White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (5 page)

I
first saw Reverend Black and the Rocking Vicars at Manchester’s Oasis club. The Oasis was where all the bigger rock bands played. I took to the Vicars straight away. The drummer’s kit had double bass drums – the first time I’d ever seen that – and he sat at the front. And they wore the Finnish national costume: reindeer-skin boots, white trousers with lace-up flies, these smocks from Lapland and vicars’ collars. I thought that was very big, you know. They were extremely loud and smashed up all their equipment, just bashed everything to bits. That was very cool, too. And they had long hair.

See, the drummer in the Motown Sect was hassling for us all to get our hair cut short. We had gone to see the Who one night at the Oasis and he was going on about, ‘Oh, they look great with that short hair, don’t they?’ Fuck that! I wasn’t gonna cut my hair. In fact, I was the last one in the band with long hair. Everybody else did cut theirs. Just in general, I was getting more and more pissed
off with the guys in the band. Finally, I saw the Rocking Vicars at the Oasis again, and they were fucking excellent, so I made sort of tentative inquiries. I learned that the guitar player was not reckoned a good long-term investment, so I followed them doggedly.

The night I auditioned for the Rocking Vicars, I smashed my first guitar. I never could play lead guitar, you see – still can’t play lead guitar as we speak. But I fooled them by turning it up and moving my hands very fast all over the guitar. Then at the end, I jumped on the piano. It collapsed and I rode it into the ground and smashed up all my equipment. There’s a lot to be said for that, you know. A lot of times over the years, I should have smashed a lot of guitars, but I didn’t because it was the only guitar I had. But you know that if I had smashed it, I would have gotten another one somehow. I would have been better off.

The Vicars hired me immediately, and I was with them for over two years, from 1965 till 1967. The band owned a guitar that sort of came with the gig, a Fender Jazzmaster. I had a Telecaster – I’d just recently traded in my Gibson 330 for it – so I put the Tele’s neck onto the body of the Jazz. That was a wonderful guitar and I played it right through my time with the Vicars. When I left, I had to give them the Jazz’s body back – but after all, who am I to judge?

The Vicars’ lead singer, Harry Feeney, was known as Reverend Black. He looked very much like Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits. When he sang, he used to do the ‘windshield wipers’ – you know, forefingers in the air, waving them back and forth. But he was a good frontman, and the chicks used to adore him. Pete
the bass player would soon leave, so we ended up with Steve Morris, or Moggsy. He was a very miserly person, a trait he got from his father. I remember going over to his house once. I went up to the toilet, and his father shouted up the stairs after me, ‘Only use four sheets!’ Scrooge comes to your town, you know.

We had a guitar player for a while called Ken, who had this Mini Cooper, a racing model, that was the apple of his eye. But he couldn’t get the wire wheels, which were very hard to come by. He was driving down the road once when this other Mini Cooper overtook him like a bat out of hell. As he came to the next roundabout, he saw it upside down, all smashed up with the wheels still spinning, the guy hanging out of it, unconscious, covered in blood. And Ken thought, ‘Ooo! Fuckin’ unconscious, is he?’ Took the fucking wheels off it, drove them back to a farm and hid them in a haystack. Then he called the police and ran back to the roundabout, and this cop was standing there, saying, ‘Look at that – some bastard stole his fucking wheels!’ Ken nodded and said, ‘Ay, there’s some cunts around.’ That’s the sort of people the Rocking Vicars were, in a nutshell.

Then there was Ciggy (short for Cyril), the drummer. He was the leader of the band, and he was one of them people who, everything he did, he was best at. Swimming – you’d do four lengths, he’d do six. If you went climbing, he would be up the tree and down again before you started on the second branch. Shooting pool – he’d have all the balls down and be on the eight-ball and you were still wondering how the fuck he did it. A driven man, but an excellent drummer. He was sort of like Keith Moon.
Remember, he always had his drum kit right up at the front of the stage, which tells you a lot about his personality.

Ciggy was a right tyrant. We had this roadie, Nod, who used to stay with him. Nod was, and is, mentally unstable but a truly wondrous man, really, all round. He’s a very successful businessman now on the Isle of Man, where he’s from. He got the job of bass player with the Vicars when Moggsy left, but he only lasted one night – he got so excited smashing everything up that he nearly fucking killed himself. Before he roadied for the Vicars, Nod was the first DJ ever to broadcast on Radio Caroline, the first pirate radio station in the world. That kind of thing doesn’t exist any more, but back in the mid-sixties, people would anchor a ship three miles off the coast of England, so they could evade its radio laws and play what the ordinary radio stations wouldn’t. There were a bunch of them around, and Nod was with the first one. But he left that to be Ciggy’s servant because he saw the Rocking Vicars and was immediately gone over them.

