A World Without Lemmy

We tried not to imagine the day arriving, and we tried to put it to the back of our minds. Nobody was entirely geared up for Lemmy's passing, and sadly it's now here.

Lemmy is no longer with us, and joined the metal festival in Valhalla.

For people of my age bracket (above 35), Motörhead have been a relevant and important band of the musical landscape; and something that is very difficult to imagine how things would be if they hadn't existed at all. In fact, in the first 10 albums that I bought as a teenager two decades ago was a Motörhead album on tape – a compilation called 'Welcome To The Bear Trap'. I may have originally jumped into the deep end with metal by discovering the likes of Sepultura, Carcass, Napalm Death, Paradise Lost and Metallica – but that solitary tape album to me was an important founding cornerstone to my collection.

Naturally, after my collection snowballed onwards I tracked down the first several albums of Motörhead on vinyl in the late 1990s; eager to burn my wages in my first job on expanding my music collection. At a time when most second hand albums varied between £3 to £10, usually on average of £5-6 each, as vinyl was deeply unfashionable (as hard as it is to believe). Naturally, this was the perfect way to build up my collection while everybody was more interested in re-buying everything all over again on CD because they 'last longer' – the amusing irony of this being that some of these shiny spinning discs suffered from disc rot and were almost as 'frail' as vinyl. Eventually, I got to see them for the first time in 2000 during their '25^th Anniversary Tour' – where I bought a  tour scarf and original tour shirt.

What is it that I love about Motörhead exactly and what is their appeal? Well, they're not the fastest band in the world, nor are they particularly complicated or proficient musically. They didn't become a shower of lazy bastards where fame eventually got to them and they pedalled any old shite (take a bow, Metallica). They didn't sit on their laurels or shit on their fans (take a bow, Axl Rose), nor did they bail out of touring citing bullshit frivolous reasons unless there was something VERY wrong. Lemmy didn't disappear up his own arse, or acted like a pretentious sanctimonious twat; preaching about how we should be give more to charity or save the world - while using a private jet just to ferry a fucking hat back to his ivory tower (take a bow, Bono).

Lemmy and his band were so brilliantly workmanlike, and had a working class ethic. For the most part in their 40 year career, they just toured. By touring, we don't mean selectively play one London date and fuck off home, oh no. They toured and catered for pretty much EVERY town, leaving no stone left unturned; levelling their audiences with sonic carpet bombs wherever they went.

Lemmy was all you could ever want from a frontman, and Motörhead was all you could ever want from a metal band. A true icon if ever there was one, dare I say God-like – I mean, look at him; he looks like the devil reincarnated as some strange hard rock bad guy from a spaghetti western for fucks sake! He was booted out of Hawkwind for being far too batshit for them (and they even had a butt naked girl with her tits out on stage in the early days). He tried to form a band called 'Bastard' until it dawned on him that it probably wasn't 'Top Of The Pops friendly' (for those under 25, that was a weekly televised popular music show that you could be forgiven for thinking solely had paedos for presenters). He may have moved to LA, but he only lived in a poxy flat filled full of war memorabilia and kept his lifestyle somewhat 'meat and potatoes'.

The band released albums as regular as clockwork, and toured regular as clockwork – a seemingly reliable force that was like night and day. Always around weathering the storms of life, and essentially no matter how bad things were in your life – Motörhead were always there. They were music to party hard to, to drive like a fucking lunatic and lose your driving licence to, a band to smash shit to, a band that has you stage diving onto your coffee table, doing Alan Partridge bass, doing the face. They were a soundtrack to people old and young, and even people that were old, who acted young, and by rights should know better. A band which huge confidence in its sound, that kept it the same for 40 years. A band that didn't change its style for fear of not fitting in with musical trends and declaring dumb shit such as “Rock is dead”, or that Metal isn't a thing any more (take a bow, Smashing Pumpkins and Metallica). Motörhead didn't jump on the alt-rock bandwagon and try to sound grunge, nor did they try to change their sound to Nu-Metal and realise it was a huge mistake, then take a u-turn (take a bow, Machine Head). They stuck with a punk fused metal ethic, and a simplistic three piece band that didn't need lots of extra musicians for no fucking reason (take a bow, Slipknot).

They were accessible to all, they gave a shit. Touring for four decades didn't bother them one bit, they had a tour schedule that would embarrass many a band and make them look like a bunch of fucking lazy ponces. They didn't pull bullshit such as crowd-funding an album and tour, because Mummy and Daddy wouldn't give Tarquin an advance lump sum from their trust fund. They cared about their fans, and were stereotypically British without looking like excessively patriotic far right die hards. You couldn't help but forgive them whenever Lemmy and his men had to apologise for cancelling a show, in fact they were like the reliable faithful old Labrador that you couldn't give a bollocking to – despite the fact he chewed your boots and pissed on your broadband router.

Motörhead WERE MUSICAL RONSEAL – THEY DONE WHAT IT SAID ON THE TIN.