White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (13 page)

Even though he couldn’t play bass worth a damn, Sid was a nice enough geezer. I got quite friendly with him. But he used to get into all sorts of fights. One night at the Marquee, he mixed it with Bruce Foxton, the bass player out of the Jam and Bruce stuck a broken glass in his face. I was walking down Wardour Street towards the Speakeasy, and the lights were still on at the
Marquee so I put my head in there – you might find some birds, you know – and there was Bruce, going, ‘Fuck me,’ and all this. I said, ‘What’s up?’ and he said, ‘I just fucking glassed Sid. I think I cut him.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m sure you cut him, else he’d still be here jumping on you.’ He was worried that he’d hurt him bad, so I went to the Speak – there used to be all these cinema seats in the front of the stage for a while and Sid was sitting right in the middle of them, all on his own. So I went over to him and said, ‘What’s up, Sid?’ ‘Cunt done me,’ he said, and he had this three-cornered fucking wound going right through his cheek. ‘You wait till I get better,’ he promised, but he never did try and do Bruce again.

One time he was trying to take a bird into the toilet for something or another and this huge Maltese bouncer who was really a hard man said, ‘You can’t go in there!’ And Sid just went for him! I’d never seen anything like it – the geezer was down on the deck, rowing backwards on his elbows up the stairs, horrified ’cause this fucking bundle of pipe cleaners in a pair of tennis shoes was kicking the shit out of him. The guy didn’t know what to make of it – Sid frightened him to fucking death! Anyway, that was the punk era for you.

So I like the Pistols, though as I said, I thought they were really a rock ’n’ roll band. And I never liked the Clash, for that matter. Joe Strummer was better in the 101’ers, the band he had before the Clash. When it came to punk, the Damned were the real thing. They never quite got it together, but they were great fun. Dave Vanian couldn’t sing, none of the guitar players could
play, and the drummer, Rat Scabies, just sort of went along with it all. But they were fucking crazy – I mean, seriously in need of professional help. One time we supported them at the Roundhouse with the Adverts. And at the start of their show, Captain Sensible – there’s a true maniac for you – came out wearing a pink ballet tutu, fishnet stockings, a pair of hobnailed boots, these big wing-tipped shades, and orange hair. And the punks all spat on them, and by the end of the gig, the band was skating around in this green goop all over the stage. They were soaked in it. And then the Captain took all his clothes off . . . of course, he used to do that at most of the gigs. When they played at another London club, the Rainbow, he took a piss on the front row. The audience was throwing seats at him, and he was throwing them back – while pissing down his leg, I hasten to add. Just your typical mid-seventies punk show – and then some.

Anyhow, I’d got to know them over the years. I met Rat at Dingwalls. I was at the bar and this over-scruffy urchin came up behind me and said, ‘Hey, you’re fucking Lemmy, are ya?’

So I replied, ‘Yeah, I fucking am.’

‘Yeah? You fucking think you’re a rock star or something?’ the little bastard inquired.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but you do. That’s why you’re talking to me.’

‘Fair enough,’ he shrugged. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

The Damned went out of business for a while, after Brian James left the band. Then when they reformed, the Captain wanted to play guitar. It was probably his idea to ask me to fill in on bass for a gig at London’s Electric Ballroom. They were call
ing themselves the Doomed for that show, but they returned to being the Damned shortly thereafter. We had about five hours of rehearsal. I learned eleven of their songs, and they learned one of mine, which they wound up fucking up on stage. I shouldn’t have even bothered having them do one of my songs, really. But it was fun, playing with those boys.

So much fun, in fact, that Eddie, Phil and I wound up doing a recording session with them, too. We recorded a couple of songs – a version of the Sweet’s ‘Ballroom Blitz’ and a Motörhead tune, ‘Over the Top’. That was a joke. The Captain was watching cricket on TV and wouldn’t come out of the TV room, for starters. And Eddie and Phil were fighting, as usual. Dave Vanian showed up late, and by then we were all drunk as shit. He took one look at us all, spun on his heel and walked straight back out. In the end, only me and the Damned bassist Algy Ward were still alive, so to speak, so we just went in and fucked around. I did a bass solo on ‘Ballroom Blitz’ and he did the vocals. That song wound up as a B-side to the Damned single, ‘I Just Can’t Be Happy Today’, but we had a rough mix that was much better than the one that appeared on the record. We never did get around to putting vocals on ‘Over the Top’. Oh yeah, and we broke the toilet bowl at the studio, too. I think the Captain kicked it in. But back to Motör-business.

