![]() ![]() “At the same time he’s been fucking chicks non-stop. ![]() “Lemmy had been up for days knocking back vodka and doing speed,” he recalls. Eddie was still spitting blood about it years later. Playing the biggest show of their career so far, Lemmy collapsed halfway through the set, forcing them to cancel the rest of the show. By the time they got to Bingley in 1980, the cracks were already appearing. That they could fuck it all up any time they wanted. What really made Motörhead special, though, was the unshakable feeling that this was a one-time ride. “You know, dealing and scoring.”Ī former skinhead and Leeds United football hooligan, whose father had bought him a drum kit as a last resort, telling him: “If you wanna beat something up, beat this up”, Phil had met Lemmy in London, via the Hells Angels, living in various squats around West London. ![]() “I met Lemmy through speed, really,” Phil told me happily. A self-admitted “hot head”, he was simply born that way. Phil was the kind of shirt-off, sunglasses-on, dagger-haired kit killer who didn’t need fame and fortune to give him permission to put the fear of God into every room he walked into. But ‘Philthy Animal’ created his own special place in the drum-or-die pantheon. Everyone knew all the best drummers were badasses: Moon was already dead, Bonham was just a few months from joining him, Bill Ward had just stormed out of Sabbath… It was the nature of the beast. Then there was their maniacally gurning, jackhammer-limbed drummer, the non-puzzlingly named Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor. My job was giving Lemmy something to sing over. But Eric Clapton never came up with Overkill or Bomber. But then of course he’d have had to kill you.Īs Eddie told me: “I’m not a virtuoso, I’m a journeyman. He could have been in the Sex Pistols or The Damned – if he’d been prepared to cut his hair. Accidentally catching the spirit of the post-punk times, Eddie was as different from the clichéd guitar martyrs of the 70s as any of the new-wave anti-heroes. In Motörhead he was joined by the non-ironically named ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke, whose knife-stabbing guitar and long, unmade-bed hair had made him the perfect counterpart to Lemmy’s evil elder brother, musically and image-wise. Lemmy since his days being the speed-freaking, biker-vibing, scary-looking fucker in Hawkwind, who helmed their only hit, the single Silver Machine, in 1972. Motörhead had something going for them that neither Saxon nor any other NWOBHM acts had: they were already legends. They also had a single riding high in the charts that summer, a live four-track EP titled The Golden Years, which, despite getting near-zero radio play, had lifted Motörhead into the Top 10 for the first time.īut those were just numbers. Motörhead’s latest album, Bomber, released nine months earlier, had also been a big-ish hit, peaking at No.12. (Image credit: FG/Bauer-Griffin / Getty Images) Lemmy relaxes on his houseboat, moored on the Chelsea Embankment in London on August 01, 1980. ![]() Seen as front-runners of the now erupting NWOBHM scene, Saxon would never be so cool or so successful again. Which was a significant accomplishment for Motörhead, considering Saxon had just had a top-five album with Wheels Of Steel and a top-20 single with 747 (Strangers In The Night). Promoted as the first big New Wave Of British Heavy Metal jamboree, also on the posters were Girlschool, Vardis, Angel Witch, White Spirit and, in the Special Guest slot, effectively warming up the crowd for Lemmy’s headliners, Saxon. But it was strictly old-school: no seating, cold concrete floor, huge stage, no screens, nowhere to park outside, you had to fight to get in and you had to bust your way out again. With a capacity of 12,000, Bingley Hall was then the biggest indoor music venue in Britain. The subject of beds and hotel rooms and, indeed, ‘birds’, had been arrived at when I tried to tease Lemmy about his extracurricular exploits the week before, when Motörhead had headlined what was billed as the Heavy Metal Barn Dance at Bingley Hall just outside Stafford. Doug also had a new all-girl band called Girlschool, who had just released their debut album, which everyone loved, including Lemmy. We were sitting in a pub by the canal in Westbourne Grove, West London, next door to the office of his then manager Doug Smith, who I worked for as the PR for The Damned and Hawkwind, who Doug also looked after. It was a thundery grey evening in the summer of 1980, a few days before Motörhead were to begin recording a new album, their fourth, which they would name Ace Of Spades. They didn’t look like they’d been taken off since the day he first put them on. These two playing card scenarios are discussed further in the following video.“Yes,” I murmured. It might seem that you could use the formula for the probability of two independent events and simply multiply \frac. ![]()
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