When People Ask Me What Lemmy Was Like, This Is What I Tell Them

When people ask me what Lemmy was like, I tell them this story.

We’re backstage at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in Lemmy’s dressing room drinking Jack Daniel’s and Coke out of plastic pint glasses. There’s a knock at the door and a lad in his late teens enters warily. He has a short, crinkly ginger mullet and is carrying a box. He is called Gerhard and he is German. “This used to belong to my grandad,” he says, “but I am giving it to you.”

He reverently hands Lemmy the box. We stare as Lemmy takes a German helmet out and places it on his dressing table. The object is a black hole, sucking all attention towards it just by its sinister presence. Lemmy feels the helmet’s weight Antiques Roadshow-style, and looks inside where a small SS is engraved into the metal. It is of the type worn by Hitler’s bodyguards. “It’s worth about £2,500,” Lemmy says. “Sell it and go to college. Or get a decent fucking haircut."

“I figured he could use the money more than me,” says Lemmy when Gerhart leaves.

And that is Motörhead on tour – where acts of goodness mix with Nazi memorabilia, where humour and light meet darkness and chaos. Where intense drama is interspersed with intense boredom. It’s the chiaroscuro of normal life but with all the extremes turned up. It is rock, and it is roll.

And for five days in 1997, the photographer Amelia Troubridge and I were part of it, going along for the ride as Motörhead toured England with their “Overnight Sensation” Tour.

All photographs by Amelia Troubridge.

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Wolverhampton Civic Hall

Tuesday 21 October, 1997

6.30pm

The gear is set up, the sound check is completed. The long, dead hours stretch into the distance until 9.15pm when Motörhead are due on stage. Lemmy is sitting at a table in his dressing room, pragmatically using the time to write some lyrics. He has refilled a plastic pint glass with a large splash of Jack Daniel’s and an equal measure of Coca-Cola. These cocktails are the only liquid I observe him to drink in five days. He is steadily working through a pack of Marlboro reds. His aluminium briefcase – containing pages of lyrics, a bottle of Head & Shoulders, an American pornographic magazine called Gallery, an electric razor and a hairbrush – sits before him, decorated by a sticker that says: “Harassing me about my smoking may prove dangerous to your health.”

Phil “Zoom” Campbell, the group’s guitarist of 14 years, shambles in and flops onto a sofa.

“Fucking BORED,” he announces. It is the plaintive cry of someone who daily trades 90 minutes of onstage glory for 22 1/2 hours of tour bus, soundcheck, hotels (if you’re lucky) and parties. “Perhaps,” he muses aloud, “I could use these quiet moments profitably and learn to read and write.”

“Learn semaphore,” Lemmy growls, “then you could make yourself understood from longer distances.”

“Gruff,” is too mellifluous a word to describe Lemmy’s voice. You could perhaps achieve it, if you were willing to spend 30 years shouting into a microphone with your head back and the intervening waking hours smoking. Ian Kilmister, aka Lemmy, is an unusual 52-year-old. He is the only original member of the band he formed 23 years ago. Guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke departed in the early Eighties, followed by drummer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor. Motörhead life on the road finally bested and basted Taylor: Lemmy remembers him mistaking his bathroom mirror for a window and trying to climb out of it.

Strewn by casualties, Lemmy marches on. “My system just flexes its muscles and goes, ‘More!’ I’ve always had good stamina – I’ve got my mother and redoubtable fucking vicar father to thank for that, God rot ’im. Luckily, I’ve mostly inherited my mother’s side because he was a small, bald man with bad eyesight. Horrible little fucker.”

The Rev Sidney David Albert Kilmister was thrown out of the church when he left Lemmy’s mother who later married an ex-Bolton Wanderers player called Willis.

Lemmy regularly puts his stamina to the test with a schedule of near-constant touring. “I spend more time on a tour bus than in my apartment. It’s not what I do any more, it’s who I am.” Despite all this, I say that I think he looks surprisingly untrammelled after such a hedonistic lifestyle. He looks at me evenly: “I’m fuckin’ trammelled all right. Interesting, isn’t it? You don’t hear the word “trammelled”. It’s like East Grinstead. You don’t hear much about West Grinstead, do you?”

Expelled from school at 15, rock ’n’ roll is his CV. In 1965, he played guitar in The Rockin’ Vicars. “A very strange band,” he recalls. “We behaved like The Who and smashed all our gear. And we wore Finnish national costume for some reason.”

Filling in time as Jimi Hendrix’s roadie, by 1971 he had joined the psychedelic rock collective Hawkwind, remaining a member for nearly four years until they parted company following Lemmy’s drugs bust at the Canadian border. In 1975 he decided to form his own group, and was going to call it Bastard until sense prevailed and he christened it Motörhead after a song he wrote for Hawkwind.

