White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (20 page)

They had a party at the Holiday Inn in Chelsea that night, which we went to. Gary Glitter was there with a drink
and
a cigarette in each hand – he didn’t know whether he was on his ass or his elbow. And there were two girls in basques hanging around who desperately wanted to fuck Frankie’s bass player (only Holly Johnson and the other singer were gay). That’s all they wanted,
and he was the only guy they didn’t fuck. They had everybody else, including Motörhead! You’d get a blow job and as you were leaving, they’d say, ‘If you see the bass player . . .’ But he’d left with his wife over two hours before. The last time I saw Holly Johnson was at a Frankie show at Wembley, and he had this huge gay geezer as his boyfriend, who was very obstructionist. One of those types that protects people from everyone, even their friends. Holly was leaving the band, and I told him not to. I said, ‘You’re making a terrible mistake,’ and it
was
a mistake because no one’s heard of him since, or any of the others. And they were
huge
for a while.

I also met Samantha Fox that year. We were both judging this spaghetti-eating contest (there were some fucking animals at that thing!). I’d been a fan of hers since she was a Page Three girl, and we were thinking of doing ‘Love Hurts’ as a single together. I did a tape and gave it to her to listen to, but our schedules got in the way and unfortunately it never happened. She’s another one that’s practically disappeared. She was very cute, but I think she was kind of misdirected. Her father was her manager, which is always a mistake, and he managed her right into oblivion. But she seems to have reappeared once again – Motörhead recently did our first-ever shows in Russia, and we went to a club owned by the promoter and there was Sam Fox! We had a great reunion there!

Even though Motörhead couldn’t make any records for the time being, it didn’t stop us from doing other things, such as benefit records. Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers got a bunch of geezers together to sing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’,
with the proceeds going to the Bradford City Football Stadium Fire Disaster Fund. Wurzel and I were on it, along with Phil Lynott and Gary Holdon, among others. That song went to No. 1 and earned a gold disc. I also produced a Ramones song along with Guy Bidmead – ‘Go Home Ann’ from their
Bonzo Goes to Bitburg
EP. I wish it had been one of their faster numbers like ‘Beat on the Brat’ or ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’.

At the end of June, Motörhead was coming up on our ten-year anniversary, and we did a couple of shows at Hammersmith to celebrate. Those were fun gigs. The first night, everybody who’d ever been in Motörhead showed up on stage, which was amazing. Wendy O. Williams and Girlschool were there, too. The second night, everybody showed up again, except for Larry Wallis. Even Lucas Fox was there, and he’d only been in the band a few months. Since we couldn’t get three drum kits on stage, we hung a guitar around Lucas, but he wasn’t supposed to be plugged in. Of course, he
was
plugged in, while Brian Robertson wasn’t. Typical. And Phil Lynott came on stage because he just couldn’t resist it. We were doing ‘Motörhead’, but he had no idea what he was playing (Eddie Clarke was over there, going ‘E!’ – he didn’t remember, either)! Phil was a good friend of mine, but he’d never heard our signature tune. We were recording those shows, and Vic Maile did a special mix of it with Phil’s bass up front and gave it to him, just to embarrass him. He had his revenge posthumously, though, when I went on stage with Duff McKagen’s band a couple of years back at the Hollywood Palladium. They started playing ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ and I didn’t know it! I was
supposed to do a different song with them, but they switched on me.

Anyhow, the second gig ended with a huge birthday cake being rolled out, and this little bird jumped out of it with these big balloons under her T-shirt. I took her home that night – actually I was going out with her at the time. Katie, her name was . . . what a little beauty! We released a video of that gig, called
The Birthday Party
. Our manager also wanted to release it as an album, but we said no. I thought it would damage video sales, and I also thought it was a con, another cash-in thing. We didn’t think it was good enough as an album, either – after all, we hadn’t played for five months before those two shows. It became an issue between us and Doug Smith. That went on for years, fighting and bitching. He finally won. It’s hard to think now why we were so adamant, but at the time it seemed real important.

