP would come back to haunt the band two years later when Lemmy befriended Wendy O. Williams. More on that later, but the pattern is one that Lemmy defends with the attitude that you can call him sexist all you want, but he’s obviously proven that any time a girl wants to join the lads in this business, she’s got his full encouragement. Girlschool, Wendy, Skunk Anansie, Evanescence . . . these names would crop up in conversation with Lem, sometimes shoehorned in as if Lemmy was making a point to put in the good word before your time on the phone with him was up.
“That was Christmas, and I think it was about March, April,” figures Eddie, on how long Phil was out of action. “Probably four months. But it was that period there from Christmas to after, obviously, St. Valentines Day Massacre came out. They weren’t actually sure whether he was ever going to be able to play again at one point, in the beginning. It was, oh we’ll have to see when you get back together. I don’t know if you know, but Phil, on his neck, he had a lump the size of a golf ball. Maybe slightly bigger now. This lump, over the years had got bigger and bigger and bigger. And it’s where his spine had protected itself and created all this stuff. He’d grown all this cartilage, and it was this big ball on his neck. It was really funny. I think on the Ace of Spades video, he talks about it and says he’s going to have a face tattooed on it. But he never did.”
Thinking again about the timelines, Eddie consults his diary entry for me and cites, “Yeah, this is interesting. ‘The Ulster Hall, and the Dublin Fiesta, Phil was inadvertently bounced on his head by a friend.’ So, no, he was only out of action for three months, well, four months. According to this, December 2nd we played the Ulster Hall and that’s when he bounced on his neck. When we came back from Ulster that time, I remember coming through the fucking airport at eight in the morning, because the police busted us on the way in. And then when we came out, they said, ‘Oh, come back and see us tomorrow. We’ll have a drink.’ They were going to bust us but we ended up chatting and having a laugh. But we had to go back and I remember them waiting for us at the airport, eight in the morning. They gave us a glass of potcheen; that’s the Irish homemade stuff.”
Indeed Phil was back for a tour that raised the stakes for the band, an intensive campaign throughout North America supporting Ozzy Osbourne, April 22 to July 15 of 1981, marking Motörhead’s first time across the pond, with, really, even their mainland European touring having been not that extensive to this point.
“Oh, fuckin’ ’ell, shit,” swears Phil, “I think probably the best tour, at least from a music point of view, was the first time we toured America supporting Ozzy, Ozzy’s first tour with Randy Rhoads. And it was just great to see Ozzy back, and the band was so awesome, and the audiences were great. It was an electric atmosphere. From that point of view it was great, and to be on that tour was just marvelous, and it was such a shame that poor Randy died. And as regards mischief and mayhem, there are far too many that I can possibly remember. There are way too many—mayhem and madness went on on just about every tour.”
“We met when Motörhead opened for him on the Blizzard of Ozz tour,” says Lemmy, asked when he’d first struck up what was to be a long friendship with the famed Black Sabbath singer. Of note, some of the best money Lemmy made in the business would came from his co-writes with Ozzy and appearances on Ozzy’s smash solo albums. “That was a great tour, with Randy Rhoads. I got to know him; he was a nice guy. He was small. He was a little fellow about the size of Ronnie Dio. He couldn’t play Asteroids worth a fuck. I beat him right away across America! But he was really a good guy. I never could get over how incredibly little he was. Randy had small hands. Boy, could he play guitar. He became an even better guitar player after he died. It is a well-known mystery that guitar players suddenly get better once they are dead. Buddy Holly was the first. Stevie Ray Vaughan is known by a lot more people than had ever heard of him when he was alive.
“Ozzy’s only problem was that he couldn’t get any more!” quips Lem, on Ozzy’s drug problem, offering a comparison to his own more scientific techniques. “I have a personality that rejects loss of control. Even when I was in my acid days, I was taking ten at a time at the end. We had heard that acid won’t work two days in a row but we found out that if you double the dose then it does. Even in those days, I used to always have what I call my window on the world. I could always stop and look out of it to see what was really going on. Ozzy didn’t have that. Ozzy was doing a lot of downers, which I never did much of. I have always been a ‘Let’s be present at the wedding’ kind of guy. I didn’t want to be outside in the graveyard.”
