White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (15 page)

We were at Jackson’s Studios in Rickmansworth for about six weeks, from the beginning of August 1980, until mid-September. Our producer was Vic Maile. I knew him from the Hawkwind days, when Vic was with Pye Records. He used to own a mobile studio – Hawkwind hired it out to do
Space Ritual
and he came along with it. Vic was a great man and a great producer, really brilliant. He had diabetes, of which he later died. It’s just an on-going thing – the nice guys always go. That’s why I’m still around.

The songs on
Ace of Spades
are considered classics by Motörhead fans, and I must say, they are an excellent bunch. We really enjoyed doing ’em. Those were good times; we were winning, and we were younger, and we believed it. The older you get, the less you can believe. It’s not your fault, you know. It just comes to you that everything isn’t corn flakes and skittles and beer. It’s a jungle out there. But I never cared about it when I was young. I wasn’t starving, you see, and I was having a good time. It certainly beats high-paid plumbing!

Like always, there were a lot of funny little segments in the songs. We had a tap-dancing part in ‘Ace of Spades’ – you know,
ding-dang-dangady
. We always imagined ourselves tap-dancing at that point. I used gambling metaphors, mostly cards and dice –
when it comes to that sort of thing, I’m more into the slot machines actually, but you can’t really sing about spinning fruit, and the wheels coming down. Most of the song’s just poker, really: ‘I know you’ve got to see me read ’em and weep’, ‘Dead man’s hand again, aces and eights’ – that was Wild Bill Hickock’s hand when he got shot. To be honest, although ‘Ace of Spades’ is a good song, I’m sick to death of it now. Two decades on, whenever people think of Motörhead, they think ‘Ace of Spades’. We didn’t become fossilized after that record, you know. We’ve had quite a few good releases since then. But the fans want to hear it so we still play it every night. For myself, I’ve had enough of that song.

My chief memory of ‘(We Are) The Road Crew’ is Eddie lying on his back in the studio, helpless with laughter, his guitar feeding back all over the place, halfway through what was supposed to be his solo. And we left it on because it was so fucking funny. That song was my first ten-minute lyric. That’s how long it took me to get the words down in the studio. I remember going off somewhere because Vic had to go eat something – it had to do with his diabetes. He hadn’t finished buttering his first cracker when I was back in there, telling him, ‘I’ve done it.’

‘Fuck off,’ he said, ‘I haven’t even eaten yet.’

When he realized I really had finished the lyric, he was astonished. I was quite surprised myself. Ten minutes of real work ain’t bad. I’ve dashed through a few more songs that way since then.

One of our road crew
cried
when we first played that song for
them. I’m not going to say who it was. We took the lot of them up to the studio one day and played them the track. And this one guy cracked and broke down right then and there. He was weeping, ‘Oh, that’s a great one. That’s great.’ It was really nice that it affected somebody that deeply. Bands as a rule don’t treat their crews too well. I try to.

I’ve caught hell from feminists for several songs I’ve written, but for some reason, they never said anything about ‘Jailbait’. They never mentioned anything about that, and it was fucking blatant! But basically, my lyrics on
Ace of Spades
came from what I know personally. Like ‘The Chase Is Better Than the Catch’ – well, it is, isn’t it? I mean, whenever you move in with somebody, it’s fucking gone, you know. They leave their knickers in the bathroom and they have horrible habits that you didn’t know about, which you become aware of almost immediately. It’s fatal, you know – to have a relationship is fatal to the relationship.

We did the photo session for the album cover on a crisp, cold autumn day. Everybody thinks we did it in the desert, but it was in South Mimms, north of London. The Western motif was Eddie’s idea; he had an aching desire to be Clint Eastwood. Keep in mind that at this point, I was the only one who had been to America. We all looked pretty good, dressed up as gunslingers, though. We had a slight problem with the wardrobe – the spade-shaped studs on my pants were too far apart. I took them off one leg and put ’em all on the other, so it turned out I could only be photo graphed from one side. But other than that, it went quite well.

