Overkill: The Untold Story of Motörhead

This book is dedicated to the great Ronnie James Dio.

Contents

Hear the Music: The Best of Motörhead

Foreword by Glenn Hughes

Introduction

Chapter 1: Before 1971

Chapter 2: 1971–1974

Hear the Music: The influences on Motörhead

Chapter 3: 1975–1976

Chapter 4: 1977

Chapter 5: 1978–1979

Chapter 6: 1980

Picture Section

Chapter 7: 1981

Chapter 8: 1982–1983

Chapter 9: 1984–1986

Chapter 10: 1987–1989

Hear the Music: Lemmy's bands

Chapter 11: 1990–1991

Chapter 12: 1992–1993

Chapter 13: 1994–1995

Chapter 14: 1996–1998

Chapter 15: 1999–2000

Chapter 16: 2001–2003

Picture Section

Chapter 17: 2004–2006

Chapter 18: 2007–2008

Chapter 19: 2009–2010

Chapter 20: 2010-2011

Hear the Music: The Next Generations

Chapter 21: 2011-2017

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Motörhead Discography

Sources

Acknowledgments

Information Page

Hear the Music

The Best of Motörhead

Click below to listen to the greatest Motörhead tunes from their forty-year career

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Introduction To The 2017 Edition

The first edition of this book was published in 2011, and although it’s only six years ago as I write this, the world was rather different back then – because it had Lemmy in it. Intellectual, resentful, intolerant and good-humoured to the last, he succumbed at the age of 70 to heart failure in December 2015, depriving us of one of the keenest minds the rock world has ever seen. I’m just glad I got to meet him a few times.

This updated edition adds a chapter covering the six years since the first edition, but the remainder of the text still refers to Lemmy and the other members of Motörhead in the present, extant sense, so don’t be surprised if you come across explanations of what they’re doing and saying as if everyone is still alive and the band still a going concern. It’s still an amazing tale of peril, pitfalls and piss-taking, grammar notwithstanding, and the legend will only grow as the years pass.

Joel McIver, 2017

Foreword

BY GLENN HUGHES

My first encounter with Lemmy was back in 1984 at the Embassy Club in London. He was minding his own business when I ambled up to the bar. If memory serves me right, I was also in the company of Motörhead’s drummer, Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor. I’d heard all the stories and folklore of the legend that is Lemmy, who was a man after my own heart. Anyone who could go without sleep for more than seven days and nights was my kind of amigo. What baffled me on this Friday night in the capital was how freakin’ eloquent and steady he was, in speech and composure.

After numerous Jack and Cokes were consumed – along with other mind-altering chemicals – I found myself in the men’s room. I would like to thank Phil for rescuing me from a fate worse than death. I had blacked out in one of the stalls, with my arms wrapped around an Armitage Shanks toilet bowl. Lesson number one: do not try and go toe-to-toe with Lem, because all bets will be off. I fell at the first hurdle. It wasn’t pretty, as I was wearing a white jacket on this particular evening.

As steady as he stood at the bar, so is his musical legacy: straight down your throat, dagger between your legs, balls-out rock’n’roll. You know what you get when you go to a Motörhead show. It ain’t gonna be polite, there ain’t no nancy-boy fragrance up on the deck – the aroma of booze and sweat is more apparent. Lemmy is very much loved in the hard rock and metal community, simply because he is rock’n’roll personified. There’s no-one like him, no sir, not even close – they broke the mould with this lad from Stoke-on-Trent. His fans love him, because he is one of them: he’s a music lover, he loves the birds and he lives his life the way he damn well pleases. Long may you reign, my friend.

Glenn Hughes

Los Angeles, 2010

Introduction

Iremember it very clearly. It was December 7, 2001, not long after 9/11, and I was standing in my living room holding a fax from Lemmy. I had sent him the letters page of that month’s Q magazine, in which a letter had appeared from me. I had written to Q in response to some moron in the previous issue who was calling Lemmy a Nazi for having a collection of Third Reich memorabilia. This was what Lemmy thought about it.

