Motörhead
Out of step with music fashions of the late 70s, Motörhead arrived with barely with an audience or a future. Then they released Overkill and boarded a rocket to the moon.
“Too metal for punk, too punk for metal. F**k that, we were neither.”
It was make or break, simple as that,” said Lemmy. We were sitting in his Ladbroke pad – like a cross between Steptoe’s yard and the living room of The Young Ones. It was about 1984. But it could have been any time during the 35 years I knew him. He was drinking from a pint glass of Jack Daniel’s and Coke and smoking two cigarettes at once, one with something funny in it. On the table between us lay a huge mirror he had taken down off the wall, on its surface a small hill of white powder. Not salt. Or sugar. He pawed at it with a large hunting knife.
“We were sick of being treated like a joke, or a sort of freak show,” he continued. “Too metal for punk, too punk for metal. Fuck that, we were neither. It wasn’t until we did Overkill, though, that even we knew what we were, really. That was the album that changed everything for us.”
It certainly was. Until its release in 1979, Motörhead had, as Lemmy correctly suggested, been something of a joke, beyond the gangs of bikers and their old ladies that followed them. Or rather, just not taken seriously. Lemmy had been in Hawkwind, for God’s sake. In the crumbling post-punk London of 1979, Hawkwind were about as fashionable as a toilet seat round the neck. He sounded horrible too, like a giant gargling with rusty nails. And they had all this hair down their backs, all over their faces. And they made records like
Louie Louie, with guitarist ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke mirroring the electric bash-bash piano riff of the original by The Kingsmen, which frankly wasn’t all that good in the first place.
Motörhead’s record company, Bronze, thought they were crap. Label chief Gerry Bron later admitted: “The first time I heard Motörhead was when I listened to a single that I put out without hearing, which was Louie Louie, and when I heard it I was horrified. I thought it was the worst record I’ve ever heard, so it was a bit of a shock. The bigger shock was, having put out a
record I thought was terrible, it went straight into the chart at number seventy-two.”
So far, so blah.
Then, in March 1979, came Overkill, first the pummelling song, then the 150mph album. And over the course of one long, sleepless, bonerattling, bottle-smashing, speed-snorting night, everything changed. Just like that.
“We had already thrown the towel in at least twice before Overkill saved us,” Eddie Clarke told me not long before he died in 2018. “The first album we did [Motörhead, in 1977] had been thrown together in about three days, based on a handful of originals, a couple Hawkwind leftovers and Train Kept-A-Rollin’ which everybody and his dog had done before. Success for us meant coming away with a few quid from a gig, a gram of speed and a joint while some bird sucked your knob.”
It was only after Doug Smith – the Hawkwind manager they had already sacked once then gone crawling back to – took a last-ditch chance on them and forked out for them to record Louie Louie that things began at last to look up. He then took the tapes to Dave Betteridge, “an old mate” at Bronze Records. “I told Dave: ‘Let’s do a single. It’s already recorded so you don’t have to pay for it. And if it charts we’ll do a deal with you.’” Betteridge agreed to put the single out – without telling his boss, Gerry Bron. Everyone involved was astounded when the single, released on September 30, 1978 jumped straight into the chart.
“Bronze was a fucking great record company, let me tell you,” says Smith. They even parlayed the success of the single into Motörhead’s first ever appearance on Top Of The Pops. Clarke was “doing a painting and decorating job to bring a bit of cash in” when the show aired. “I had to ask the punters if we could watch their telly, because I was on in a minute! I was standing there in my overalls with a paintbrush in my hand.”
The limited chart success of Louie Louie also garnered Motörhead their first John Peel session, on which they played the single, B-side Tear Ya Down and Keep Us On The Road and I’ll Be Your Sister. Suddenly, Motörhead were in danger of actually becoming cool. That situation wasn’t hindered by Lemmy’s growing presence on the London punk scene, appearing on stage for a one-off show at the Music Machine with The Dammed (billed as The Doomed) and being photographed with Sid Vicious, who let it be known that Lemmy “was the one what taught me the bass”.
With momentum now building beneath them, a 10-date autumn ’78 British tour was extended into a full-blown extravaganza, culminating in November with Motörhead’s first headline show in their own right at Hammersmith Odeon, a venue that would become part of their growing mythology.
Motörhead’s signing to a long-term contract with Bronze now seemed like a formality. But just to be sure, Doug Smith made sure Gerry Bron was at the Odeon to gauge the reaction of the audience for himself. “I knew it was going to be full and that the fans would go mad,” says Smith, “the hard part was making sure people like Gerry and Dave and Neil [Warnock, promoter] were all there to see it.”
Doug needn’t have worried. As Gerry later told Dave Ling: “I went to see them at Hammersmith Odeon and it was packed to the rafters with people going absolutely crazy.” That was when he knew that “we had to sign them right away,” he said.
So began a four-year period in which virtually everything Lemmy and Motörhead touched turned to gold – or at the very least, silver. Four Top 20 singles, three of which went Top 10. Six Top 30 albums, including two that went Top 10 and one all the way to No.1. It was also now that Lemmy (words) and Clarke (riffs) co-wrote all the songs that would make Motörhead a legend.
“Lemmy was still finding his feet as a lyricist, and I’m not a virtuoso, I’m a journeyman,” Clarke told me. “But Clapton never came up with Ace Of Spades or Bomber. My job was giving Lemmy something to sing over. And we were a great team like that.”
The trick, he said, was: “You’re bombing along having a fucking ball, then as you’re having a ball you put a couple of little changes in, and next thing you’ve got a song.”
Drummer Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor was always credited as an equal co-writer on the albums because, said Clarke, “we knew if we did make it, that we didn’t want Lemmy and I coming to work in Rolls-Royces and Phil on a pushbike.”
Yet it was Taylor who came up with the musical motif that turned Motörhead from a street-level