A “motorhead” is an enthusiast of the drug speed – and never has a band been more aptly or honestly named. Lemmy claims that when he asked for a complete blood transfusion in 1980, the doctor refused: “I had become so toxic, mostly from all the speed and alcohol, that fresh blood would have killed me."

7.15pm

I observe that Lemmy rarely leaves his dressing room and ask why. “You can stop being a writer for a few hours,” Lemmy tells me, “but I’m Lemmy out of Motörhead 24 hours a day.” And it’s a role that he’s intellectually unsuited for, being about 20 IQ points too intelligent for it. “My mind has to be occupied all the time. Without a book, I’d go fucking nuts. Our drummer Mikkey has only read one book in his life – I don’t know how he survives.”

So while the other band members and road crew can venture into whatever city they’ve landed in during daylight hours, Lemmy lies low in his dressing room reading. It’s not like he can put on a disguise. He wears black boot-cut trousers, a bullet belt, a black shirt which struggles to contain his barrel of a chest, white cowboy boots and a German cross round his neck. This isn’t a stage outfit – rather, the clothes he has chosen over the years that reflect the character of a man who does exactly what he likes. And in doing so, they have become the capsule wardrobe for anyone in heavy rock. He has worn his Viking-thick hair below the shoulder since 1963. “It was very difficult back then – ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ ‘Well why don’t you suck my dick and find out?’

“I’m not a hard man when it comes to fighting. I mean, I look like this. Who’s going to bother me? But I was the only English kid in a school of 700 Welsh ones, so I had to learn to fight well. Actually, I always preferred running away. It was good fun, besides being good exercise.

“If you’re in a boozer, don’t worry about the guy throwing his weight around: the guy you want to watch is the quiet one sitting in the corner with half a pint of mild.”

7.30pm

Phil Campbell is still bored.

“Seen Mikkey?”

Lemmy doesn’t answer. Mikkey Dee (Micael Kiriakos Delaoglou), Motörhead’s powerfully talented, if egocentric, Greek/Swedish drummer, is having his passport picture taken for the next leg of the tour in Russia.

“What’re you reading?” asks Phil.

Lemmy silently holds up his book, The Prince with the Silver Hand by sci-fi writer (and ex-Hawkwind lyricist) Michael Moorcock so Phil can see the cover.

“Oh. OK. I’m off out. Anyone know where I can buy some cock mags round here?”

Phil has broken Lemmy’s concentration. He puts the book in his briefcase and goes over to his personal one-armed bandit, a German Rotamint machine, which is always installed in his dressing room. A quote by blues legend Albert King is written on it: “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” Lemmy unlocks the back, removes some change, and feeds it into the machine. He presses some buttons. He thumps it a bit. Then he puts it on automatic mode, which means it will play on its own, trying various combinations until it pays out.

Martin and Patrick, some Swedish friends of Mikkey who are on the tour as “a holiday” snigger at this. “Why do you bother doing this? It is your money anyway,” says Patrick. He looks round for encouragement. No one meets his eye.

“If you don’t understand,” says Lemmy, “I can’t explain it.”

The classic Motörhead rabble rouser Ace of Spades explains his philosophy in four lines: “You know I’m born to lose/ And gambling’s for fools/ But that’s the way I like it baby/ I don’t want to live forever…” Gambling is Lemmy’s vice. One of them. He admits to me that if one-armed bandits were legal in his adopted home of California he wouldn’t have been able to afford his collection of Nazi memorabilia. “I’ve got no control.”

A crew member knocks and asks if a journalist from a magazine called Songwriter’s Café can come in for an interview. Lemmy acquiesces, mainly out of boredom. But when he claps eyes on the writer, he is delighted. “Murph! This is Murph,” he tells me. “He went to Blackpool Tower dressed as a bat and said he wanted to fly off the top. The ticket guy says, ‘It’s one-and-six to go up the tower.’ Murph says, ‘I only have to pay half – cos I’m going to fly off it.’ The ticket guy says, ‘Tell you what. You fly up there and back down and I’ll give you your money back.’”

9.00pm

Dave “Hobbsy” Hilsden, Motörhead’s tour manager, enters. Everyone refers to him as Hobbsy, although no one – not even Hobbsy – is sure why. A slight, bespectacled man with only one fully-functioning lung, he alternates between cigarette and asthma inhaler. Organising Motörhead is a stressful and often thankless job, but he manages to stay jovial.

“Fifteen minute warning,” he says.