"Hi, Joel,

Yes, thanks for the bumf. They do get upset don’t they? It is after all fashionable to get upset. Actually, I do have a frame of reference for the Holocaust: it’s not the only, let alone the first time, that a minority has been murdered for being a minority; and the way the human race is going, caring and concerned people (Jewish or not) should be looking at their govt. now not Germany’s in the 30s, or it won’t be the last. Plenty of attacks on Arab-Americans since Sept. 11th etc. Still, there we are AHAHAHAHA!

Love & rockets.

Lem"

This is not meant to imply that I’m friends with Lemmy: I doubt if he even remembers me. I was just one of many journalists who had interviewed him at that time, and during the course of the interview I’d mentioned the Q debate. He expressed an interest in seeing the letters and suggested that I fax them over, given that he didn’t have email because he didn’t trust computers. I didn’t know that a decade later I’d be referring to that fax in a book I was writing about him. I’m glad I hung on to it, not just for its sentimental value but also because it sums up the man’s character. Here’s a chap who is historically educated, very literate and unafraid to draw ominous conclusions – and then he’ll reach for the bourbon bottle and shrug it off.

Overkill: The Untold Story of Motörhead fills an important gap. Lemmy wrote an excellent autobiography, White Line Fever, back in 2002, and a revealing read it was too, but it didn’t tell the story of Motörhead: it told the story of Lemmy, just as it should. Although I read his book when it came out, I have neither re-read it in the course of research nor quoted from it here: this book overlaps with Lemmy’s, of course, but it takes an entirely different perspective on the band and it covers much wider ground. Again, just as it should.

Motörhead are an international institution. The band members spend a lot of time lamenting the fact that they have been relegated to a non- competitive ‘icon’ or ‘legend’ status before their time, but one of the points I make here is that they’re just as good as they ever were, if not better, as they enter their 36th year in business. Since the recruitment of producer Cameron Webb in 2004, the band have hit a renewed streak of inspiration, writing their best music in years. I don’t see why they should be put out to grass yet. In fact, only when – not if – Lemmy’s lifestyle catches up with him, and he heads off to jam with his old friend Jimi Hendrix in the sky, that will be the time to call them legends. Right now, in 2011, Motörhead are too powerful to be dismissed. This book explains why.

Joel McIver, 2011

www.joelmciver.co.uk

Chapter 1

Before 1971

Christmas came a day early in 1945 – at least in Burslem, part of the town of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. On December 24 that year just months after the end of World War Two, a son was born to an ex-Royal Air Force chaplain and his wife, the Kilmisters. The boy, Ian, was born four weeks premature and came complete with a perforated eardrum and whooping cough, causing his parents to fear for his life and request an emergency christening in case he didn’t recover. He recovered all right, but the family were about to experience more turbulence.

For reasons undisclosed, Kilmister Senior decided that family life wasn’t for him and left his wife and son when Ian was three months old. We will probably never know exactly what his reasons were, although his son expressed some pungent views on the subject in later life.

Lemmy – let’s call him by the nickname he received in due course – was an only child and, in the absence of witnesses other than his mother, was initially sanguine about his father’s absence, saying later: They were young when they got married, at the end of the war – the whole wartime romance thing. She was probably struck by his uniform and his holiness, he was probably struck by her legs and her ass. Who knows? It takes two in a couple to know what happened and I’ve only ever heard my mother’s side, which necessarily is a little biased.

Along with his maternal grandmother, Lemmy and his mother moved to Newcastle-under-Lyme and then to Madeley in Staffordshire. Given that he would go on to know over 1,000 women (his own estimate) in the Biblical sense, Lemmy grew up with a refreshingly healthy attitude to the opposite sex. As he explained: I like women, see – I don’t think I’m in competition with them. I don’t think I have to dominate them, I actually like women. I was brought up by two women, I didn’t have a father around for years, so I don’t have that problem.