We toured through September and October, and on 24 October, we filmed our first
Top of the Pops
appearance.
Top of the Pops
is a terrible programme, really. They had bands on the show who were either in the Top 30, like Slade and the Nolan Sisters (I did a record with those ‘innocent little virgins’ once – more on that
later), or who the programme thought were headed for the Top 30. There was no regard to anything like talent – it was just reflecting the charts. We weren’t anywhere near reaching the Top 30 at the time (‘Louie Louie’ had peaked at 68), but this friend of ours who worked at Bronze, Roger Bolton, used to work for the BBC, so he had a lot of handy influence. Roger wound up getting us on the show about five times before we really had a hit! In fact, Roger’s efforts on our behalf helped us quite a bit on our way up the charts, for which I will buy him a drink any time.

So we went down to the labyrinthine BBC studios to tape our appearance. It’s like a rat’s nest in there – hundreds of studios and corridors – and you need a guide to take you to the studio. It’s lunacy. Some day, all the guides are gonna be ill and everybody’s gonna be fucked. We were supposed to re-record the song, but no one ever did. We just used to remix the original track slightly, put the vocals up a little bit higher or something. Then we’d put our amps up, lean the guitars on them and turn everything on. Then the inspector from the BBC would come round to the studio to make sure you’d done the work. He knew what was going on, of course, and we knew that he knew. It was all a game – tacit agreement, we’d call it. At least we really played on our records, instead of having studio musicians, like a lot of pop stars did.

The
Top of the Pops
people treated us all right, but only because they had to. I don’t think they liked us much, really – especially because I won £100 on the one-armed bandit that was in their canteen. That pissed off everybody from the BBC, because they’d been waiting for it to pay off!

By this time we had already worked up several songs for the upcoming album, playing them on stage, and we were looking for a producer. We wound up getting Jimmy Miller, who had produced
Exile on Main Street
and
Goats Head Soup
for the Rolling Stones. So things were really starting to look up for us. Our years of struggling were paying off, and by now Phil and Eddie had stopped complaining about lack of momentum (that doesn’t mean they stopped complaining, however!). The kicker was in November, when we headlined the Hammersmith Odeon, the same place where Blue Oyster Cult had so soundly fucked us over three years earlier. It was fully packed with 3,000 fans cheering us on. You could feel the energy – our rise up the rock star food chain had begun.

W
e only had a fortnight to record
Overkill
, our second album and first for Bronze. Considering our checquered recording history, however, it was a world of time for us, and besides, being quick in the studio has always been natural for us. The whole experience was pure joy. We recorded at the Roundhouse Studios, which were next to the club of the same name in north London. Jimmy Miller was excellent, as were Trevor Hallesy and Ashley Howe, the engineers.
Overkill
was supposed to be something of a comeback album for Jimmy Miller, which is exactly what it turned out to be for him. He had gotten very heavily into heroin (which likely began when he was working with the Stones) and he had lost it for a couple of years. Since
Overkill
charted right away – it eventually peaked at 24 –
he got a lot of work from it, but months later, when we were working with him on
Bomber
, it was sadly clear that he was back on smack. Come to think of it, he must have been doing it during
Overkill
too because he’d already started showing up late now and again to the studio and coming up with completely preposterous excuses. One incident will give you a good example of his modus operandi.

This particular day, he arrived five hours late for a session, and we were all sitting in the studio, twiddling our fucking thumbs at a thousand bucks an hour, muttering, ‘That bastard! He cometh not.’ Finally, he showed up and before he was even through the fucking door, he’d launched into his tale – that way, of course, we didn’t have room to start in with, ‘You bastard! Where have you been?’ and all that.

‘Guys! Guys! You wouldn’t
believe
what happened!’ he said. ‘I called this taxi and it didn’t come, so I had to call another one, and then that arrived in the
snow
, you know what I mean? And then he ran out of gas, so we had to push it to a filling station! And then the thing on the solenoid was gone, so I had to call another cab from the filling station and he didn’t arrive for ages. And anyway, he broke down on the way after that too, and I’ve been walking through the snow for three hours! Look at my clothes!’

