The story behind MOTÖRHEAD’s stupidly iconic, er, Motörhead.
Ace Of Spades might have cemented Motörhead’s legacy, but it was a song originally written for a different band that changed their lives forever
It was the song that gave a name to one of the greatest and loudest bands on Earth; the song that defined the man who wrote it as the epitome of the sex and drugs and rock’n’roll lifestyle; a song that had a profound influence on such groundbreaking bands as Metallica, Venom and
Napalm Death. But when Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister wrote Motörhead almost 45 years ago, it was, he said, “just another song.” Nobody, least of all Lemmy himself, could have foreseen that this song would become the most important that he would ever write.
In 1974, Lemmy was 28 years old and the bassist for space rock gurus Hawkwind. He’d been in the band for three years, and had sung lead vocal on their biggest hit, Silver Machine, which had reached Number Three on the UK chart in June 1972. But as a songwriter, he was feeling frustrated. Dave Brock, Hawkwind’s leader, wrote the bulk of the band’s material, and as Lemmy wearily recalled, “there was never much interest in my songs in Hawkwind.”
Nevertheless, Lemmy stuck at it, and when Hawkwind reached Los Angeles on a 1974 US tour, he found the inspiration for a new song during an all-night booze and drugs bender. The band were staying at the Continental Hyatt House hotel on Sunset Boulevard, an establishment nicknamed ‘The Riot House’ by music business insiders after numerous wild parties staged there by visiting rock stars – most famously Led Zeppelin, whose drummer John Bonham once rode a motorcycle along the hotel’s corridors. It was the perfect setting for Lemmy to fully immerse himself in the rock’n’roll lifestyle – and to write a song about it.
On the balcony that opened out from his room on the hotel’s seventh floor, with panoramic views of North Hollywood and beyond, Lemmy wrote the song in one marathon overnight session fuelled by whiskey and speed, and using an Ovation acoustic guitar that he had borrowed from Roy Wood, whose band Wizzard (yes, the ones that did the Christmas song) were also holed up at the Hyatt. “I don’t remember the exact chronology of the night,” Lemmy said, understandably given the circumstances. “But I had been up for a few hours before I started writing, and I was still up at seven in the morning, howling away at the top of my voice.” He remembers seeing cars pulling up on the street below, as early morning commuters looked up open-mouthed at the bizarre spectacle of a screaming longhaired lunatic apparently about to jump to his death. And yet, amazingly, there were no complaints from fellow hotel guests. “Mind you,” he said, “it was a lot wilder in them days at the Hyatt.”
What Lemmy bashed out that night was, in his words, “a basic rock’n’roll number”. And its lyrics were effectively a running commentary on the night’s events – a classic case of art imitating life. The opening couplet placed
Lemmy as a mad Englishman abroad: ‘Sunrise, wrong side of another day/Sky high, six thousand miles away.’ The refrain ‘Remember me now…’ was a reference to his many one-night stands – what he referred to as “hit and run” encounters. And the song’s title was adapted from American slang. “A motorhead,” he explained, “is someone who talks all the time. I heard the expression and I thought it was rather apt.” Lemmy was also “very proud” of the fact that Motörhead is the first and perhaps the only rock song ever to include the word ‘parallelogram’. Even Neil Peart of Rush, a man known for his intellectualism as ‘The Professor,’ couldn’t beat that.
LeMMy was surprIsed when Dave Brock consented to record the song with Hawkwind. They cut it at London’s Olympic Studios in January 1975, with Lemmy singing lead. And if this first recorded version of the song was a little sluggish for Lemmy’s taste, he did like the jazz-inspired violin solo by the band’s keyboard player Simon
House – included, he said, because Hawkwind “endeavoured to perplex people.” Motörhead was used as a b-side for the Hawkwind single Kings Of
Speed. “How ironic,” Lemmy noted.
But a greater irony was to follow. In May 1975, Lemmy was fired from Hawkwind after being busted for possession of cocaine on the Canadian/American border. He was jailed for five days, resulting in the cancellation of several gigs. And although he was released after the drugs found on him were identified as amphetamines – a lesser offence, for which the charges were dropped – he returned to London jobless.