Decades later, Lemmy ascribed his adult nature firmly to the experiences of his youth – and specifically to being an only child. I’ve always been something of a leader, he told one interviewer. Most only children are. They’re the leader in all their childhood fantasies, because they’re by themselves, so then they usually grow up to be that way… [My mother] didn’t marry again till I was like 10 or something, so I understand women a lot better than a lot of guys do from going out hunting with dad. Mostly I like women more than guys.

In 1955 the family moved to a farm in the town of Benllech on the island of Anglesey in north Wales. Lemmy’s mother had married a man called George Willis, who had two children from a previous marriage. They were older than Lemmy by some years and he preferred to spend time alone. His school, Ysgol Syr Thomas Jones, was in the nearby town of Amlwch (pronounced Am-luck). The experience of being the only English kid at a school full of Welsh children made an impact on him – a physical one, with some of the other kids picking on him.

By all accounts he gave as good as he got, even becoming a bully himself for a spell. We used to have this kid, he told the Guardian half a century later. We’d tie him up and burn him. With matches. I don’t know why we did it, probably because he let us and he kept coming back. However, bullying lost its appeal when a friend of the victim gave Lemmy a solid punch in the head. He was just trying to save his mate, he reflected. And I thought that was a much better thing to be doing than bullying. Cured me instantly.

Despite the scuffles, Lemmy did well at school, he recalled: The English teacher at my school made me interested in words, he said. Without that, I would have just been another moron down at the filling station, you know. It was a great thing that she did for me. Because she saw I was good at it. And she encouraged me. Which is a rare thing among teaching personnel these days, you know. She’d work alongside me and teach me things. I passed the matriculation level exam, the graduation exam, at the age of 13, so I was always good at English. And that’s a great blessing, you know. Reading and writing is a great blessing.

Lemmy’s childhood was, he insisted, a happy one, possibly because it was a relatively free one, although he admitted that life could be boring at times. Rural Wales, he observed, was like being in fucking Bulgaria; nothing ever happens there. If you want something to happen, it would be on a very small level anyway. There are no peaks in life there. And if you want something interesting to happen, it might be a problem. If something from the outside comes in, then they don’t like it. He had a point: his outsider status induced the other kids to give him his famous nickname, although precisely why is unknown. For decades Motörhead fans told each other that Lemmy came from its subject’s habit of saying ‘Lend me some money’, but this, he revealed later, was a joke which he invented himself (Saying it was short for ‘lemme a fiver’ was my idea afterwards – I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Talk about backfiring…). Some Welsh kid, now in his sixties, has a lot to answer for.

Still, the life of rural peace and quiet had its advantages. The farm where the Kilmister/Willis family lived was 3,000 feet above sea level and surrounded by open land, which led Lemmy to his first love, horses. Working at a stables while at school, he planned a career as a horse breeder when he was old enough. I had two stallions, bought for £24, which I’d broke in myself, he recalled. I assisted in cutting the balls off my horse once, which I felt bad about for years. I held one of his legs. I saw the whole thing. They open up slits in the bag and pull them out and chop them up. I never felt right about that. Taking the balls off a male is about as bad as you can get, isn’t it? If someone did that to me, I would never let them get away. I would stalk them. I don’t know why he didn’t kill me. I couldn’t look him in the eye after.

Girls soon featured on Lemmy’s radar, and an early experiment with a guitar led him to conclude that success with music and success with women are often related. My mother played Hawaiian guitar, he said, but there was a really bad action on it [the distance between strings and fretboard]. Nevertheless, I put strings on it and took it to school during the week after exams, when you don’t do anything. And I was immediately surrounded by chicks. It worked like a charm, and I couldn’t even play the fucking thing.