We knew he’d been rolling in the snow outside for three minutes to get his drawers wet – I looked out the window and saw him doing it as a matter of fact! But at least he was jovial, and he got the job done. And he took the trouble to be original, God rest his soul.

As is usual with Motörhead, there were quite a few new songs that we’d already been performing live. ‘Damage Case’, ‘No Class’, ‘I Won’t Pay Your Price’ and ‘Tear Ya Down’ were among those. Others we wrote in the studio. ‘Capricorn’ (which happens to be my astrological sign) was written in one night. Eddie’s solo for that one, I recall, happened while he was tuning up. The tape was running while he was fooling around with his guitar, and Jimmy added some echo. When Eddie finished tuning, he came in and said, ‘I’ll do it now,’ and Jimmy told him, ‘Oh, we got it.’ That saved us some money!

‘Metropolis’ was another fast one. I went to see
Metropolis
, the movie, at the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road one night, then I came home and wrote the song in five minutes. The words don’t make any sense, though. They’re complete gibberish:

See what I mean?

But some of my lyrics have more meat on ’em. I always wanted Tina Turner to record ‘I’ll Be Your Sister’, for instance – I like writing songs for women. In fact, I’ve written songs
with
women. I’ve been called sexist by some factions of radical, frigid
feminists (the kind who want to change the word ‘manhole’ to ‘personhole’, that kind of crap), but they don’t know what they’re talking about. When I find good women rockers, I’ll lend them a hand. I’ll never get any kind of credit for helping to advance women in rock ’n’ roll, but I have. Girlschool is an example. They were never that well known in the States, but in England they were quite popular for a while. In March, 1979, when we began our
Overkill
tour – our first big outing, really – they were our opening act. A lot of their early success came from their association with us, and they wound up being quite an asset for us, too.

It was one of the guys in our office, Dave ‘Giggles’ Gilligan, who found Girlschool originally. The band was from Tooting, south London. I listened to a single called ‘Take It All Away’ that they’d put out on some little label and thought they were fucking excellent. Plus I liked the idea of girls being in a band – I wanted to stick it up these pompous bastard guitarists’ asses, because Girlschool’s guitarist, Kelly Johnson, was as good as any guitarist I’ve ever seen in my life. The nights when she was really on, she was as good as Jeff Beck. So I went down to see them at a rehearsal they were having. I thought they were great, and I went back and told the others, ‘They’re coming on tour.’ The boys were a bit weird about it at first, but after the first night they played with us, they shut up.

Not only were Girlschool an excellent band, they were really feisty and they didn’t give a fuck. One night, a couple of days after the tour started, they walked out and some guy in the
audience shouted, ‘Go on! Get ’em off!’, and Kelly walked up to the mic and said, ‘You get ’em off. We could all do with a good laugh.’ I thought that was really good – I like chicks who stick up for themselves. Then they kicked into their set and proceeded to knock the crowd on their ass.

During the first week of the tour, we were in Edinburgh, and a few of us were sitting in the lobby of the Crest Hotel – it was me and Eddie, and Kelly and Girlschool’s singer, Kim McAuliffe, with her boyfriend Tim (he later wound up being the boyfriend of their drummer, Denise Dufort. See? There’s not much difference between male and female rockers). I don’t recall where Phil or the rest of Girlschool were. And I fed Kelly Johnson the worst fucking line I ever fed a woman in my life:

‘How’d you like to go up to my room and watch
The Old Grey Whistle Test
?’

Fuck me, that’s lame, isn’t it – ‘Would you like to go to my room and watch TV?’ But she said, ‘Yeah,’ which only goes to show! So off we went. And I heard that later, Kim leaned across to Eddie and said, ‘Let’s go to your room and watch
The Old Grey Whistle Test
,’ too. Eddie was a bit embarrassed, but she got up and led him to the elevator, with Tim still sitting there in the lobby! And Tim walked out of the hotel, got in the van and drove home to London, stranding all the chicks at the hotel. So we had to take them on our bus with us for the tour, which suited me fine. They were great people, and really funny.