White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (22 page)

We had our own kinds of recreation. Phil Campbell pulled one of Alice’s dancers. I never forgave him for that, because she was so beautiful. Gail was a great girl and we still see her when we go through Chicago. And an Alice Cooper show is always an impressive thing to watch. I’m a big Alice fan. On a less pleasant note, it took some effort to get to some of those venues. I remember going up to a gig in St John’s, Newfoundland. We had to load all our stuff on a ferry and it was fucking freezing, so cold that it bit straight through you, and there were icebergs in the water. In the middle of the night, we came out of the cabin to get something out of the bus and I slid all the way across the deck to the railing and nearly went over into the fucking sea. The story of the
Titanic
has fascinated me for years (well before the film and all the fuss) and the whole time I was thinking, ‘This is what it was like when the
Titanic
went down!’ ’cause we were at the same latitude. In fact, our next date was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is where they brought all the bodies. Imagine jumping into that water voluntarily! The shock when you hit it must have just fucked you up. So on the metal wall, next to the rail where I’d landed, I wrote, ‘Remember, and be thankful it wasn’t you on the
Titanic
, 1912, 14th of April.’

We spent a good portion of 1988 on the road. It had been our natural habitat for a long time and it’s still that way today. It’s funny – the metabolism you need to tour is unlike anything any doctor has come across. Ever. Forget the Elephant Man – at least he was all in one piece and working in the same direction, deformed as he was.
We
are deformed. Not
that
much, just slightly deformed . . . correct that – we’re very deformed! The physical requirements for touring are unique (we’re no good for anything else). You’ve got to get up on stage every night and suddenly be energetic within minutes or everybody in the world is gonna
die
! They’re going to go home and shoot themselves because you didn’t go on stage that night. We’ve gone on stage in all kinds of conditions. Once, in April of 1988 in Paris, Phil Campbell broke his ankle – he was fighting with Phil Taylor and they fell under a table and only one of them got up. He did the gigs we had scheduled after that in a cast. And I’ve already enlightened you on the various states of Philthy’s health (both physical and mental). We have missed a gig here and there because of injuries or illness, but those have been very, very rare occasions. I can’t understand any other way of being alive than playing in a rock band all over the world. For two years we were home for one month in each year. It was great fun, though. Kind of blurred, but fun!

Occasionally during the brief periods of time we spent at home, we’d attend some really stellar event. That spring we saw the Rolling Stones play a surprise show at the 100 Club, an old jazz club on Oxford Street that turned to rock and blues. That was an extremely good evening. Everyone – Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton
and the like – showed up with their guitars and jammed, so it obviously wasn’t that much of a surprise. The real surprise was Wurzel. I think he was even a surprise to himself!

We got to attend the after party at Keith’s suite at the Savoy because a friend of ours, Simon Sesler, had an uncle who worked for Keith. But Wurzel had already begun his evening of terror at the 100 Club by knocking Bill Wyman flat on his back! He was flying down the stairs and Wyman just happened to be in his path. We managed to arrive at the party without any further mishaps, but there were more to come. For a while, we were sitting and talking with Simon when Kirsty MacColl came by with her new husband, producer Steve Lillywhite. Kirsty was a great old friend of mine – I was in a video of hers once – so I gave her a big hug, and Wurzel turned to Steve Lillywhite and said, ‘Who’s that old boiler that Lemmy’s got a hold of?’ Steve gave him this look and replied, ‘That’s my wife, actually.’ ‘Ah!’ said Wurzel. ‘Could I have some more coffee, please?’ Then about a half hour later, he was standing by the bar next to Ronnie Wood. Jo Howard, Ron’s stunning wife, walked past, and everything was moving, you know what I mean? And Wurzel leered, ‘Eh, I’d like to fuck her, wouldn’t you?’ And Ron said, ‘I do, actually. She’s my wife.’ Talk about putting your foot in your mouth – Wurzel had both feet in up to the knees! Luckily, it wasn’t catching, because I was standing around when I heard this voice behind me say, ‘Hello, Lemmy. I’ve always wanted to meet you.’ I turned around and it was Eric Clapton. This was big news for me because I remembered him well from the
Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds. So I managed to say hello without grovelling – I mean, Eric!