By 1957 Lemmy was 12 and rock’n’roll, the new wave of American music imported by US servicemen and sailors into western cities such as Liverpool, had made its presence felt even at the very tip of Wales. Lemmy heard the first big hit, Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’, and wasn’t convinced. The first stuff I listened to would have to be Bill Haley, he said. But I knew that wasn’t it, really. It was OK. It was kind of pop-country, really. Then Little Richard was the first one who really [impressed me], and Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis and all of those – Chuck Berry, Fats Domino…

I was gonna be a horse breaker, that was my dream, he continued, and then I heard Little Richard and literally that was it. I thought, ‘That sounds great. He sounds like he’s really having a fucking good time.’ And then I learned that there were women connected to it as well. So that was it… rock’n’roll changed the whole bill completely. All of a sudden it was like, ‘What the fuck’s this?’ and everybody changed… I remember before that. Sort of. Boy, it was terrible before rock’n’roll, really.

Like most males, Lemmy got into rock’n’roll for the women. Unlike most, he was honest about it, saying: "I always knew what I wanted to do. I used to watch the TV show Oh Boy!, Cliff Richard was the resident singer and he was immediately surrounded by all these birds screaming and tearing his clothes off. So I thought, ‘That’s the fucking job for me!’ And his gimmick then was that he never smiled, doing the moody Elvis thing. But you couldn’t stop the cunt smiling now with a crowbar, could you?

Girls always did loom large in my life, he added. Every summer, these families would arrive from places like Manchester for their summer holidays. They’d come for a week, and their daughters were always up for a good time. They kept me very busy.

Lemmy’s school days were about to come to an end. Having accidentally cut the palm of his hand with a flick knife, Lemmy asked his head teacher – who was about to cane him twice on each hand for truancy – if the cane could fall four times on his uninjured hand. The teacher refused and hit Lemmy’s injured hand, which began to bleed. Enraged at this pointless torture, Lemmy grabbed the cane and smacked it around the hapless teacher’s head. He was summarily expelled.

After school, Lemmy found himself following the depressingly familiar working-class career path of the day – into a succession of miserable jobs. Factory work was inevitable, firstly on a lathe (It did one good thing for me, being a lathe operator… It convinced me I’d rather starve to fucking death than go back. Some of my mates are still there, because they had nowhere to go) and then in a washing-machine plant owned by the Hotpoint company. All the while, Lemmy kept his eyes fixed on rock’n’roll. I got my first record in 1958, he said. ‘Knee Deep In The Blues’ by Tommy Steele. It was an old Guy Mitchell number. I said, ‘That’s for me. It doesn’t even look like work.’ I found out later that it was, but it does have its advantages over working at a washing-machine factory.

As for so many kids whose experience of popular music was limited to light orchestra and crooners, the primal rhythms and aggression of rock’n’roll were enormously attractive to Lemmy. I remember before rock’n’roll, before there even was any, he mused later. I remember when Elvis came out, and Bill Haley. A lot of the early rock was country, it’s just these people didn’t know it. Carl Perkins was country, for sure. All that picking, and the vocals, it was country with a bit more of an edge, and then the blues came in there and it became the real thing. And that’s the best music, some great shit-kicking country music mixed with the down-home blues guys. It was fucking great, it’s the greatest fucking fusion there’s ever been.

By 1961 Lemmy was 16 years old and making the tortuous journey from Anglesey to Liverpool to see The Beatles play at the Cavern Club. Long acknowledged as one of his biggest musical influences, The Beatles left an impression on him that would never be erased. They made so many people start rock bands it’s unbelievable, because they were the first real sort of proletarian band. They were working class, you know, they showed that anybody could do it for themselves, he said. You will never see anything like them again, because they were at the peak of their game and they came in and fucking wiped everybody out.