Mikkey starts binding his hands with tape. He soaks them in salt water every night but even just four days into the tour, they are covered in weeping blisters.

9.10pm

Hobbsy pops his head round the door again.

“Five minute warning.”

No one moves.

9.15pm

Lemmy, Phil and Mikkey go to the bathroom and return looking skittish.

“Let’s go down there and make a spectacle of ourselves,” says Mikkey.

“I’ll go down on me own and make a monocle of meself,” counters Lemmy.

I wander down to the bear pit in front of the stage. I’ve never seen Motörhead before.

Wolverhampton Civic Hall holds 2,100 people. So there really isn’t any need to play that loud. Motörhead is a different kind of loudness from, say, a Notting Hill Carnival Jamaican sound system where the bass makes the air in your chest move. This moves your extremities – your trousers shake and your hair vibrates. It is a merciless, savage kind of loud that rattles your brain. It’s impossible to think – I actually try to think and can’t. “Motörhead are actually a blues band,” Lemmy tells me later. “We just do it very, very fast.”

Lemmy’s microphone is at eye-height. He sings with his legs splayed and his head thrown back. “It’s comfort, really. Plus you don’t have to look at the ugly bastards in front of you.” He plays in front of his bass speaker stack called Murder One. Phil’s is called Exorcist. They play beneath the “Little Bastard” logo, originally designed by the artist Joe Petagno, which together with the German gothic Motörhead script has become visual shorthand for heavy metal. “I wanted a cross between a knight in armour and a robot gone wrong,” says Lemmy of the Little Bastard. “It’s done very well for us.”

The gig goes relatively smoothly. The only snag comes when one of Mikkey’s cymbal stands breaks and Jonas, a young Swede standing in for Mikkey’s usual drum tech, makes a balls-up of replacing it. Mikkey throws the offending hardware offstage in disgust and it hits the unfortunate Jonas on the head. Onstage, it is serious. Fools are not suffered lightly. Mikkey is very proud of his Sonor kit. A snare drum alone costs $3,000.

12.15am

The dressing room is crowded with loud young women and quietly spoken Hells Angels wearing the back patches of Nottingham and Wolverhampton. Meanwhile Phil Campbell is in puckish mood, hard at work removing support band Novocaine’s gear from their dressing room and depositing it in another room down the corridor.

“It’s sort of a tradition that they [the Angels] come along,” explains Lemmy over the party noise. “We go back a long way – when I first started Motörhead I was living in a house with two of them. Although, as they well know, I don’t agree with everything they espouse, I still feel a great kinship for them cos they’re out on their own, too. There’s no hope for them. There’s no hope for us.”

Born to lose?

“Yeah. And they don’t give a fuck. Which is very cool. Anarchy, really. Nothing gets you down. People keep coming to us with these terrible downfall stories. ‘Your new album’s not selling.’ I just say, ‘OK, we’ll make another one until they do fucking buy ’em.’”

Like the Angels, Lemmy is a quiet but forceful presence. Always in control, nothing happens on tour without him knowing about it. He never has to raise his voice.

“It’s a benevolent dictatorship. I use the veto whenever I have to, but mostly everyone’s free to do what they want to do. And it is a vote.

“People know how to behave. You know how to behave, or you wouldn’t still be on this tour. People know right from wrong, otherwise why would they do all the bad shit in the dark? And if I catch people doing shit they shouldn’t do, I rear up at them. Just cos you’re in a rock ’n’ roll band doesn’t give you the right to behave like an asshole.

He pauses and scans the room which is full of people behaving like assholes. But the right type of asshole. There are boundaries.

“Our crew once saw two Swedish girls thumbing a ride to the next gig. So they picked them up in the crew bus and tried to get hold of them, and the girls said ‘no’, so they put them out at the side of the road in the middle of the night to hitchhike. I went fuckin’ nuclear on those cunts. I had them all in, one by one: ‘Let’s hear your story.’ I found out who did it and fired them. I mean, if a chick says she doesn’t want to fuck you, that’s it. It’s not going to kill you. Get back in your bunk and have a wank. I’m the watcher, the social worker of the band.”

Hobbsy squeezes in between two immense Hells Angels and a girl in a silver bikini and body paint to have a word: “I just wanted to inform you before the evening progresses that it’s Cambridge next stop. Tomorrow.”

“Oh brilliant – a load of uneducated students. I’ll wear my iron cross for that one.”

Then the Hells Angels Wolverhampton Chapter invite everyone back to their club house for a drink. A drive ensues through leafy Wolverhampton suburbs in the dark to a detached house that is unremarkable except for a lot of security cameras. Inside is a bar, and a snooker room reached through a door from an old Coke machine.

