LEADERS OF THE PACK
“We don’t bother with beds in our hotel rooms now,” Lemmy told me as I stuck another large Jack and Coke on the table in front of him. “We tell them to take ’em out.”
“Why’s that, then?”
“Cos we don’t sleep.”
I laughed at the joke, but he just gave me that gimlet eye that could freeze a penguin’s chuff.
“The only time I use a bed on tour is if I’m with a bird,” he explained matter-of-factly. “Even then I don’t really need one. Back of the bus does very nicely thank you. Also, that way I don’t have to keep taking off my boots.”
“Yes,” I murmured. I could see how that might be useful. I glanced down at his old white boots. They didn’t look like they’d been taken off since the day he first put them on.
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. 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. Doug also had a new all-girl band called Girlschool, who had just released their debut album, which everyone loved, including Lemmy.
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. With a capacity of 12,000, Bingley Hall was then the biggest indoor music venue in Britain. 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. If you thought you were hard enough. And you were still conscious.
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. Which was a significant accomplishment for Motörhead, considering Saxon had just had a top-five album with and a top-20 single with . Seen as front-runners of the now erupting NWOBHM scene, Saxon would