Some of his respect for the band undoubtedly came from their roots in one of England’s toughest cities. As he explained: The Beatles were from Liverpool. It’s a hard town. The Stones weren’t the hard men. They just dressed up. The Beatles were the hard men. Fucking Liverpool, man. The Stones are from the suburbs of London. Ringo was from the fucking Dingle, which is the worst area, next to Glasgow, that I’ve ever seen in my life. What they did in both those places [was] they couldn’t reform it, so they just knocked it down. They moved everybody out and razed it and built new housing projects. No way to make it civilised, you know what I mean? It was fucking lawless. The police wouldn’t go in there.

After the rise of The Rolling Stones a couple of years later, Lemmy commented: The Stones were second-hand next to The Beatles. It was only when The Beatles were gone that they could start calling themselves the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, which they never were. They were always pretty ropey onstage. Without all that production they do now they would still be pretty ropey, because Keith is pretty ropey, isn’t he? He is a great rhythm guitarist, but he isn’t a leader. He was livelier earlier on, but Brian Jones was the leader of the band for years. It was his band. He hired Jagger and Keith too, but they paced him out.

Other bands made less of an impact on the teenage Kilmister. I saw Buddy Holly just before he died, he told one interviewer. He was touring England with… ah, who was it? A couple of English bands at the time. It was all new; it was like, 1958, y’know. Only been going for three years. My dad [stepfather George Willis] took me. But I don’t really remember it, not really. And I didn’t know any music and I didn’t play anything. I suppose it taught me that up there in the lights is better than being down there in the seats, y’know.

Like any era, the early sixties had its good and bad music, although the decade tends to be depicted by writers these days as a uniformly golden age. Lemmy was sharp enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, though, and also to appreciate that the limelight in which huge bands like The Beatles operated would stop being fun after a certain point. What it must have been like to be in The Beatles or the Stones, man, I cannot imagine, he mused. "It must have been fucking torture. George Harrison said it was the worst time of his life and the best time of his life. Everything they did was under the microscope. One British daily paper had a Beatles page in it that was about whatever they did the day before. A mass-circulation paper – the Daily Mirror, it was – which was the biggest-selling paper in Britain at the time."

Marooned in darkest Wales and a perennial outsider, within his own family and in his community, Lemmy took to rock’n’roll with such passion because it was uniquely his, and because it offered him a means to rebel. The music he heard at home merely accentuated this, as he said: "The first record I ever heard was probably The Pirates Of Penzance, the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, because my mum was always playing it around the house… [It was] a five-album set on 78 rpm. I hated it, really hated it."

It all pointed towards music becoming more than just a hobby. Having played around with his mother’s guitar since the age of 12, Lemmy decided to learn to play properly and set to work. An early song that he mastered was ‘Hit And Miss’ by the John Barry Seven. That was one of the first songs I learned to play on guitar, he said. "It was the theme song to Juke Box Jury. I was really young when I started to play. Although I wouldn’t really call it ‘playing’. I didn’t actually know what to do with a guitar, I just took it to school to show off to the chicks."

By his own admission, Lemmy never became more than an average guitarist, even though he worked hard on the instrument. You have to go through the bleeding fingers syndrome, he once declared, if you really want to play. I really wanted to. I didn’t give up. It’s the vocation, the priesthood. It is similar. If it’s your vocation, you have to do it. There’s no choice, yeah? ‘You hear the word and the word is good,’ and that’s it.

The stultifying factory conditions must have been a strong motivator for Lemmy. Even at the time, he was a classic angry young man, sickened by the lives that his parents’ generation had settled for. Nowhere was this more evident than on the factory floor. I worked for this factory when I was 16, he said, and this guy said to me, ‘I’ve been here since 1953.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, Yeah, and I never missed a day, either’. And he was proud of it, you know? He never misses a fucking day. Why not?

He added that industrial relations were never his strong point: There’s always gonna be a Hitler running a job, and I always seemed to catch them, you know? They had to make you conform, they had to make you match the others. I didn’t let them. But then they hate you. You represent everything that threatens their cosy little world. Other terrible jobs included a painting stint for a memorable patron. Me and my mate were doing this house up for an oldish gay guy, he chuckled. You can’t believe what his name was: Mr Brownsword. Can you fuckin’ believe that? That was incredible. Talk about life as art.