Ozzy, who thinks the world of Lemmy and has called him the ultimate rock ’n’ roller, remembers that all Lemmy had with him on the tour was a plaid bag with a notebook in it and three books to read—conspicuously absent was a change of clothes. As for Lemmy’s rider, Ozzy remembers it as being nothing but vodka, orange juice and bourbon.
“Randy was a really good guy,” adds Eddie, on Ozzy’s virtuosic axe prodigy. “He was very quiet and modest for such a great player. We talked a fair bit, as you would over three months, and I watched the shows whenever possible. He was a pleasure to watch. He played the L.A. speed style a bit but he had the ability to make it fit with the tune and he still had bags of feel, whereas a lot of the later speed guitarists were just quick with no real feel. I used to think guitar playing was becoming an Olympic sport all about who is the fastest—not really my idea of guitar playing. But we owe Ozzy a big one for that. His office got in touch and said Ozzy wants you to support him in the U.S.A. Without that, we might never have got there. My memory is a little faulty now, but I can say it was a lot of fun and we were really excited to be in the U.S.A. for the first time. I have to say we did not go down well everywhere, which was a big change from Europe. I think we came back a bit damaged by the experience and should have taken a little longer before our next album, Iron Fist.”
Preceding the Ozzy dates, however, is where we get the material for what would become the band’s first and only U.K. No. 1 album, the live No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, issued June 27, 1981. The dates culled for the seminal live stand would come from a short tour with Girlschool called the Short Sharp Pain in the Neck Tour, celebrating Phil’s return from near death by misadventure.
Aside from a fall 1980 performance of “Iron Horse” (NWOBHM hopefuls Weapon supporting on the night), the rest of No Sleep consisted of selections from shows at the West Runton Pavilion, Norfolk, on March 27, 1981, Queen’s Hall, Leeds, the following night, Newcastle City Hall on the 29th and 30th, and then Maysfield Leisure Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The brunt of the album was recorded at Newcastle given the superior sound from those two shows over the other dates.
“We had a full month there, a gig every night,” recalls Eddie, accounting for how on fire the band was, playing these songs with an unmistakable authority that ensured that the record would be seen as one of the greatest live albums of all time. “And this was after the layoff, then, which was December, January, February and then Phil was back in the saddle for March. So it wasn’t so bad then. And then of course earlier, on the Ace of Spades, we played four Hammersmiths, and that took us to the end of November [Note: of which none are featured on the album titled as such]. As it says in my diary, ‘The three gigs were recorded by Vic Maile on the Manor Mobile, which was to be the June 1981 live album,’ No Sleep ’til Hammersmith.”
~
Motörhead’s first live album is a frightening document of this most egregiously powerful of power trios at the height of their power trio dominance, despite Phil having just returned from a life of toddling around in a neck brace. In fact it is Phil that ensures the record is high octane from start to finish, exemplified by his amusing two tries and two different tempos of high-hat count-in on the band’s landmark song, “Ace of Spades,” which opens the album. Chaos is averted for this landmark opener as the traditionally trained Taylor switches to lock-perfect snare and the band is off to the races. By the time we get to track two, “Stay Clean,” Phil executes the signature drum roll flourish that opens the song perfectly and then lays down a driving groove that is eclipsed only by his performance on track three, “Metropolis,” which Phil elevates eons o’er and above the murky studio version, aided and abetted by Lemmy’s gorgeous and top-shelf bass line.
Lemmy dedicates the fourth track on the album, “The Hammer,” “To Little Philbert,” after which comes the older performance, “Iron Horse.” Once more it is Phil that gets—and gives—the most spirited workout, but this one’s got probably the best bass sound from Lemmy on the album, making it a huge improvement over the version on the crusty debut.
Concerning the dedication on the last track of side one on the original vinyl, Lemmy quips that, “Because Phil’s already had one, this one’s for me and Eddie” after which “No Class,” the band’s NWOBHM update on ZZ Top’s “Tush,” gives new heavy metal meaning to the term shuffle.
Onto side two and the band absolutely tear it up on “Overkill,” injecting new violence and speed, Phil impossibly bashing harder, Eddie hitting his marks aggressively, arguably setting the tempo, pushing Phil harder with every revisitation of the riff. After roadie Ian “Eagle” Dobbie does his scheduled roaring into the mic, Lemmy dedicates “(We Are) The Road Crew” to “a fine body of men” and then croaks his way painfully through the song, his voice on the ropes.