But Lemmy wasn’t finished. And with a song that Hawkwind dismissed as no more than a b-side, he had the template for a new band that would become one of the most famous and influential in the history of rock’n’roll. Joined by guitarist Larry Wallis and drummer Lucas Fox, Lemmy originally named this new band Bastard. But, as he recalled: “A friend said, ‘You probably won’t get a lot of Top Of The Pops action with a name like that.’
So I went with Motörhead.”
This name was perfectly suited to the band’s music: “loud, fast, city, raucous, arrogant, paranoid, speedfreak rock’n’roll”, as Lemmy himself described it. But it took a little time to really nail that sound – as illustrated by Motörhead’s first recording of their signature song in 1976. To Lemmy’s mind, this version was “too slow”, and it remained unreleased until the band became successful in 1979. It was only after Fox was sacked and Wallis quit that the definitive full-throttle version of the song was recorded in 1977 by the classic Motörhead line-up of Lemmy, guitarist ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke and drummer ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor.
And, in keeping with the song’s subject matter, this version was recorded with the whole band – and their producer, the aptly named ‘Speedy’ Keen – all buzzing on amphetamines. “We were at Jeff Beck’s studio, Escape, in Kent,” Lemmy recalled. “And we were out of our heads. Speedy did 19 fucking mixes of Motörhead and said, ‘Which one do you like the best?’ I just pointed at one and said, ‘That one.’”
What they created was a fast and loose rock’n’roll anthem, which in
1977 resonated with punks and headbangers alike. And for many musicians that followed, Motörhead would be a touchstone. Says Napalm Death singer Barney Greenway: “That song had a primal power. It was fast and right on the edge of control – it really sounded like it was about to come off the rails at any point. It had a real ‘fuck it’ mentality. And it became a huge influence for so many bands, from punks like Discharge to metal bands like Venom and Metallica. I believe that extreme music began with Motörhead, and all the stuff that followed would not have happened without that one song. That’s how important and influential it was.”
Motörhead has not only been recorded by Hawkwind and Motörhead themselves, but by a diverse array of other bands, including Primal Scream, thrash metal jokers Lawnmower Deth and US hardcore punks Poison Idea. For Lemmy, the best cover version was by Oi! ruffians the Cockney Rejects on
“I WAS STILL UP AT 7AM, HOWLING AT THE TOP OF MY VOICE”
LEMMY
their 1981 album, Greatest Hits Vol.3: Live & Loud. “That was good,” he said. “Quite lively.”
the song was a staple in Motörhead’s live set for decades. The definitive recording was on the band’s legendary 1981 live album No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith, surely the heaviest live record ever to make it to Number One on the UK chart. But in the last 10 years of the band’s existence, this was one number that they dropped from the set. “I got sick of it,” Lemmy later admitted.
By his reckoning, the song had never sounded quite right after ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor left the band in 1984. And, as he explained, this was no slur on Mikkey Dee, the drummer who served Motörhead for many years until the very end. “You need a fairly chaotic drummer for that song to sound like it should,” Lemmy said. “And Mikkey’s too good of a drummer. He’s too precise, so the song just doesn’t rave enough, you know? So that’s one of the reasons we stopped playing it.” The other reason he explained bluntly in an interview in 2014, sniffing: “I don’t really give a fuck about it anymore.”
It was with a degree of nonchalance and humility that Lemmy treated the song that started it all for him, noting, “Motörhead is just a song I wrote for Hawkwind, which was updated for Motörhead.” There was, however, a bigger truth than this. What he had created back in 1974, out of his mind in LA, was the song that set the template for Motörhead’s whole career, defining a style encapsulated in their famous motto: ‘Everything louder than everything else.’ And while Lemmy always considered Motörhead as simply a rock’n’roll band – nothing more, nothing less – the raw power and all-out attack in their music inspired countless bands to play ever harder and faster.
So many beginnings can be traced back to this one song: Venom inventing black metal, Metallica leading the first wave of thrash. Most significant of all, it was from this song that
Lemmy Kilmister began the greatest adventure of his life. From that high time in Hollywood, amid the madness of a dusk-to-dawn bender, a legend was born.
“IT SOUNDS LIKE IT’S GONNA COME OFF THE RAILS”
NAPALM DEATH’S BARNEY GREENWAY
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