There will be no sleep till Cambridge.

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The University Arms Hotel, Cambridge

Wednesday 22 October

12.30pm

The band bus driver (another Phil) wants his bed. But he can’t have it yet. He’s watching his bus, which is parked on double yellow lines outside the band’s hotel. The rest of the band have disembarked but Phil can’t move the bus until one final member of personnel wakes up and gets out. And no one would dare to wake him.

Half an hour later, the door opens and Lemmy slopes towards the lobby. His face looks even craggier than usual. He bids us good morning: “Gumurrghin.” And that is the last we see of him for 24 hours.

Amelia and I go to a nearby pub where Paul Hadwen, one of Lemmy’s old friends, is trying to get rid of the speed shakes by drinking draught Stella. “I was trying to find Phil,” he tells us. “I asked at the desk which room Mr Phil Campbell was in. They didn’t know. So I asked if they’d seen a small Welsh guy who looks like a tramp. They said, ‘Room 192.’”

Phil comes in ten minutes later and orders a pint of cider. He’s small and wiry, wearing a backwards baseball cap and carrying a plastic bag containing a cheeseburger and a copy of Escort. I ask how he got to be in the band.

“Well, I first met Lemmy in 1973 when Hawkwind played Cardiff. I was 12 and asked for his autograph,” says Phil.

So being a fan, were you nervous when you auditioned to be in Motörhead?

“It wasn’t a traditional audition. I think I had to drink a bottle of vodka and keep it down.”

9.00pm

We regroup in the pub, which is getting a lot of business. Lemmy isn’t there, and neither is Phil. Or Paul. Or Amelia, who’s gone to Boots. So I’m on my own with the road crew.

One of them – a big, bald one, backs me up against a pillar.

“I know what you’re doing.”

What?

“You’re just digging the dirt like all journalists. You’re fucking scum.”

I babble that I’ve been sanctioned to do the piece by Lemmy himself and that because all the dirt is freely on display, there’s no digging required…

Another member of the crew comes over and claps me on the back.

“Well done, you stood your ground. He was just trying to see if he could make you cry. He does it to everyone. What do you want to drink?”

I ask for a Guinness. I feel like I’ve passed some test. But I can hardly drink the pint because my hands are shaking. And I avoid the guy for the rest of the tour just in case.

Phil walks in and places a large bet that when Mikkey arrives he won’t buy a round. Mikkey comes in and buys a round for all 16 of us which still costs less than Phil's losses. “Look at us,” says Stuart, one of Motörhead’s chefs and possibly the most underused member of the tour, “Our day off, and all we can do is get wrecked.”

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (a bloke with a cloak over his denim jacket and a beard) comes over and says he knows a good club. Everyone goes to the club to get more wrecked.

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A coffee bar near The Corn Exchange, Cambridge

Thursday 23 October

4pm

Nigel, 38, from Southend and Chris, 34, from Gravesend are warming themselves against a radiator. They are following the tour, sleeping in a car. Amelia and I are suffering too, but more from lack of sleep. While the band are driven to the next town, we have to drive. So they’re getting an average of four hours more sleep than we are. Lightweights.

The Corn Exchange, Cambridge

7pm

Tony Beeton, lighting director, has just spent three hours setting up Motörhead’s 100-kilowatt lighting rig. It involves strobes, rays, ACLs (aircraft lights) Lekos and Par Cans – the traditional pallette of rock. “When I started working for Motörhead, Lemmy gave me strict instructions. He wanted Par Cans and ‘no wobbly mirrors. We’re rock ’n’ roll, not a fuckin’ disco.’”

I’ve taken time out to wander round Cambridge’s second hand book stores and found a near-pristine copy of John Keegan’s The Face of War, which I present to Lemmy as a thank you for suffering us for a week. I think he’s genuinely touched. He puts it in his briefcase.

He starts talking about history – a topic he loves. Yet it always has a Lemmy spin on it. Heinrich Himmler, for instance. “He’s supposed to be buried in Kreuzfeld Cemetery, but he’s been working for the CIA since 1941.” The Nazis again…

Collecting Nazi paraphernalia is one of Lemmy’s passions. Back in 1975 London, it was a way of provoking and underlining the leap he was making from the hippy space rock of Hawkwind to his new group. Lemmy took his psychedelic-coloured amps, painted them flat black and his band instantly attracted punks, ex-Hawkwind fans and “a horde of nasty characters”.