After the Hammersmith Odeon gigs, we toured Scandinavia for a month. We played just about everywhere there was to play – above the Arctic Circle, every shit-ass town. They have fairs in the summer in Sweden, so we did all of them, all of Norway and a couple of dates in Finland (our last gig was in Gothenburg, Sweden – our present drummer, Mikkey Dee, was living there and we never knew!). We called it the ‘It Never Gets Dark Tour’ because it
doesn’t
get dark there in the summer. The sun just gets low on the horizon, then comes up again. In Norway, we had the promoter from hell. He kept telling us the wrong distances from gig to gig so we kept missing the ferries – Norway’s all fiords, and you have to keep catching ferries and we missed about half of
them and had to take speedboats. It was really annoying, not to mention expensive, and we were constantly late for gigs. Once when we got to the show really late, we walked into the dressing room to find a bowl of cold water with, like, one fucking beer in it, three yoghurts, a few biscuits and fruit and nuts – you know, bear food. So I said to the promoter, ‘Hey! Come here a minute!’ and I hit him with the three yoghurts before he got out the door. A bit later on the door opened a crack and a bottle of vodka was rolled across the floor to us. Finally in Trondheim we got totally fed up with him and covered him with squirty cheese. It was the fifth time we’d had to take a speedboat and we were two hours late for the show and we were really pissed off. Kids always think it’s the band’s fault when the gig starts late. So there we were on stage at last, and this cunt of a promoter was leaning against the PA like he was some Big Deal because it was in his hometown. And our roadies came up behind him and grabbed him, handcuffed him, dragged him out on stage and pulled his trousers down. Then they squirted him with the squeezy cheese and mayonnaise and anything else they could get their hands on. Our tour manager at the time, Graham Mitchell, walked up to the mic and said to the audience, ‘See this asshole? That’s why we’re late tonight!’ And,
per-doom
!, we pushed him off the stage. The guy wound up going to the police station – like that! Covered in slop, and in a taxi! After the gig, in the dressing room, we got the inevitable loud
thump-thump-thump
on the door, and it was this giant fucking cop – the Norwegians are real tall – who looked like the super-Gestapo.

‘I sink you haff done somezing very awful to this person,’ he informed us.

‘Yeah? Well, he told us all the wrong fucking directions,’ and all: we told him the story.

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ he said. ‘But zis is no reason to cover a man viz cheese!’

It was the cheese that seemed to bother him, not the assault. It was a cheese thing. Strange.

When we got back to London, we did a few things around town before heading back to the States. Hawkwind was doing an anti-heroin gig at Crystal Palace, and I got up and did a couple of numbers with them. At this juncture I would like to mention that I think these anti-drug gigs are a joke. They’re generally set up by people who are smashed out of their minds, which already defeats the object. And what do you do with the money you get from an anti-heroin gig, anyway? Not buy drugs with it?! They just set up clean-up centres or rehabs that really don’t work. No drug taker worth his fucking name is ever going to listen to the people who are in charge at those places because they run them like youth clubs, which is the very reason you started taking the stuff in the first place, as a mark against your parents’ generation. You don’t want to be herded somewhere and told you’re a bad boy. That isn’t the way to do it: you lock ’em in a fuckin’ room until they’re clean and then let ’em out and see if they stay clean. That’s all you can do. And actually, it’s not even much use doing that, because a smack addict has to want to be clean. They’ve got to come to you. You don’t do things like offer them rehab instead of jail,
either – obviously, who’s going to choose jail, for fuck’s sake? They go to rehab to get the heat off ’em and maybe get rid of the annoying girlfriend. Then they get clean and it’s cheaper for them for a couple of months afterwards ’cause they only have to take a fraction of what they were doing before. From my vantage point, the whole ‘Drug War’ is a fucking mess.

Anyway, enough of that. Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics were playing at Camden Palace, so me and Wurzel got up and did a couple of our own songs with them – ‘Jailbait’ and ‘No Class’. They released a video of that show, if you can find it now. The next month, November, we were in the US, and I finished up the tour by appearing on MTV with Dee Schneider. By then we’d had very good news: our litigation problems with Bronze were over and we could begin 1986 by making a new record.

O
f course, Motörhead didn’t wind up on just any record label. Our manager, Douglas Smith, had convinced us that it would be best if we went with his company, GWR (an acronym for Great Western Road, where his offices were located). So our manager and record label were under the same roof. Plus Doug and his wife were handling our merchandising, too. Anyone could probably have told us this was a very unhealthy situation, giving our management this much power, but no one did. So, ignorant of business affairs as always, we forged ahead with the recording of
Orgasmatron
.

