Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister: 1945 - 2015

December 2015

Motörhead | Hawkwind | Ace of Spades | Rocker

If you can smoke as many fags as Lemmy, and drink as much booze, and take as many drugs, and sleep with as many women through the AIDS "crisis" and still make it all the way to 70, you're a pretty good advert for the virtues of rock'n'roll excess.

This legendary electric hellraiser also had a penchant for owning and riding motorcycles, not least the Triumph T140 Bonneville above, and therefore toyed with a very different kind of danger.

He was born in Stoke on Trent, raised in North Wales, and found himself in the music business as a roadie for a certain Mr Jimi Hendrix. Lemmy carried amps, drove a van, fetched tabs of acid, and had a very high opinion of Hendrix (1942 -1970).

In 1971, Lemmy joined the band Hawkwind and, according to his own account, became the lead singer on the hit record Silver Machine simply because "everyone else in the group had had a go at it and couldn't do it right." He, however, was the new guy, and was therefore untested. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted the mic, hit the right notes at the right moments, and gave the song its famous laconic, haunting, psychedelic voice. Underlying this, it's claimed that Hawkwind was "experimenting" with sending its audience into spasms of ecstasy, or just fits, largely through the use of low throbbing bass-lines and hypnotic drum rhythms.

After being fired from Hawkwind (following a drug bust in Canada) it was soon time to form Motörhead.

Lemmy apparently wanted to use the name "Bastard", but was advised that the prudes at the BBC and elsewhere in the music industry might take umbrage and sideline the music, so the name Motörhead was a safer bet.

The breakthrough album was Overkill (their second big platter). And soon enough, the band was hitting the headlines, partly due to Lemmy's monster appetite for women, partly due to the music and the public antics, and partly for the "industrial quantities" of drugs consumed from LSD to amphetamines to whatever the hell looked illegal and was consequently interesting. At one point, the entire band was hospitalised having mistakenly taken some kind of belladonna-based compound.

But nothing quenched Lemmy's desire to get out of his head as often as humanly possible, usually by drowning the tediousness of ordinary existence with a bottle of whisky or bourbon pretty much every night.

For starters.

Ace of Spades, released in 1980, became the band's most famous song. In 1981, No Sleep 'till Hammersmith went to number one in the UK album chart and sold over 300,000 copies. However, Motörhead's fortunes waxed and waned, and in the 1990s the band all but disappeared when no one much cared about heavy metal, at least not in the style as was expressed by Motörhead.

But Lemmy, with his legendary gravel-slide voice, continued thumping out his own brand of shrapnel, slowly clawing his way back to wherever the hell he was since he last sobered up.

He was a self-professed Thatcherite. He also admired the band ABBA. He had an interest in English history. And he collected Nazi memorabilia.

But he was no Nazi, or so he claimed. It was simply that, as he once put it, "the bad guys always get the best uniforms".

He published an autobiography in 2002 (appropriately entitled White Line Fever). And soon after, he was roundly accepted as one of the elder statesmen of rock music and was soon fighting of both new fans and fresh accolades.

Lemmy never married, partly because he already had too many women in his life to deal with, and there were always other desirable females coming right at him. But he fathered two kids (by different women).

He's been quoted as saying that he doesn't feel that his life has been very important, but at least "it was fun". Amen to that.

His last musical outing was in Berlin in December 2015. Two weeks after that, he was gone.

— Dexxion