“People are good at misreading things,” says Lemmy. “We had a support group where the lead singer actually was a Nazi. Fuckin’ twat gave me this book about the American Nazi party. It was about the second coming of National Socialism and how the new Führer was going to be Charles Manson. I tore the fuckin’ thing in half, put it in the trash can and pissed on it. Then I took it back and said, ‘Here’s your fuckin’ book.’ He was very quiet after that.”

“They [the Nazis] were just always more interesting. The only interesting geezer we had was Churchill. The rest were just parvenus. Eisenhower? He was just a lemon. The best guy the Americans had was Patton, but they stopped him doing anything. He was right – he said, ‘Let’s carry on’ when they got to Berlin. ‘Let’s push right on into Russia.’”

Hobbsy knocks and persuades Lemmy to go right on down for the sound check.

7.30pm

In the foyer of The Corn Exchange, a posse of thickset security guards are being given their briefing and earplugs are being handed out like rations. “Motörhead,” says the gaffer, “are going to make The Prodigy seem like a children’s choir.”

11.30pm

In Lemmy’s professional estimation, the gig has not been a good one. An annoying bass hum through one of the speakers has spoilt it, although no one else seems to have noticed it, or even heard. Despondent, he sits in his dressing room smoking and drinking Jack Daniel’s. Paul Hadwen makes an effort to lighten the mood by engaging him in a conversation about the relative merits of German Second World War tanks.

Various well-wishers come in to congratulate him. “Hey, Lemmy, says a pony-tailed man in a suit, “that wasn’t a gig, man – that was WAR!”

“Yeah,” reflects Lemmy pouring more whiskey. “I think we lost.”

I wonder if he’s going to hit someone. “Don’t worry,” says Paul. “The last time Lemmy was violent was 1986. “Tell him about the Norway tour…”

Lemmy brightens up – he loves a tale. “It was this Norwegian promoter. He did everything wrong. He kept telling us the wrong mileages, so we had to hire a speedboat to go up and down the fjords to gigs. All the profits of the tour went on speedboats. It was the last gig of the tour in his hometown. He was standing by the PA. Suddenly our roadies grabbed him, pulled his trousers down, dragged him onstage and covered him in ketchup and cheese.”

Cheese?

“Yeah – that squirty stuff in tubes. Our manager stood onstage and said, ‘You see this asshole? He’s the reason we’re late.’

“So then he pulls his pants up and gets in a taxi to the police station. And this huge chief of police, a fucking terrifying geezer, comes along and says, ‘I think you haf done something very terrible to vis man!’ I explained everything. ‘Yas, yas,’ he said. ‘But vis is no reason to cover a man viv cheese!’”

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Brixton Academy, London

Saturday 25 October

8pm

After touring the country, this gig feels like Motörhead coming home. This is the big one. The celebrity guest count in the dressing room is certainly higher – where else could you get into a conversation with Dee Dee Ramone, Captain Sensible and Alex Winter? Plus a tall woman wearing a white feather boa.

Tonight, the 90-minute set features old warhorses like “Stay Clean”, “Orgasmatron” and the balls-out tub thumper “Going to Brazil”. “You’d Better Run” finds Lemmy in full bluesman mode, illuminated by a single green spotlight that exaggerates his daunting features. Then “We Are the Roadcrew” and “Bomber” are brought kicking and screaming into the Nineties with Mikkey’s pounding double bass drumming.

“Are there any alcoholics in the audience?” shouts Mikkey.

3,300 people scream, “Yes!”

“Welcome home,” says Lemmy and launches into “Ace of Spades”, in which Motörhead are joined onstage by Lemmy’s son Paul on guitar. “He’s suffering from depression at the moment,” Lemmy explains to me before the gig. “I’ll have to gently draw him aside later and beat him about the head.”

Brixton Academy

After-show party

1.20am

We’ve done five days on the road. I think I’m getting a cold. I sit on the stairs talking to Paul Hadwen. Mikkey walks past us with the boa woman. She shows us some cheese she has nicked from the buffet and secreted in her bra. Upstairs, the sound of glasses breaking, girls screaming and the sounds of a fight breaking out. But by now Motörhead are already in the bus, bound for the White House Hotel, Albany Street. Tomorrow they’re flying east for the next leg of the tour, pushing on into Moscow.

Just like Patton should’ve done.

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Footnote

A version of this article was first published in Esquire in 1997. When I picked it up to revise it, I was shocked to ponder the obvious fact that many of the main characters had since died, although they still seemed to be alive in my memory. After this tour Paul Hadwen became one of my best friends. I was privileged to know him for the 10 years before he died in 2007. Lemmy died in 2015. Hobbsy died the same year (but possibly only to assist Lemmy with his schedule in the afterlife).