“We just recorded it as it was,” recalls Eddie on the transition of these headbanging anthems from stage to the vinyl that made physical the performances. “We did do a little bit of fucking about in the studio, I seem to remember. I think there were a couple of vocals that needed just some tightening up. There might’ve been a couple of bits and bobs we fucked with. As you do. But the crowds were fucking great. We didn’t need to add any crowds as far as I can remember.”
“Capricorn” is next (“a slow one so you can get mellowed out,” says Lem), and once again it is Phil who proves his prowess most with tasty fills and a display of strength that propels the track way beyond the original. “Bomber” follows at light speed and with punk rock fury, with Phil’s double bass drumming prominent, leaving only “Motörhead,” which is preceded by Lemmy’s cryptic, “Just in case,” a subject of controversy and query over the years. Just in case of what? Just in case the plug gets pulled on the gig? Just in case they keel over and die onstage? The mystery continues.
Exemplary of the band’s do-no-wrong run of good luck at the time, “Motörhead,” the album’s oldest and trashiest track, as well as arguably the most haplessly written, would be issued as a single (backed with “Over the Top”), becoming the band’s biggest U.K. hit ever, peaking at No. 6.
What’s more, backstage in Leeds and Newcastle, the band was presented with silver records for Overkill and the St. Valentines Day Massacre EP as well as a gold record for Ace of Spades, making them fully sated big fish in a medium-sized pond, further confirmed when the album improbably vaulted to the No. 1 slot on the U.K. charts, by far the nastiest, most uncompromisingly heavy record to ever reach that loftiest of plateaus.
“It was our peak time,” agrees Eddie. “The bummer, though, about the album, No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, we were in America when it came out and went straight to No. 1. And normally you’d be in the fucking pub and in the clubs, right? Everybody’d be buying you drinks. But of course we weren’t there. Typical Motörhead. We were on the road in the U.S.A. with Ozzy in Beaumont, Texas, with Mountain, strangely, opening the show. Because they had to be somewhere else, Leslie, who is a very good guy, used my amps that night, and I can honestly say they never sounded so good. But we missed all the free drinks we would have been eligible for back in London, and it was all over by the time we returned to the U.K. It was a bad time to have a No. 1 album, but I can live with that.”
Not only were they away for the accolades, but earlier on, they were away for the finalizing of the mixes. “Yeah, we were in America for that too, and as I remember it, they sent us a rough mix of some of the stuff, and we were having a rave-up. We were in Detroit, which would’ve been May. We were with our agent, Nick Caris, and we were at his office in Detroit, and we were partying that night at his place, and we played the tapes, and we thought it was terrible. It was the mix of the album we played him, and we hated it, just the mixes. So we sent a six-foot-long fax to Gerry Bron at Bronze Records, telling him what we wanted changed and all that. And at the end of it, we said, ‘If you put it out on us, we’re going to kill you.’ He put it out anyway. It went straight to No. 1. They didn’t do any changes. They put it out as it was, even after us sending him a six-foot fax telling him we’re going to kill him. But of course it came out and went straight to No. 1. And as I say, we were in America at the time, so we missed all that.”
But at least Eddie got to rectify the situation 20 years later, being in on the remix of the album for the hugely expanded version issued by Sanctuary/Metal-Is in 2001. “We had a situation with the record company, whereby I got involved with doing the mixing on it. What happened was, we didn’t really want to change No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith, the original, because it was a classic record. But as it turned out, the record company would have expanded it anyway, as record companies do. They want to give away more later just to keep a little bit of something going. So I spoke to Lemmy and Phil about it and we agreed that because I’m here in the country, I should at least go in and keep an eye on it and do a bit of mixing on it. So that’s how that came about. I didn’t want people to think it was just being thrown out there for any old reason. We did as much as we could. We are all very pleased with it. The material we added on didn’t have the overdubs. Because we replaced a couple of things on the original, because Lemmy’s voice was a little bit shot because we had been touring a lot. So back then we had the opportunity to change a few things. But obviously in the second lot, we couldn’t change anything; it’s got more of a nice life feel somehow.”
But nearly four decades on, people are still scratching their heads as to how Motörhead could have such a hit with such an egregiously noisy and distortion-drenched live album.
