

Lemmy, The Soundtrack to His Life
“Little Richard sang how I felt. I was 12 years old when I first heard him and that music, and I felt it was mine. He was the greatest rock vocalist ever, there's no doubt. The Beatles are close, and the Everly Brothers and all kinds of other people are close, but nobody comes within 50 yards of Little Richard. He just took a song and ran away with it, and he was so joyful. He was full of good meaning and good intentions. I didn't find out he was gay for years. You saw these pictures with the pencil moustache and the pancake make-up, but in those days you didn't think about stuff like that. He was just this real exotic creature from America that land past Mars, where people go when they're really rich and can afford to go on a plane. I never thought I'd go to America.
Where I lived in North Wales, which is pretty desolate, there were no TV shows then with rock and roll on them, and there was no way to hear it because the radio didn't play it. You had to tune into Radio Luxembourg, which was in Luxembourg, in Europe, so that was very dodgy with the reception. You'd often find that a song would come on and you didn't find out
who played it until three weeks later because the fucking tuner would fade out. I first heard Chuck Berry on the jukebox, in the local cafe that we used to go to, I think it was Sweet Little Sixteen. I'm not sure. I would've been 13 or 14.”
As well as the influence from America growing up, Lemmy, like his long time friend Ozzy Osbourne, was always a huge fan of The Beatles. “Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption (The Beatles), but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia, a hard, sea faring town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo's from The Dingle, which is like the fucking Bronx. The Rolling Stones were the mummy's boys, they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability. I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near The Beatles, not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always shit on stage, whereas The Beatles were the gear.
I remember one gig the Beatles had at The Cavern, It was just after they got Brian Epstein as their manager. Everyone in Liverpool knew that Epstein was gay, and some kid in the audience screamed, John Lennon's a fucking queer! And John, who never wore his glasses on stage, put his guitar down and went into the crowd, shouting, "Who said that?" So this kid says, "I fucking did". John went after him and BAM, gave him the Liverpool kiss, sticking the nut on him twice! And the kid went down in a mass of blood, snot and teeth. Then John got back on the stage. "Anybody else?" he asked. Silence. “All right then, this is Some Other Guy".
Lemmy joined bands himself around this time including playing guitar for The Rocking Vickers and for a brief time in 1967, Lemmy was a roadie with Jimi Hendrix. “I was sleeping on Neville Chester’s floor, he was sharing a flat with Noel Redding,” Lemmy told Rolling Stone, adding: “So whenever they needed an extra pair of hands I was right there. I didn’t get the job for any talent or anything . . . I had the chance to watch Jimi’s performances many times, twice a night, for about three months I saw him play. Hendrix was incredibly sexually magnetic on stage. He had a body like a snake, and you knew that he knew what he was doing . . . and it wasn't offensive with him. It was just like, ‘That's what I do’. Some people only have that charisma on stage, then when you meet them they're dull as hell. You would watch him and space and time would stop.” But it wouldn’t last forever and Lemmy remembered feeling a little pity for the corner Hendrix had painted himself into. “He was supposed to be a showman but I think he eventually got sick of it, and when people moaned at him, he’d go into this kind of imitation Jimi Hendrix routing, you know? It wasn’t convincing. That was a shame. Jimi was so effortlessly cool and he would move like an elegant spider. He was always interested in the crowd. He made very bad jokes because he was so out of his mind. People couldn’t figure out what he was talking about by the time he was finished. But he was certainly the best guitar player you’ll ever see, probably ever.”
In August 1971, Lemmy joined the space rock band Hawkwind, based in Ladbroke Grove, He was cajoled into joining immediately before a benefit gig in Notting Hill by bandmate Michael “Dik Mik” Davies. Lemmy originally auditioned for Hawkwind as a guitarist, but on the morning of the gig, they decided not to get another guitarist. By chance, the bass player didn’t show up and left his equipment in the van. Lemmy often said, “Their bass player was pretty much saying ‘please steal my gig!’ So I stole his gig.” Lemmy quickly developed a distinctive style that was strongly shaped by his early experience as a rhythm guitarist, often using double stops and chords rather than the single note lines preferred by most bassists.