I also wrote some songs that year for people other than Motörhead. We were rehearsing in the same area as Girlschool and we all went to a pub, and I wrote ‘Head Over Heels’ there for them. I scribbled it down on the back of a beer mat or something and Kim took it away with her. I also wrote a song, ‘Can’t Catch Me’, for Lita Ford’s record,
Lita
, which turned out to be her most successful album. We were in LA at that time and she came down to our hotel, the Park Sunset, and told me she needed songs. Once again, I wrote it right there and gave it to her – I wrote it as a twelve-bar, but she didn’t record it that way. I’d known Lita since 1975, when she was in the Runaways – at their first gig in London, Joan Jett wore my bullet belt. I thought Lita was the best thing in the band: she had great tits and played mean guitar, but Joan
looked
meaner – probably because she was! Lita made a great solo record but then I think she let the people around her have too much of a say in her career – for a start, she was too dressed up, and it looked like she was being pushed way too hard to try to be the ‘next big thing’. It just didn’t work for her. She was a real rock ’n’ roller, not the glossy chick they made her out to be. Then her mother died, and she was really devastated by that. Last time I saw her was a few years ago at a music convention in LA. We were on a panel together, but she was quite short – just ‘Hi, Lem’ and a quick squeeze and she was gone. She didn’t hang around at all, which I thought was very strange. So, Miss Ford, give me a call – we’ll talk!

A lot of performers from the eighties haven’t fared very well – that’s obvious from watching
The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years
. Where are all those people now? That film probably helped kill their careers – it made everyone who liked heavy metal look like morons. I was filmed for a segment of that, but I came off okay – no thanks to the director, Penelope Spheeris. She took me up to Mulholland Boulevard, in the Hollywood Hills and the camera crew was about twenty yards away from me. Penelope had to shout her questions at me.

I said, ‘Can you ask me questions from a bit closer?’

‘I don’t want to be in the shot,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to be in the shot!’

‘Nah, I’m going to read them from here.’

Fucking idiots – they could have come closer, used a different lens or something, but no! It was a stupid movie, anyhow. Everybody always says I’m the best thing in it and I tell them, ‘The only reason I was good is because all the rest of them are so terrible!’

I’ve had to do a lot of strange appearances. I was interviewed on the radio by some TV psychiatrist – that guy used to reduce a lot of people to tears on his show (
Room 13
, I think it was called) but not me, as you might imagine. I was also on a programme with The Joan Collins Fan Club, which was just one guy, Julian Clary, who’s famous now under his own name. He’s gay, so I guess as far as Joan Collins was concerned he was both the Bitch and the Stud. He was all right – very bitchy and camply sarcastic, and I love that kind of humour. I think Julian’s going to end up as
a modern-day Noël Coward. But him and me together on a TV show certainly made an odd combination. A couple of years ago I – along with a lot of other heavy rock performers – did a video for Pat Boone because of the album he made covering metal tunes. This is not as weird as you might think. I thought he was an excellent performer in his day.

Anyhow, back to
my
day (or with this particular period of time, you might call it ‘dog days’). In 1988 we also did another live record,
No Sleep At All
. We figured we might as well, since we had this relatively new line-up and all. It was recorded at the Giants of Rock Festival in Hameenlinna, Finland in July. But it was a mistake and failed miserably sales-wise. The record itself is all right. It could have been better no doubt, but we had Guy Bidmead mix it because we wanted to give him another try, mainly because he had been Vic Maile’s boy and Vic was a great live mixer. After that, I think we finally figured out that Guy just wasn’t Vic Maile. Don’t get me wrong, though – after all I’ve said about Guy, it was only ’cause he was taking orders from us. He was too nice! Vic knew when to tell us to shut the fuck up!

Of course, we went on the road and toured behind
No Sleep
– nothing new there! When we went through the States we opened for Slayer. Tom Araya is a really nice guy (plus he plays bass and sings, as I do!), but I’m not so sure about the band’s philosophy of terror and gore. They don’t realize what they’re doing. Like, in the middle of their show, Tom would say something to the effect of, ‘Do you want to see blood?’ One day I told him, ‘You don’t want to be saying that, Tommy. Someday that’s gonna backfire on
you.’ And he insisted, ‘Oh, these are my people, man. I understand them and they understand me.’ Then the very next night, in Austin, Texas, there he was – ‘Do you want to see blood?’ – and half a chair went past his head, missing him by about an inch. He lost it altogether! He got on the mic and gave the audience a fucking sermon, waving his finger about and stomping up and down. He was beside himself with fury, and when he came off the stage, I was standing there, going, ‘Uh-huh, your people, eh?’ I enjoyed that tour quite a bit, actually. On the last night during Slayer’s set I went behind guitarist Jeff Hanneman and just stood there – dressed up as Adolf Hitler.