After we finished the album, it was back to all those TV shows
and interviews, which seem to blend together in a haze. But there were some highlights. One was in November, when we went on an ITV show called
TisWas
. It was a kids’ Saturday morning show that featured a rock band every week. Chris Tarrant, who hosted the show, was a real strange person, but he knew what kids want to see: kids want to see grown-ups fuck themselves over, you know; they love that shit. There were buckets of water everywhere on this programme. It wasn’t warm water, either – it was fucking cold and they were slinging it all over. And there was the Phantom Phlan Phlinger: he’d come up to somebody during the show and go
bhuuf
with this huge fruit pie. It was great fun, completely slapstick. We were on that show a couple of times.

Once, we were on with Girlschool and we were having a game of musical pies. The pie stopped in my hand and I had to smash it in the face of Denise, Girlschool’s drummer. The poor girl was cowering a bit, but it was like, ‘Sorry. I’ve got to let you have it, babe.’ Everybody who went on got it, bad. At one point on this November show, Eddie Clarke was decimated by about six buckets of water. It was funny as shit. And they had this cage there, and they’d put people in it. Viewers wrote in for weeks ahead of time, volunteering to get in. There was a waiting list to be stuck in this cage, where everything in the world was dumped on them. They had this big trough full of green gunge – viscous, garbagey slop – and they’d tip that all over ’em at the end of the show. Phil had volunteered to be in the cage, but our manager, Doug Smith, went in – then they wouldn’t let him out again. Ha-ha! So we had some revenge on the son of a bitch. Great show.

Our ‘Ace Up Your Sleeve’ tour that fall was fucking mammoth. We barrelled through all of Great Britain with the ‘Bomber’ rig, the ‘Overkill’ backdrop with its flashing eyes, and on a couple of the earlier shows, we also had these lighting tubes forming a gigantic Ace of Spades playing card. The latter didn’t last very long – it was a bit on the fragile side and I believe it met an untimely demise. It was around the time of this tour that our old label, Chiswick, released the
Beer Drinkers
EP, the leftovers from the
Motörhead England
album sessions. The record charted, peaking at 43, and although we didn’t see any big monetary returns, it was good for us. Anything’s good that gets the name around, you know.

We finished up the ‘Ace Up Your Sleeve’ tour with four nights at the Hammersmith Odeon, and then an aftershow Christmas party was thrown for us at the Clarendon Hotel. There were some fire-eating strippers there – all good, wholesome English fun. I don’t know where they came from – it was some publicity-type scheme. If it had been somebody else’s party, I probably would have enjoyed it, but as I said earlier, I hate those things if I have to be involved. It’s terrible because you’ve just come off stage and you’re knackered. The last thing you want to do is to go to some fucking room upstairs at a boozer and be
sociable
! I mean, who needs it?

After a gig, I prefer to get laid immediately, if possible (as you may have gathered). I like to get one on one with a chick and just go someplace with her. I don’t really mind where. A club or the back of the bus or whatever, you know. One time, I vanished with this chick out the side door of Hammersmith Odeon right
after our gig. Her name was Debbie and she used to be a Page Three girl in the
Sun
. Saw quite a bit of her for a while. (Debbie, sadly, is no longer with us – rest in peace.) I walked off stage and gave the guitar to the roadie. Debbie was standing there, so I grabbed her and we immediately nipped out the door, joining the crowd that was walking away from my own gig. There I was in the middle of all these people walking down the road. A couple of them looked – ‘That’s Lemmy.’ ‘No, it’s not! Can’t be. Forget it. It can’t be him.’ They couldn’t believe I was out that quick, so nobody asked me for an autograph, nothing. It was really funny. I’d fooled them, stonewalled them!

In late December, we popped on over to Ireland to do a few more dates. That’s where Philthy broke his neck. It was in Belfast after a gig, and he was on a staircase, playing ‘Who can lift each other up the highest’ with a large Irishman. The Irishman lifted Phil up the highest, and at the same time, took a step back to admire his work – into thin air. They went backwards down the staircase, with Phil flying, and he landed on the back of his neck. We went over to them – the other guy got up, but Phil didn’t.

I said to him, ‘Come on, man.’

With stark terror in his eyes, he looked up at me – ‘I can’t fuckin’ move.’

We took him to hospital in Falls Road. Keep in mind that this was Belfast on a Saturday night, and Falls Road is a Catholic area. Jesus Christ, you know! There were fuckin’
bullets
going by! We went into this hospital, past the gunshot wounds and the
bomb-blast wounds, and they took him in. They had him braced on a table with his head propped up so he couldn’t move it – well, he couldn’t move it anyway.