The addition of Lemmy helped propel the band to greater heights. His bass work was a distinctive part of the Hawkwind sound.
After Hawkwind, rock and roll had become more primal and acts like The Velvet Underground were bringing a degree of menace into music, with artists like Iggy Pop playing punk rock years before it had even properly begun. If The Stooges were the beginnings of punk, The MC5 was a combination of garage rock, punk and heavy metal all rolled into one.
The band’s mentality of kicking out the jams every time they hit the stage was just the kind of mentality that Lemmy wanted to have. Though Lemmy praised the likes of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran, The MC5 were his true gateway into putting Motörhead together. Although Motörhead would be a trio for most of their career, the original band was a five piece and Lemmy said, "I wanted to form the MC5 of Britain. They were such a great
band."
Another band hugely influenced by The Stooges and MC5 was The Damned. Lemmy once called The Damned “the only real punk band” and performed a gig under the name Les Punks with members of them as early as 1976. Three years later, The Damned had split then reformed with the Les Punks line-up for a series of demos and live performances, performing under the name The Doomed. Although the stint was brief, Captain Sensible credits Lemmy with encouraging the members to go on, and wishes that they had done more shows with him. "We did offer him the job permanently, because he saved the band, really…I think we were considered to be pretty washed up. Without Lemmy and his encouragement, I don’t think we would have gone on. But he had another band to do, so he couldn’t do it full-time. Lemmy was a great man, a real charmer, an absolute gentleman. But he always reserved the right to be as fucking rude as necessary if the occasion demanded it!”
Lemmy’s other ‘other band’ was the collaboration with Slim Jim Phantom of The Stary Cats and Danny B. Harvey, Head Cat. “We first got together doing an Elvis tribute record with Johnny Ramone, 2000’s Swing Cats: A Special Tribute to Elvis. We sat around and realized
that we were playing about 35 songs, and we knew them all exactly. So we thought, why don’t we make an album, since we’re in the studio? It took us like two weeks to do the whole thing. That first record sank without a trace. It was on Cleopatra Records, who didn’t advertise it. It was a bit of a drag and I was disappointed with that, I thought it would at least get a few reviews. It didn’t even get reviewed! Interest fell off between the three of us, I suppose. Then we kept getting offered shows here and there. We got back together and did a few shows. We liked it, so we did another album, and there you are. There isn’t much (time off) between Motörhead, because we’re always working.” Head Cat recorded and performed from 1999 - 2015 as a parallel band with Motörhead.
Lemmy went on to record and perform with many other bands: Girlschool; Ramones; Ozzy Osbourne; Metallica; Wendy O Williams; Nina Hagen; Shonen Knife; Ugly Kid Joe; ANIMAL; Doro; The Warriors; Meldrum; Throw Rag; Probot; Skew Siskin; The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Airbourne; Slash; Michael Monroe; Nashville Pussy; Emigrate; Foo Fighters and SpongeBob Squarepants amongst many others. His influence and inspiration stretches out light years further . . .
This piece is a compilation of Lemmy stories and quotes from many interviews from sources listed below. It’s hoped to give new fans and old an insight into Lemmy’s personal musicalinfluences and encourage you to revisit the original interviews and get into some of these great bands and artists. The nine tracks below Lemmy listed during a conversation on My Planet Rocks as some of his most treasured records, the soundtrack to his life.
Lemmy Kilmister’s favourite songs:
The Beatles – ‘Slow Down’
MC5 – ‘Human Being Lawnmower’
The Rolling Stones – ‘Route 66 – Live’
Jimi Hendrix – ‘Love or Confusion’
The Who – ‘Summertime Blues’
The Ramones – ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’
The Sex Pistols – ‘Anarchy In the UK’
The Damned – ‘Neat neat neat’
Led Zeppelin – ‘Black Dog’
Sources: