White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (12 page)

Originally, I had intended that Motörhead be a four-piece band, and we tried out a couple of different guitarists. One was Ariel Bender – known at the time as Luther Grosvenor – who was in Mott the Hoople and Spooky Tooth. We did a few rehearsals with him, but it didn’t work out. He was a nice guy, but he just
wasn’t our type. He didn’t have the same sense of humor as the rest of us, and I couldn’t imagine being on a bus with him. So we carried on as a three-piece until we found Eddie Clarke . . . and wound up carrying on as a three-piece anyhow.

Phil met Eddie while they were both renovating a houseboat down in Chelsea. But it wasn’t Phil who brought him to us, it was Aeroplane Gertie, who was a receptionist for this rehearsal studio in Chelsea. We were rehearsing there for free – if somebody quit early and there were a couple of hours left, we’d whip our gear in and use the leftover time. Gertie used to wear a hat with a plastic aeroplane stuck on it, hence the name Aeroplane Gertie. She was living with Eddie, and it was she who brought him round to the rehearsal studio. We decided to try him out, and it turned out to be a very weird situation. Larry didn’t show up right away, so me, Eddie and Phil began jamming. It was going along pretty well by the time Larry showed up, hours later. Then Larry started playing along, but he was so loud that we couldn’t hear anything else for half an hour. After that, he left and that was it, he’d quit the band. And Larry was the one who was always on to us about getting another guitar player, so go figure.

But Motörhead always worked really great as a trio anyway (and still does today). If there’s two guitars, then you have to sort of toe the line a bit, because if the two guitarists ain’t together – and the bass too, of course! – it’s really messy. But with only one guitar player, you can do anything. I used to play all kinds of weird shit behind Eddie and it would work.

Right off the bat, I was trying to find nicknames for everyone.
Nicknames are good, people like them. So Eddie became ‘Fast Eddie’ Clarke, which was logical, really. I mean, he was a fast guitar player. Phil became Phil ‘Dangerous’ Taylor for a few months, but although the nickname was apt – he certainly was dangerous to himself! – it didn’t last. It was Motorcycle Irene who christened him ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor. By then, Phil and Irene were living together, so she knew whereof she spoke.

Eddie and Phil were great friends – at one point, Phil was living at Eddie’s house. They were as close as brothers, which was occasionally problematical because they fought like brothers, too. Like one would turn around and the other would say something and the next thing you know,
bang
! They were beating the shit out of each other. The two of ’em used to fistfight all the fucking time. On the way to one gig we had in Brighton, Phil and Eddie were punching each other in the van the whole way down. By the time we got there, Phil had a black eye and Eddie’s arm was bad. But when it was time to go on, I said, ‘Okay, that’s it. On stage.’ And they both straightened up and went, ‘Ahem! Okay!’ and we did the show. Then when we were coming off the stage, Phil smacked Eddie in the back of the neck and sent him sprawling, and there they went all over again. As fighters, they were pretty well matched.

Eddie was always thought of amongst our fans as the quiet one, but he was more vicious than Phil. He really is a nasty piece of work when the fists start flying. I remember him and Phil both rescuing me out of a fight. This guy jumped me from behind in this boozer in Portobello Road, and Eddie and Phil got a hold of
him and his two mates and they just wound them out the door and kicked them down the street! I never even got a chance to get a punch in. I couldn’t get at them because Phil and Eddie had ’em busy. Incidentally, the week after that, the geezer from the pub broke a pool cue over my head! Those were the days, eh?

This new line-up of Motörhead had been working together for a few months when Tony Secunda got us a deal to make a single for Stiff Records. So some time during the summer of 1976, we did ‘White Line Fever’ – a song that the three of us had written together – and ‘Leaving Here’ for the label. Somehow, UA got wind of this and started giving us trouble because we weren’t yet officially out of our contract with them. At that point, we hadn’t talked to UA in months – I don’t know why they gave a shit. But they kept the single from being released until 1977, which frustrated us.