Orgasmatron
was our first full studio album in three years and the line-up, except for me, was completely different from
Another
Perfect Day
, but that didn’t faze us any. Between the recording sessions for
No Remorse
and all the touring we did, the four of us were rather used to each other by then! We made the record in eleven days, which as you might have figured by now, was no big deal for Motörhead. It was very easy, in fact, because the guys were so glad to be there. We gave our producer, Bill Laswell, a bit of a fright the first day, however. Me and Paul Hadwen, the fan club secretary at the time, had been drinking in this boozer when we saw an advert in the paper for Fat-O-Grams. We immediately thought, ‘This is just the thing for Phil Campbell!’ so we booked one. Then we went in the studio with Bill Laswell and his engineer, Jason Corsaro. They’d just come over from the States and they didn’t know us at all – I’d met Bill for half an hour before this and, of course, nothing had been mentioned about Fat-O-Grams and such. So Bill and Jason were being all gung-ho American – ‘Let’s get it on, boys. It’s gonna be great!’ etcetera. But there was this large lady standing around the lobby (Phil later said he thought she was somebody’s mother), and she came into the studio after us, asking, ‘Which one’s Phil?’ And Phil said, ‘I am.’ WHAM! She tore off her dress and there she was, this huge woman in a little, skimpy outfit with the tits cut out, singing ‘Happy birthday to you – !’ (I suppose it may not have been his birthday – but we told
her
it was!) And she grabbed Phil and stuck his head between her tits – all we could see was just this little tuft of hair sticking out between ’em! Then she started slapping him with them! Nearly knocked him out. It was fucking great, and Laswell and Cosaro were edging behind the desk,
going, ‘What the fuck is
this
?’ That was their introduction into the world of Motörhead.

As it turned out, Bill was good for getting sounds, but he fucked everything up in the mix. It was a much better album when he took it to New York than when he brought it back. A bunch of us – our people, Laswell’s people – got together for the grand, first-time playing and our publicist brought a case of champagne to ring in the occasion properly. It was dreadful.
Orgasmatron
was mud. There was supposed to be a four-part harmony on ‘Ain’t My Crime’, but he wiped three of them out! I won’t bore you with the rest of the ‘highlights’. Suffice it to say that our publicist was edging the crate of champagne back under the desk with her foot, while Laswell’s manager was standing by the door, bopping determinedly. It was hopeless. I tried to remix some of the record, but Bill and Jason weren’t being particularly helpful because ‘it was our mix and
we
liked it and that’s the way it was and this difficult musician was coming over trying to teach us our own job’ – well, I suppose I
am
difficult, if you consider wanting to get the job done right ‘difficult’!

I didn’t come up with the title
Orgasmatron
right off the bat. The album’s working title was
Riding with the Driver
(each Motörhead studio album, except
Bastards
, which we made in 1993, is named after one of its songs), but that track didn’t turn out as good as we’d hoped. I didn’t even know at the time that an ‘Orgasmatron’ was a contraption in some Woody Allen film – I never saw the movie – but I’ve been told about it quite often since! However, I made up the word on my own. A lot of our fans
consider this album one of our ‘classics’, and there are some great songs on it – the title track and ‘Deaf Forever’, for example. I’ll always have problems with the way it was mixed, though. As far as I’m concerned it was only half the album it should have been. I do want to note, however, that there’s a great picture of Lars Ulrich on the original album sleeve. He had come up to see us at the Beverly Sunset a couple of years before while we were in Los Angeles, and he got a bit ill. He was still a youngster in those days, but it’s a fallacy to say I taught him how to drink – I actually taught him to throw up, and that’s what he did, all over himself – that’s what he got for trying to keep up with older people’s habits! A photo of that classic moment in rock history appears on
Orgasmatron
.

With a new album to promote, we were on the road again, and Douglas had to outdo himself once more with the stage set-up – hence the
Orgasmatron
train, to go with the record’s cover art. The drums went on the front of the train, and it came out on rails in the middle of the stage – basically Pete was riding out to the front on the train. But it never fucking worked. You couldn’t get the rails on the stage properly and things like that. Douglas did have some great ideas – the Bomber rig was brilliant – but this one was a very botched job. That and the infernal Iron Fist. But the train came with us through most of Europe.