We took a short break at the beginning of 1989, during which Phil Campbell went off to Germany to do some tracks for some Swiss band called Drifter. Then, after we went through the UK, we headed to South America for the first time. We’d never seen anything like Brazil. On one hand, you’ve got Copacabana beach, with bronze billionaires and their molls, then 200 yards away there are people living in cardboard boxes amongst sewers running through the sand. You’ve got shopping malls with everything in them that you could possibly want and next door, literally at the edge of the parking lot, is a shanty town with one wire running from the telegraph pole with a light bulb in each cardboard box. We saw a guy sleeping under a bridge with a table, a chair, a sofa and a picture on the wall – five feet from the traffic. That’s where he lived! Unfortunately I see the US heading in the same direction. Great Britain already seems like a Third-World nation, and judging from all the homeless people
around, it looks like America isn’t far behind. Can somebody tell me why the richest country in the world has bums living on the streets?

Anyhow, we played four dates in Brazil – two in São Paulo and one each in Porto Alegre and Rio. The venue in Rio was underground – an incredibly hot concrete bunker. They weren’t these massive stadiums that one had heard about, although we did play those when we came back. It wasn’t that great a tour the first time we went, but it was amazing all the same. We went home with mountains of practically worthless currency – it was like Weimar Germany. Interesting place, but rather frightening, really.

Another country we toured that year was Yugoslavia. That was where Phil Campbell made one of several attempts to quit Motörhead – for a while it seemed like he was quitting every other day. I’m not sure what was really going on with him at the time – it seemed like he was having a nervous breakdown or something. Anyway, we were driving across Croatia, in the mountains. It was in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere – all they’ve got up there is sheep, goats, crags and the odd shepherd – and it was the middle of the night, and Phil was having a row with somebody. I forget what the problem was, but he was storming up and down the bus, packing his bags and yelling, ‘Stop this bus!’ The Yugoslav bus driver didn’t care: he stopped the bus and –
froom
! – opened the door. So Phil stepped out of the bus with two suitcases into three feet of snow. There was a blizzard howling horizontally as he looked around. On one side of him was a snow drift and down the valley, miles away, there was one light. It
went out as he was looking at it. Fucking great, that was – a treasured moment in Motörhead history.

Needless to say, Phil didn’t quit the band that night. He did keep trying, though. We were on our way to Berlin and he was doing it again – ‘I’m leaving the band!’ He came up behind the bus driver and said, ‘Take me to the airport.’

‘This bus is going to the gig,’ I said.

Phil wasn’t about to let that stop him. ‘Well, I’m hiring the bus as well as you are and I want to go to the airport!’

‘This is paid for by the
band
,’ I replied, ‘and you are now a civilian. The band is going to the gig on the band’s bus. So if you want to go to the airport, you get out and get a fuckin’ taxi, right? And you can ring one from the gig because you can’t use the band’s mobile phone any more. Okay? You’re a civilian now, Phil!’ This bit of news was met by a lot of muttering under the breath and again he gave up the idea of leaving.

He tried once more at the beginning of another German tour. He left the band the first night we got to Frankfurt, before we’d even gotten started. Nothing would do but he had to go to the airport – no matter that it was half-past eleven and all the planes were gone. He went there anyway and slept in a chair: when he woke up, somebody had stolen all his bags. After that, I think he learned his lesson and stopped trying to quit the band. Phil is still with us today and other than me, he’s the longest-running member of Motörhead. He’s also a constant source of amusement. Many’s the time he’s walked out of a gig into the back of the gear truck, thinking it was the bus. He got into a bass bin once – thought it
was his bunk. No end of fun, Phil. He’s sort of like our Keith Moon. Incidentally, he’s also an excellent guitar player. And a Taurus.