“It’s to do with the whole Motörhead attitude, what we kind of stood for back in those days,” answers Eddie, asked why No Sleep’til Hammersmith was so popular. After all, again, logic would dictate that Motörhead in the studio was already a pile of abrasive signals, one would think only accessible to the most metal-tolerable of potential consumers. And along comes a live record of those songs, played fast and loose, ferocious, naturally dirty songs played much dirtier. Who the heck was buying all these copies of No Sleep ’til Hammersmith?!
“I used to think the show had a lot to do with it,” wonders Eddie, agreeing with the characterization. “Having the bomber and stuff like that, and generally so fucking loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. But obviously you can’t include that on the record. So I think it’s just the thought that somehow we did capture that as well. When it came out, the kids and everybody who was a fan of Motörhead used to enjoy the live gig so much that a live album sort of takes them back there. So they get a little piece of the magic of the gig. Because our gigs were kinda special. Obviously the sound used to vary because of the volume and stuff, but it was always a good show. We were a great band and a great live band, and everything we did was for live. And I think with Motörhead, there was a charm with the live shows. People used to come to the shows, and it wasn’t just the songs and the music. It was an event.
“I went to see fucking Queen,” continues Eddie, drawing comparisons. “I saw Zeppelin, I saw Bowie, you know, back in the ’70s, and you go to the show, and after halfway through you go, I’ve had enough this, really. I might as well go put the record on. Not Zeppelin so much, but Queen, definitely. And Bowie a little bit. But Motörhead wasn’t like that. You went to Motörhead, you couldn’t get that in plastic, you know what I mean? The whole event, the vibe you got at the gigs, the bomber, the sweat, the noise—it was an event. And I’ve spoken to people since, and they always talk about going to a Motörhead concert. When I’m talking to them, I’m thinking, they didn’t just go for the music. They went to see Motörhead, but not Motörhead playing music—it was Motörhead: the event. And I think the live album was that. I think when people bought the live album and put it on, it took them back to the event. As opposed to, ‘Oh, listen to that guitar solo. Isn’t he fantastic?’ It was fucking great in those days getting your ears blasted out, you know?”
Lemmy had a way of bringing the fans into it as well. Even from the few lines he throws out on No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, there’s a sense that he’s (begrudgingly) glad you’re there, and that he was going to treat you with a level of intelligence because you’ve made the effort to drag yourself down to the show. He’s a frontman that detests the tropes of frontmen. This is not a “Hello Cleveland!” kind of pony show. It’s more “We’re Motörhead and we play rock ’n’ roll” and brief inside jokes with the hundreds of people inside, including a shared laugh over just who, really, has bought the new album. In a sense, he’s not going to suffer fools gladly, just like in his interviews, but he’s pretty sure there are few fools in the crowd anyway, because after all, they have the good cynical sense to be at a Motörhead show.
“Lemmy was a very serious frontman,” continues Eddie. “He took his job very seriously. Yeah, he was a funny man, but he loved every minute of it. He didn’t have any contempt for the audience at all. He did it 100 percent. He was honest and he had a wry sense of humor. We were all honest; we weren’t trying to lie. And I guess you’ve hit on it there. Being honest was our thing; we weren’t trying to sound better than we were, but we were just doing the best job we possibly could. And Lemmy always had a nice turn of phrase; he always had a good vocabulary, Lemmy. So he could come up with good things. Whenever you hear his interviews, he’s always got a little something to say.”
“He was a very good guitar player,” says Angel Witch bassist and Bronze Records label mate Kevin Riddles, assessing Eddie’s place within Motörhead. “He used to rein it in a little bit sometimes. Because he could quite happily go off and widdle away, like most guitarists can for hours on end. But he knew what was required in Motörhead, and did it, I think, brilliantly. And yeah, he was the thinker, if you like. Lemmy is the tactician, if that’s the right way to put it. Lemmy’s the quarterback, Eddie was probably more like the wide receiver and that sort of stuff. He was brilliant at what he did, incredibly quick, occasionally had to rein it in for the good of the band. But that was classic Motörhead, to me, just classically brilliant.”