Ciggy had this huge bed in his bedroom, while Nod had a campbed a couple of feet away.

‘Do you know what I’m doing now, Nodder?’ Ciggy would ask.

‘No, Cig.’

‘I’m stretching out and my arms don’t even reach the edges of the bed, it’s so big. And you’re in that campbed, Nodder.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Say “sir” when you speak to me!’

‘Yes, sir, I know!’

Then, in the morning, Ciggy would snap his fingers and Nod would be out there with a frying pan, cooking his breakfast. There had to be some sort of latent gay thing going on there. They weren’t fucking each other, because Ciggy was sleeping with this bird, I think her name was Jane. And Nodder used to go with girls, too. So I don’t think they were really aware of it. It was some weird, subconscious thing.

There was this one time Nodder was driving our van along the promenade in Douglas, on the Isle of Man – a big van, with a gold cross on the roof and covered in lipstick-written messages like, ‘I love men with long hair’. That was the thing in those days, lipstick on the van: the more covered it was, the more successful you were – the one-upmanship thing again. Ciggy looked over at the rest of us.

‘I don’t think you boys realize how devoted Nodder is to me,’ he said.

‘Yeah we do,’ we told him.

‘No you don’t. Stop the van, Nodder.’

Nodder stopped the van.

‘Everybody get out,’ Cig declared.

So we all got out of the back of the van. Ciggy slammed the door shut, opened the window and spoke to Nod.

‘Nodder, drive this van through that window.’ He pointed at a wedding store, with a large display showing.

‘Certainly, sir.’

VROOOOM! BROOOUUUMMM!!! Straight through it. Wedding dresses all over the van.

The guys in the Vicars were a strange lot, but I had a lot of fun playing with them. We toured all over the north of England and we’d fucking bring the place down wherever we went. And I would always do a piano. A lot of places we played had a grand piano, usually painted white, and I would leap on the end with the outermost leg and ride it down into the crowd. We were a hell of a band, loud and exciting, kind of like the Who with long hair. We never did any original material, however. It was all covers, like ‘Skinny Minnie’ by Bill Haley, or the Beach Boys. We did ‘Here Today’, from the
Pet Sounds
album, which was quite innovative in those days.

We used to do something of a cabaret act. Pete, the bass player before Moggsy, would drop his trousers during our show, and he had these big, theatrical underpants on. That’s always good for a laugh in England. So Pete would stand there like that, and I’d hit him with a custard pie. I’d go right to the audience, pie in hand, asking, ‘Shall I? Shall I?’ And they’d reply, ‘YEAAAHHH! Hit him!’ – they always do, don’t they? Nothing as funny as a guy getting pied, you know. Every night – boof! Pete would get the pie, everybody would laugh, and we’d finish the song and pack up. The roadies used to make the pie out of flour and water, just mush the stuff around on a paper plate, and set it up behind the amplifier every night, and I never really checked on it. But there was one night where I went back to pick it up and it was in a tin plate – a thick tin plate at that, like an ex-Army tin plate. So I went over to Ciggy, playing away, and I said, ‘It’s a tin plate!’

‘Hit him!’ he hissed.

‘But I’ll fuckin’ – it’s a tin plate! Look!’

‘The act – hit him!’

‘All right, then.’

So I went over to Pete and – WHAP! You could hear a muffled scream of ‘FUCKIN’ HELL!’ I broke his nose in two places and there was blood and snot everywhere. The kids thought it was excellent though, thought it was part of the show. We used to have a good laugh with the Rocking Vicars.

We had this terrible manager, Jack Venet, a Jewish crockery salesman. He had a shop full of wholesale crockery in Salford, north Manchester, near to the Jewish neighbourhood of Cheetham Hill. He got us this apartment there, and all the Jews really hated us because we were lying on the lawn on towels with chicks doing our nails and our hair. You know, all the Orthodoxes walking by, glaring at the girls and shit. They didn’t like us at all. The wrong side of the tracks, we were. But we got away with murder there because they were nice people, most of them. It was just the militant ones that wanted to give us trouble – but aren’t there militants of every race, creed and political persuasion who want to ruin it for everyone else? And we were fairly militant too, I guess, so fuck ’em.

