White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography by Lemmy Kilmister Page B

band of most of the underground, and throw in elements of Little Richard and Hawkwind. And that’s more or less how it turned out. We were a blues band, really. Although we played it at a thousand miles an hour, it was recognizable as blues – at least to us it was; probably it wasn’t to anybody else.
    It was pretty easy getting the band together, really – too easy, in fact. Within a very short period of time, I’d recruited guitarist Larry Wallis and Lucas Fox as the drummer. Larry I already knew – he’d been in UFO before they made a record, and he had been playing guitar for the Pink Fairies after the departure of Paul Rudolph, the guy who replaced me in Hawkwind. Pretty incestuous, eh? On top of that, the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind used to play on stage together billed as Pinkwind (Hawkfairies didn’t work, really). Lucas was introduced to me by my roommate at the time, a girl name Irene Theodorou, who I called Motorcycle Irene, after the Moby Grape song. I’d begun living with her before I went on my last tour with Hawkwind. She wasn’t a girlfriend of mine, just a friend, although we did have some wild times together. She was a very nice girl, and a good photographer. She did some shots of us in the early days. Lucas had been hanging around with Irene, hoping to fuck her. He never did, of course. He was a bit of a dork, but a very sound guy, really, and since he was always around, and a drummer, and had a car – he appeared very handy. I didn’t want to sing; I wantedsomebody else to do it. But the problem with that, of course, is you get stuck with a fucking singer! No matter – we never did find anybody else and I wound up doing the vocals.
    At first I was going to call the band Bastard, a name which pretty much summed up the way I felt. But the guy who was managing us at the time, Doug Smith (he’d been managing Hawkwind – that’s how I knew him), didn’t think it was a good idea. ‘It’s very unlikely that we’re gonna get on Top of the Pops with a name like Bastard,’ he pointed out. I figured he was probably right, so I decided to call the band Motörhead. It made sense: ‘Motorhead’ was the last song I wrote for Hawkwind, and it was also the American slang for speedfreak, so all the pieces fitted. And it was a one-word name; I believe in one-word names for bands – they’re easy to remember.
    So I took my psychedelic-coloured amps, painted them flat black, and Motörhead got under way. The press was having a field day with us – my firing from Hawkwind had been in all the British music papers, and everyone wanted to know what I was up to. That was when I came up with the famous quote that first appeared in Sounds : ‘It’ll be the dirtiest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. If we moved in next door your lawn would die!’ Actually, I stole that line from Dr Hook, but it quickly became the first of Motörhead’s many catchphrases.
    Our first show was on 20 July 1975 at the Roundhouse. That was fast, considering I’d left Hawkwind in May. We opened for Greenslade, a kind of pomp-rock band formed by this guy, Dave Greenslade, who’d been somebody’s keyboardist. All the bands inthose days had intro tapes, and since I’ve always been a World War II fanatic, we used a recording from Germany of marching feet and people yelling ‘ Sieg Heil! ’ It just sounded really powerful and incredibly cold, all those feet smashing on the German cobblestones, that bromp, bromp! tromping sound. That was our outro tape, too. I had a silver-painted human skull on stage, on the top of my stack. But in spite of these theatrical touches, I have to admit we weren’t very good (bloody awful, let’s face it!). Undaunted, we proceeded to go on a trek of England through most of August. After all, that’s the only way you get better – you keep playing.
    We were already attracting fans, though – punks, old Hawkwind fans and a horde of nasty characters were coming to see us. And some of them were