Music

Don't get me wrong, the chief belcher of the English speed metal trio, born in 1945, had an almost commonplace surname: Ian Fraser Kilmister.

What do you mean, the first syllable of his name already augured well for his propensity to push potentiometers into the red and perforate the sturdiest of eardrums? Lemmy intones his first howls on Christmas Eve, scaring away the “angels in our countryside” and putting a stop to “Douce Nuit” and “Silent Night”. The divine child made his first wails in the small English Midlands town of Burslem (population just 10,000), at the risk of disrupting the sacrosanct Midnight Mass forever!

A few decades later, when Motörhead was born in 1976, it had to make do with two grim-faced Three Kings around the cradle: “Fast” Eddie Clarke on guitar and Phil “Philty Animal” Taylor on drums. Most of the titles of the trio's albums speak for themselves and don't pull any punches: “Overkill” (1979), “Bomber” the same year, “Ace Of Spades” (1980) “Iron Fist” (1982), “Orgasmatron” (1986), “Bastards” (1993), “Hammered” (2002), “Inferno” (2004) and “Aftershock” (2013) are thrown like so many grenades with pins pulled. In fact, I defy anyone to listen to all 23 of the band's studio albums without seeing their sanity fail. Unless, that is, you start out in a straitjacket!

“March Or Die” (1992) and ‘Kiss Of Death’ (2006) sound like the death knell, given the number of participants in the Motörhead tornado who disappeared too soon: Phil Taylor at 61, Eddie Clarke at 67 after leaving the adventure in 1982, and guitarist Michael Burston at 61. 

Perhaps one of the most astonishing things about Lemmy's life is that it lasted so long. He left us in Los Angeles on December 28, 2015 at the venerable age of 70. Proudly claiming to have guzzled a daily bottle of Jack Daniels for decades (and then switched to vodka-orange to avoid abusing his diabetes!), Lemmy also consumed LSD, amphetamine and cocaine without too much restraint. “But never heroin!” he always asserted with his hand on his neck. “Too many friends died from it."

Although Lemmy never submitted to the dictatorship of Christmas songs, he did compose a few very rare ballads, such as “1916”, the titular track on his 1991 album. Not content with having propelled Girlschool, England's first all-female metal band, to stardom, he has also offered his pen to Lita Ford (ex-Runways); Ozzy Osbourne (ex-Black Sabbath) or in 2010 with “Debauchery As A Fine Art” for Michael Monroe. A title which, in a few words, sums up his philosophy of life admirably well!

(MH with AK - Photo: © Etienne Tordoir)
Photo: Lemmy with Motörhead at the Heavy Sound Festival in Poperinge (Belgium), June 10, 1984