So we had our nice, big flat in Cheetham Hill, and I fell in love with a French girl while we were living there. It was wonderful – I was smitten completely. Anne-Marie, her name was. She looked just like Brigitte Bardot. She was a dentist’s daughter from near Limoges, and she came on holiday to my house in Wales. After two days, I left her sitting there totally on her own while I went
out with the lads. I don’t know why I did that. She obviously wasn’t the right one. I never found the right one. I thought I’d found the right one a few years later, but she died. But then, it’ll always be the right one who died because you’ll never know – she didn’t have a chance to become the wrong one.

Come to think of it, my next unintentional foray into parenthood happened while I was in the Rocking Vicars. There were these two girls who were singers in a band that used to tour the American air bases in Europe. I forget what their group was called – the Rock Girls or the Rock Birds or some sort of birds (it was always ‘birds’ around Liverpool). Anyway, Tracy and her friend used to come around. I really wanted her friend, but Harry got her. Tracy was cute too, and she had bigger tits anyway, so I was quite keen. The two of them came back to our apartment in Manchester and stayed for a weekend. Then after that, they would come and stay with us now and again. And then Tracy showed up one morning around six o’clock and woke me up.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, standing by my bed.

‘Eh, what? Pregnant?’ I groggily inquired. I mean, who’s conscious at six in the morning?

She took this as a terrible affront, that I wasn’t immediately awake and at attention.

‘Right then!’ she snapped and walked out.

That was it. She went away and had the kid, Paul, and brought him up on her own. I met him when he was six, on a coke deal. I went to buy some cocaine from these Brazilian guys in Warwick
Road, Earls Court. We were all, you know, waiting for the man, and I was in the kitchen making a piece of toast. Then in walked this little blond kid.

‘You’re my daddy,’ he told me. ‘Mummy’s in the other room.’

I walked in there, and sure enough, it was Tracy. I know why I was there, but how the fuck did she come to be there? I’ll never know. So I got her a fridge, ’cause she didn’t have one. Dragged it up four flights of stairs for her. Fucking terrible job, really, with only me and another guy doing it.

Anyway, this kid was a great kid. He still is. I remember one time he came to see me. He was about twenty-three at the time.

‘Dad?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I have a problem.’

‘How much is it, Paul?’

‘It’s the landlord, Dad.’

‘How much is it, Paul?’

‘He said he was going to throw us out on the street with all our stuff and he’s going to take my guitar—’

‘
How-much-is-it-Paul
?’

‘Well, it’s quite a lot.’

‘Fuck it. How much is it?’

‘It’s £200, actually.’

So I gave him the £200 and he went away. The next day, he showed up in a secondhand Lincoln Continental, the little fucker. He pulled up outside of the house saying, ‘Come and look at my new car!’

‘Good con, Paul,’ I told him, ‘but don’t ever ask me for rent again ’cause you ain’t gonna get it.’

An excellent scam, though. And then he stole one of my chicks off me. But I got him back – I stole one off of him. In fact, we swapped girls one night, at Stringfellows in London. You’d be amazed how many women want to fuck the old man and the son as well.

Paul came over to the States a couple of years ago. He went over to my place and stayed for one day. The next day, two chicks called for him in a car and he was gone. He went up into the hills with them and I didn’t see him again. He went back home without even calling and saying goodbye. I remember he was asking me for advice and I was giving it to him. He’s always done the exact opposite of what I’ve said, which I think is fundamentally sound. Chip off the old block, wouldn’t you say? But as usual, I digress.

The Rocking Vicars recorded three singles while I was with them, two for CBS and one for Decca in Finland. One of the songs was called ‘It’s All Right’, which Ciggy claimed he wrote, but it was mainly a bastardized version of the Who’s ‘The Kids Are All Right’. Our other song was the Kinks’ ‘Dandy’, and we actually got all the way up to No. 46 in the charts with that one. We even wound up getting the Who and the Kinks’ producer, Shel Talmy. He was an American who was living in London. His office was above a Chinese food store on Greek Street in Soho, London – quite a multinational happening. But that Chinese store with all the ginger and shit in jars stunk really bad. When we had
to go and see Shel, we would hold our noses and dash across the street and up the stairs until we got into the office.