Travelling around on the only motorbike he has ever owned – a forties ex-army Matchless, which he described as a fucking old puffer – and possessing rudimentary guitar skills, Lemmy joined his first band, The Sundowners, about whom very little information exists. He labelled them truly awful and, while the next outfit (a band which rejoiced in the original name The DJs) lasted a little longer, they made no impact either. Lemmy laughingly recalled their attempt to ape The Shadows, who had perfected a kitsch unison step onstage. We thought we were well flash, doing all The Shadows steps, he sniggered.

Good times, but an unexpected step into a more serious world came in 1962 when Lemmy got a girlfriend pregnant. Cathy, a teenager from Stockport, had come to Anglesey on holiday: a summer romance blossomed. On returning home, accompanied by Lemmy, she had her baby, which was adopted. Lemmy has occasionally alluded to his first child and to Cathy over the years, but there appears to be no other information other than that the child, who must now be in his late forties, is called Sean. As Lemmy explained in 1983: He must be 19 by now. His mother had to take her graduation exams in the maternity ward! Most embarrassing. I almost got prosecuted for that, because she was underage.

After Stockport, Lemmy moved to Manchester, where he joined a band, The Rainmakers. Again, this came to nothing, but his next group, The Motown Sect, were more durable. The scene was all Motown, so we figured if we called ourselves The Motown Sect we’d get gigs. We played soul clubs just on the strength of our name, he said. We used to turn up in striped jerseys with our harmonicas and long hair, but it was too late, they’d booked us by then. Went down like a concrete parachute. We used to do ‘Smokestack Lightning’ and ‘Baby What’s Wrong’ by The Downliners Sect. We got a year’s worth out of that – ‘Here’s one for all the James Brown fans – it’s by Chuck Berry.’ Hahaha!

Despite the band’s moderate levels of recognition, Lemmy was still broke: fortunately his mother helped him pursue the rock’n’roll lifestyle. My mother loves it, really, he said later. She’s a bit of a bolster. She doesn’t give a fuck. She thinks it’s wonderful. When all of us lived in Manchester and there were 18 people living in one room, she would send me a fiver quietly and stuff like that. She was very subversive. She always wanted to sneakily do something like that, but she couldn’t because in her time it wasn’t possible. But she loved me doing it.

More enduring success – in fact, a level of attainment that Lemmy later recalled as the best time of his life – came with The Rockin’ Vickers, a Burnley rock’n’roll band that had moved to Blackpool and with whom he remained for two years. This outfit, strange even by the standards of the time, took to the stage in Finnish national costume, for no obvious reason. We only used to play up in the North, he told writer Mat Snow in 1991. We were huge. We could sell out the Bolton Locarno by ourselves. We wore dog collars and the Finnish national costume – the Lapp smock, royal blue with orange and yellow felt stick-on stuff across – and skintight white jeans with lace-up flies, and reindeer-skin boots. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

With a repertoire of covers of songs by Bill Haley, The Beach Boys and Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, the band played every small and mid-sized venue the Midlands could offer, which in those days was an array of Odeons, Imperials, Locarnos and church halls. We didn’t know if it would last until next week, cackled Lemmy, but even he was surprised at how much money the band brought in. We didn’t have hit records, but you didn’t need ‘em. We were making, in those days, quite a lot of money. We had this big house we lived in and three fucking Jaguars and a speedboat on Lake Windermere. We used to go water-skiing. That was the heyday, if you ask me.

While in The Rockin’ Vickers Lemmy played rhythm and lead guitar, the former rather competently, the latter less so. As he recalled: "I find it quite easy to play chords and, you know, that was all I ever did. I never wanted to be a lead guitarist. I didn’t even realise there was such a thing as a bass player till later. So I