True to Lemmy’s word, Motörhead created a racket like no other; filthy and uncompromising, like a pack of Harleys booming through the wrong side of town. With albums like the aforementioned Overkill and Bomber, and later Ace Of Spades, they inspired punk bands and metal bands alike, and pretty much single-handedly kick-started thrash – although, ironically, Lemmy wasn’t really a fan of the latter, or, indeed, heavy metal, and considered Motörhead more of punk band.
“We’ve got a lot more in common with The Damned than Judas Priest,” he said, “but we had long hair so they racked us in with heavy metal. If we had short hair, we’d be one of the last of the punk bands. I mean, that’s fucking smart: it all depends on your fucking hairstyle.”
To be honest, most of this is already known to the majority of Motörhead fans, and well documented. Having had the privilege of being Lemmy’s close friend for over 30 years, however, one question that gets asked with regularity is ‘What was Lemmy really like?’ Truthfully, it is one that has always confused me. It’d perhaps be understandable if he had a persona, like Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson, or had hidden his true self away for the sake of personal privacy. But Lemmy was always Lemmy. Nothing about him was an act. He didn’t rise in the morning and dress up as ‘Lemmy’. You may not have even met him, but you knew him, too, and any misconceptions people may have had about him were entirely their own. “Whatever I seem to be, that’s what I am. That’s the whole story right there,” he told Kerrang!.
Read this: The United States of Mötorhead
At a club you’d find him ruthlessly feeding coins into a games machine, Jack and Coke in one hand, Marlboro Red in the other. At home, in his small and hopelessly untidy West Hollywood apartment, a few blocks from the Rainbow and “downhill going home”, you’d find him much the same. Except that the History Channel would be on, airing some World War Two documentary, and he’d often be wearing unreasonably tight Speedos, because LA’s hot and he didn’t give a fuck. He got a lot of backlash from UK fans when he first moved to LA in 1990, but, again, that was other people’s problem, not his.
“People don’t like me living here and I don’t understand it,” he told me. “I wasn’t exactly around their house all the time. England lives in my heart forever, I’m an Englishman and proud of it. But just because you were born on a piece of geography doesn’t mean you have to stay there.”