READY FOR TAKE-OFF
The pressure was on in that overheated summer of 1979. With Motörhead’s second album, Overkill, having just become their first UK Top 30 chart hit, Lemmy should have been skipping around in his dirty white boots. They had even been on Top Of The Pops – twice – and overnight they’d gone from being “the worst band in the world” (copyright NME, 1978) to the coolest rock band on the planet. Well, the coolest rock band in Britain, anyway. But instead of feeling pleased, Lemmy was fretting more than ever.
We were sitting outside a pub in Notting Hill, by the canal. A beautiful summer’s evening. But Lemmy was lost somewhere inside the darkness of his head.
“It’s not like I’ve got any more money to spend,” he told me as I lent him another fiver. [He always paid me back, by the way.] We’re all still on forty quid a week. Only now they [the label] want another album out before the end of the year. They’re worried we’re a flash in the pan,” he growled. “I’ve been in bands for fifteen years. Had my first hit with Hawkwind in 1972. But the record company and the promoters still think it’s all just luck – and that we’re always about to run out of it. Fuck them.”
Lemmy always talked a good fight. But the truth is that he was backed into a corner. The recent success of the Overkill album and single had surprised everyone – including Lemmy – and now he felt that fear that all first-hit heroes feel when they’re expected to come up with an even better follow-up.
Things would get better once they got into the studio and started work on a new album in a couple of weeks, I assured him.
“Well, it will keep us out of trouble, I suppose,” he said gloomily.
He and the band had just returned from three days in jail in Finland, he elaborated. They had been arrested at Helsinki airport, on their way home from appearing at the Punkaroka Midnight Sun Festival. The festival promoters had gone to the cops after being horrified at the damage Motörhead had done to their stage. Lemmy had begun the show by offering the sizable crowd ‘peace and good vibes’ in Finnish, only to end the day by destroying all the equipment on the stage.
The real trouble started, though, said Lemmy,