As for the dynamic in a studio setting, Riddles continues, “I saw them once and it was the most chaotic thing I’d ever seen. Phil just played all the time. He never stopped hitting something. So there was always that noise of a drum kit going in the background. And then all of a sudden, Lemmy would shout, ‘Right, here we go, one, two, three, four,’ and off they go. And somehow it would all come together. But I know that at that time, the only time they ever did any overdubs was at the intro of the song, because they never came in all together. So by the time it came to like the verse, they were all where they were supposed to be. But leading up to the verse, they were never together. It was only when they got to the verse. And when they came to listen to it, they’d always go back into the studio and do the first bit again and splice it back together. That happened on three or four cases I know.”
But on stage, the band was all black clothes and smoke, Eddie, the second coming of Blue Cheer’s Dickie Peterson, buried in his long hair, Phil givin ’er, and Lemmy croaking up at his mic. “That was to help him to sing,” explains Eddie on Lemmy’s battle stance. “When it’s that high, to sing up like that, it opens up his throat, and it makes a clear passage. The air goes straight up and out your mouth. If you have it down, you’re almost cutting off your throat a bit. And Lemmy used to always be able to sort of shout up. He’d position it so he could shout up.
“I tell you what, I think we looked great,” laughs Clarke. “Now that I look back on it. I didn’t really pay very much attention to what we looked like, but on reflection now, we really did look fucking great. Bands out there now, they go out in their fucking pipe and slippers, or you had the spandex look not long afterwards with the hair and the makeup. But we didn’t do any of that. We went on with our jeans and stuff, bullet belts, leather jackets. We wore those in the street. That’s what we wore all day, really. And I just thought we looked kind of real. I think we looked quite serious, really.”
But, again, it’s not so much a biker look. “Well, not really. But like we had to say in an interview once, well, actually, I don’t own a motorbike; I don’t ride one. And so even though a lot of bikers had taken us to their hearts, we weren’t actually bikers.”
What they were was approachable. And fully anti–rock star. According to Rob Godwin, one might trace this ethic back to Lemmy’s time in Hawkwind. In this light, Motörhead came honestly and naturally to their role as bridge band between long-haired rock and music by people with hair like Phil’s. “At that point in time, by ’75,” says Rob, “when Motörhead first came on the scene, bands like Priest and AC/DC were just getting recognition, the punks come in and derail many different subgenres of rock music, including prog and psychedelia. And everything was being tossed out. But Hawkwind and Motörhead just plowed right through, because they had a connection with their fans that was more in sync with what the punks were saying. Which is, you know, we don’t want these big rock guys looking down on us from 60-foot-high stages and from behind a moat. You want to go and have a beer with them at the bar.
“And that was something that Hawkwind had cultivated,” continues Godwin. “I don’t think they consciously cultivated it. It was just something that they’d been doing since the beginning, right from playing outside the gates of the Isle of Wight festival in 1970. While Hendrix was playing inside, they’re playing outside the gates for free. That mindset, I think the punks sort of latched onto. It was like, these guys, they’re the same as us. And I have to say that that mindset continued in the sense that you could always go and find Lemmy at the bar at the Rainbow. He wasn’t going to go hide behind a castle wall. And it’s the same with Hawkwind today. The last time I saw Hawkwind was a year and a half ago playing some theatre in Yorkshire, and before the show they were in the pub next door, with all the audience. I can’t say what other bars they’d be in, but having said that, the Hammersmith Odeon was one of those places that Motörhead, obviously, played. It is a very well-known large venue in the West End of London, and it had pubs all around. Even now, they’re still gathering places for punters before the shows. I went to see Kate Bush a year ago, and every pub within spitting distance of the Hammersmith Odeon was overflowing with the punters. Needless to say Kate Bush wasn’t in the pub, but you can bet your ass Hawkwind and Motörhead would’ve been there.
“There’s an authenticity about it, right? You could tell Motörhead was the real deal. I don’t think they got into it for the money. They got into it because they wanted to be musicians. They wanted to play rock music. And like I say, in Lemmy’s case, certainly, that whole mentality came from Hawkwind. They would play a paid show and then five minutes later they’d go and play somewhere for free. And I think that whole outlaw counterculture thing went all the way down the pipe to Lemmy as well.”
Addressing the band’s visual image, Rob clearly sees the connection of Taylor to the punks. “Yeah, I think so. His image, with the piercings and the spiky hair and sort of ripped clothes and everything else, he was always like Animal from the Muppets. And when he first came on the scene, yeah, I think he complemented Lemmy’s image. Lemmy had started to cultivate a biker look. I have to say that the first time we really got a sense of that was that shot for the cover of the NME in the mid-’70s, a famous photo of him in shades sitting on a long-neck chopper, and there’s a girl on the bike with him. That was like the first time that we saw him doing the sort of Hells Angel/Easy Rider thing. But he was just another one of the guys.”