All through the rest of ’76 and early ’77, we played gigs here and there, a lot of one-offs. I remember at one gig, in a disco place in Shrewsbury – Tiffany’s, for God’s sake! – Eddie and I both fell flat on our backs onstage. It was one of those slippery plastic floors with lights under it. But the crew only lifted me up – Eddie used to treat them like servants so they left him down there. There he was, lying on his back, waiting confidently to be picked up and it never happened. On the way to another gig, Phil was angry about something and kicked the side of the van, breaking his toe. By this point, the morale of the band was getting pretty low; all our efforts were getting us nowhere. We were starving, living in squats and nothing was happening. I was well prepared to keep
going but Phil and Eddie wanted to give it up. It wasn’t their band and they didn’t have the commitment I did. So finally in April, after much debate, we decided to do a goodbye show at the Marquee in London and call it a day.

Around this time, I had hooked up with Ted Carroll from Chiswick Records. I asked Ted to bring a mobile studio down to the gig so we could document our farewell performance and our fans would have something to remember us by. Well, Ted apparently couldn’t get the studio down to the Marquee, but he did show up backstage after we played, and he made us an offer.

‘If you want to make a single, I’ll schedule you two days at Escape Studio in Kent.’

So we went down to Escape with producer Speedy Keen, who had been in a band called Thunderclap Newman, which had a No. 1 hit in England with the song ‘Something in the Air’. In two days, we recorded eleven backing tracks with no vocals. We all agreed there was no point in doing a single, because we wanted to at least leave an album as a memento. So we just barrelled our way through an album’s worth of material in forty-eight hours with no sleep. Speedy Keen and the engineer, John Burns, were speeding out of their heads because they couldn’t afford to go to sleep – they didn’t have the time, and they wanted to make an album as much as we did. They mixed twenty-four versions of ‘Motörhead’ alone! Then they asked me which one I liked the best, as if I would remember. I mean, you can’t tell after three. I just said, ‘Fuck it! That one!’

At the end of the two days, Ted came down to hear two
finished songs and we gave him eleven unfinished ones. But as he was listening, he was doing the boogie at the back of the studio, so we knew we’d got him! He gave us a few more days to finish vocals and such, and
Motörhead
was our first album to see the light of day. By then, we had wrestled our freedom away from UA, so we were back in business.

We recorded a total of thirteen songs for Chiswick and eight of them wound up on the album. Much of
Motörhead
was material from
On Parole
, which we re-recorded: ‘Motörhead’, ‘Vibrator’, ‘Lost Johnny’, ‘Iron Horse’, ‘Born to Lose’ and ‘The Watcher’. We also did two new songs, ‘White Line Fever’ and ‘Keep Us On the Road’, and a Johnny Burnett song, ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’ (you’re probably familiar with Aerosmith’s version of it – it was a hit for them). The other songs that didn’t wind up on the album included ‘City Kids’, which was a B-side for the ‘Motörhead’ single; a ZZ Top song called ‘Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers’; ‘I’m Your Witchdoctor’ – a great song by John Mayall and Eric Clapton; ‘On Parole’, and an instrumental jam which was appropriately called ‘Instro’. Those last four songs were released as
The Beer Drinkers EP
in 1980, long after we’d left Chiswick and not-so-coincidentally near the peak of our success. Once again, it was cash-in time – for the record labels, at least. I’ve never recorded more than we need since! But having said that, I don’t begrudge Ted Carroll that – he saved my band, after all!

It was about this time that we were starting to have some differences with Secunda. For one thing, he wanted us to get our hair cut! Obviously we weren’t gonna do that. Doug Smith started
coming back into the picture when he put us on a tour through England with Hawkwind, whom he was still managing. That was in June of 1977. But with our usual bit of luck, Phil broke his hand in a fight on the day before the tour. We were all at my house, painting our equipment, and this guy came over, a junkie who was a real drag. We told him to leave, but he wouldn’t go, so Phil hustled him out the door and punched him. Unfortunately, this shoved Phil’s knuckle back to about the centre of his hand. So we ended up gaffer-taping the drumstick to Phil’s bandaged hand, and we did the whole tour that way. Other than that, it was a good tour, and things were fine between us and Hawkwind.

Phil injured himself again a couple of months later, with more disastrous results. We’d just started a headlining tour to promote the new album, which was due out in a few days, and we were supported by a band called the Count Bishops, who were very good. We called it the ‘Beyond the Threshold of Pain Tour’, which should have given us a hint. Round about the fifth show, Phil got into an argument with Bobs, one of our roadies, over Motorcycle Irene. This time he broke his wrist instead of his knuckle, so we had to cancel the whole tour. Tony Secunda fired Bobs that night, but it wasn’t really Bobs’ fault. It was unfortunate because Bobs had worked hard for us – he was actually going down to phone boxes with bags of two-pence pieces and getting us gigs. But in the end, I guess it didn’t matter – we had to wait for Phil’s hand to heal before we did any more shows, and we were offstage until November, when we did a show at the Marquee.