‘I’m dying for a piss,’ he moaned as he was lying there. When he said that, our tour manager, Mickey, grabbed me and pulled me out the door.

‘What’s the matter?’ I wanted to know.

As we were just through the threshold, we heard a nurse saying, ‘I’ll just put this catheter in here, Mr Taylor.’ Then as the doors closed . . .

‘AAAAAARGH! YOU BASTARD!’

‘I just wanted to get out of there before the screaming started,’ said Mickey.

I suppose Phil had assumed they were going to somehow walk him into the toilet, let him have the piss there and bring him back. He was lucky – he could have been paralyzed forever.

Finally, Philthy emerged, wearing this huge brace on his neck. I cut a bow-tie out of black gaffer tape and stuck it on the front so he looked like a Spanish waiter with a goiter. Phil’s done lots of other stuff besides that. We were going to do a book called
Hospitals I Have Known Across Europe
, by Phil Taylor – a guide to European emergency rooms, you know. He’s not real graceful, you see. On the bus during one tour, he was almost completely prone at all times because he couldn’t get his bus legs together. The guy couldn’t walk down the aisle. He would affect this very strange, stiff-legged gait, which he thought would help him stand up, but in fact laid him flat nearly always. He spent that whole
tour on one knee on the bus, mobile proposing across Europe!

With Philthy out of action, we had to postpone the European tour we had planned at the beginning of ’81. Meanwhile, Girlschool were at Rickmansworth, making a record with Vic Maile. It was Vic’s idea to have Motörhead and Girlschool record a single together. The song we did was ‘Please Don’t Touch’, which was originally recorded by one of my favourite groups of days past, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. The band had some attention around 1977, after John died, as the Pirates. This cover wound up being part of a record called
The St Valentine’s Day Massacre EP
, which was released on 14 February. The flipside had us doing the Girlschool tune, ‘Emergency’ (Eddie’s second vocal), and also the girls covering ‘Bomber’. Denise Dufort played drums on all those tracks, since Phil couldn’t. That single turned out to be the biggest hit either Motörhead or Girlschool ever had in the British singles chart. It went to No. 5, and we went on
Top of the Pops
, billed as ‘Headgirl’. Although Denise played the drums on the show, Philthy made an appearance, dancing around and adding a back-up vocal or two.

About a week before that
Top of the Pops
appearance, both Motörhead and Girlschool were filmed in concert for a Nottingham TV show called
Rockstage
. It was held at the Theatre Royale. I’ve still got a video of that performance. At the end of ‘Motörhead’, I leapt on to the Bomber lighting rig, pointing my bass at the audience like a machine gun, as one does – and got stuck halfway up. The guy who was in charge of lifting the rig left me up there for what felt like fucking years, but it was only a
couple of minutes. I had this curly lead and it was stretched out tight. It was fuckin’ pulling me out of the plane and I was thinking, ‘You bastard! If I ever get down alive, I’ll fucking kill you!’ You can’t tell that from watching the show, however – the effect looked great. The guy responsible for that SNAFU miraculously and wisely disappeared after the show.

In late February,
Sounds
magazine ran its 1980 readers’ poll results and we came out on top in everything. I think we even nabbed ‘Top Girl Singer’! Oh, except for one category – I came second for ‘Male Sex Object’, below David Coverdale. I didn’t mind – he had more hair!

By March, Philthy had healed enough so that we could resume touring. We went all through Europe with Girlschool, and then came back and did four dates in England. We recorded all the English gigs for our live record,
No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith
. Originally, we were going to make it a double album but we didn’t quite have enough material. It would have been three sides, which would have been a bit of a con. Incidentally, none of the recorded shows were at Hammersmith – they were at West Runton, Leeds and two dates in Newcastle. The last three dates turned out the best, and we chose the songs from those shows. It was also Leeds and Newcastle where we were presented with silver and gold albums for
Ace of Spades
, a silver disc for
Overkill
and a silver for ‘Please Don’t Touch’. This time they gave ’em to us backstage, however.

We didn’t stick around for the release of
No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith
. By mid April we were off in the States for our first
tour there. We were opening up for Ozzy Osbourne on his ‘Blizzard of Oz’ tour. While we were doing that, the record came out and immediately charted at No. 1. I heard about it in New York – I was still in bed when somebody phoned me.