So like their fans and like bikers, the guys in the band lived fast, traveled light, and could always be available for a pint—Lemmy would indeed tell me at the end of every phone interview in advance of a show (and I’m sure everybody else he talked to as well), “Come say hi and we’ll have a beer.” Furthermore—between the three—there would be no marriages and only one child (Lemmy’s son, Paul Inder). One can debate the number and intensity of regrets, but I’m sure there are a few for each of the three members of the classic Motörhead lineup. There was not even much in the way of transportation or purchased accommodation, although, as Kevin Riddles relates, once the band had a bit of money in their pocket, Lemmy upgraded his digs, which nonetheless remained a rental until jettisoned.
“He used to live on a beautiful houseboat on the River Thames in London, in Chelsea,” recalls Riddles. “And I walked in there one day, and the one thing I noticed by their absence, there wasn’t a single piece of musical equipment. Not one—there wasn’t a guitar, there wasn’t a ukulele, there wasn’t a juice harp, there wasn’t a kazoo, nothing. And I just happened to say, ‘So where do you practice?’ And he goes, ‘What the hell would I want to fucking practice for?’ And that was it. He, by his own lights, by his own admission, developed his style. And the way he played during his Hawkwind days, if it was good enough in 1970, so it was good enough for the rest of his career, basically. And that’s all he did. That’s what he did. That’s why it’s unique.”
Eddie adds his thoughts on no instruments in the place. “When you’re in a band and you’re rehearsing every other fucking day. I mean, I always had a guitar on the side, but I was too busy partying and shagging birds to fucking play the fucking thing. You know what I mean? Someone to pick you up and stick you in a fucking rehearsal room and put a guitar in your hand and say ‘Go,’ and you go off. Fucking great. It was a little bit like that. But Lemmy wasn’t, like I say, about the jamming thing. Lemmy wasn’t the greatest man for rehearsal. I used to like rehearsing; I used to enjoy it. And I know Phil did. But Lemmy didn’t like it.”
Back to the home on the river. “Fucking cold in there, mate,” remembers Eddie. “Yeah, he had this fucking houseboat. I only went on there a couple of times to go and see him. And of course trying to get to it, you had to jump across all these other boats to get there, which, being a piss-head, could be quite difficult at times. But no, he stayed on there. That must’ve been about 1981, I guess. That might’ve been about the Ace of Spades tour; I’ve got to think it was. But it was very cold, very damp. Great in the summer, but in the winter, cold and damp. In fact, we worried about Lem on that. In fact, he tried to buy the fucking thing, if I remember rightly, but they wouldn’t give him a mortgage on it. He fell out of love with it eventually, but there was something he kind of liked about it. I think it was the fact that he felt a little bit cut off from everybody there—he kind of liked that.”
“Phil had his old green Camaro,” says Eddie, on any other material possessions the guys had, now that they could afford them, albeit modestly. Confirms Phil, “I was out to buy a bike once, and my manager said, ‘You’ll be dead in a week,’ so I bought a Camaro instead. I was dead in three weeks.
“What did I have? I had a fuckin’ old piece of junk,” continues Clarke. “I was never really bothered about cars. Lemmy doesn’t drive. I never had a fancy car. Fancy cars never did it for us, especially me. You know, the last thing I want to be seen in is a fancy fucking car. It’s not my cup of tea at all. We sort of tried to buy some houses, sort of after Ace of Spades, and after No Sleep in the early ’80s. Phil managed to put a deposit on a flat, in I think ’82, and I was going to buy something in ’82. But then of course I wasn’t in the band anymore. So that went up the Swannee.
“I mean, the thing with us, we didn’t give a shit. We didn’t think about things like that. I remember, I was living in this flat, and I was living in it for years. And the owner spoke to me and said, ‘Do you want to buy it for X amount of money?’ And it was cheap. I thought, what do I want to do that for? You’re rocking and rolling, you just want to carry on what you’re doing, going to rehearsals, writing songs, doing gigs and being on tour, you know? There was nothing else for Motörhead.”