During the first few months of 1978, nothing much was happening; the odd gig here and there, including one in Colwyn Bay, near where I grew up, but that was about it. Tony Secunda had had some sort of dispute with Chiswick and fired them. I believe it was also around this time that we parted ways with Tony. He bailed out, and eventually went to work for Shelter Records in San Francisco. In 1995, he died, rest in peace. This was a bleak period for us. It seemed like we couldn’t even get arrested. Our lack of forward motion was getting to Eddie and Phil once again, so they went off and did some shows with Speedy Keen and a bassist, Billy Rath (who had played with Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers and Iggy Pop). They called themselves the Muggers. I think Speedy wanted to form a band with them permanently, and he might have been successful because we were about to break up. But finally Doug Smith took us back and got us a deal with Bronze Records, who had bands like Uriah Heep and the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band on its roster. It was just for a single – they wanted to see how it did before they invested any more money in us – but it turned out to be the beginning of our long-awaited upward ascent.

Not only did the Bronze deal give us a shot in the arm, we would have our biggest hits with the label. And, really, they treated us quite well there. Not that we appreciated it at the time. In fact, we found a lot to gripe about! We thought Bronze gave us a hard time, but considering the dealings I’ve had with record companies since, they were fucking great. Since then, I’ve often looked back on the Bronze days with nostalgia. The label head,
Gerry Bron, and his wife, Lillian, were really enthusiastic about us and A&R exec Howard Thompson – who was the one responsible for signing us – was brilliant. They believed in us and made some good efforts on our behalf.

So that summer we went into Wessex Studios in London and recorded ‘Louie Louie’, with one of our own numbers, ‘Tear Ya Down’, as a B-side. Covering ‘Louie Louie’ was an idea Phil had come up with some months back, when we were still with Tony Secunda. We’d been sifting through some old songs, and I wanted to cover a Chuck Berry song, ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, or something like that, but ‘Louie Louie’ was the better choice, really. I think we did a very good version of it – people tell me that it’s one of the few times it’s been recorded where the lyrics can be understood! Actually, I only got the first two verses and then the last verse was largely improvised. We produced it jointly with this guy, Neil Richmond. We never did work with him again, but he was good . . . except for that weird clavioline thing he put in. I thought that was suspicious. We used to call him Neil Fishface. I don’t recall why, ’cause he didn’t really have a fishface – well, only from certain angles.

Anyhow, the single was released on 25 August 1978 (the photograph of us on the sleeve, incidentally, was shot by Motorcycle Irene). By the end of September, it had gone up to No. 68 in the charts, which was enough for Bronze to give us the go-ahead for a full album. As it was making its move up the charts, we started a tour around England, but before we took off, I had my brief excursion with the Damned.

In America, the Damned were never more than a good-sized cult band, but in England they were much more famous. They were the true punk band,
not
the Sex Pistols. The Pistols were a great rock ’n’ roll band, but really that’s all they were. I actually gave Sid Vicious some bass lessons – he came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Lemmy, teach me how to play bass,’ and I said, ‘All right, Sid.’ But after three days I had to tell him, ‘Sid, you can’t play bass.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I know,’ and he was all depressed and went off. Then a couple of months later I saw him down at the Speakeasy and he said, ‘Hey, Lemmy, guess what! I’m in the Pistols!’ ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘I’m the bass player in the Pistols!’ he said. ‘It’s great, innit?’ ‘You can’t play bass, Sid.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, I know, but I’m in the fucking Pistols!’ Steve Jones just taught him the basic bum-bum-bum-bum. That’s all he had to do, really. Anything more complex than that on the album, it’s either Steve or Glen Matlock. Sid – he wanted to be in a punk band so bad. He’d been in a band called Flowers of Romance for about three weeks, and in Siouxsie and the Banshees for about three days – he just talked everybody into it. But he was very good for the image. He was perfect – fuckin’ hell, he out-Pistolled the Pistols as far as image was concerned!