THE UNHOLY SPAWN OF THE DUAL METALLICUS

THE UNHOLY SPAWN OF THE DUAL METALLICUS

by Sylvie Simmons

Nothing (except the last Journey single) lasts forever. Six-and-a-half years they were together. 6⅛. Plenty of time to emerge as the Best Heavy Metal Band On The Face Of The Earth. Motorhead. The band that put the screw in screwdrivers; the band that put the wart in What Kind Of Band Do You Call This; the band that put the tack in aural attack; the band that brought tears to the eyes and hair to the chest every time you mouthed its name.

And Fast Eddie left. Upped and quit the BHMBOTFOTE in a fight over Wendy O. Williams. Lemmy wanted to do a record with old sticky nipples; Eddie didn't want to

touch her with surgically-sterilized gloves. They came to a compromise—Fast goes on his Way in search of new vinyl and new life.

"When I joined Motorhead9 we were the worst hand in the world." —Fast Eddie

First person he happens upon is Pete § Way, drifting off from another exemplary o British metal outfit, UFO. How about it, says J Ed. Why not, says Pete. Why not? Because 1 he's taken a job with Ozzy Osbourne, that's | why not, and later leaves to form his own g band Waysted. So a solo Fast recruits °" veteran (Humble Pie, that's how veteran) drummer Jerry Shirley, session bassist Micky Feat (replaced on the road by Charlie McCracken) and tops the lot off with a fine young Dublin vocalist by the name of David King, a fledgling Robert Plant (Robert Seed?) and gets down to business. Business being an album and a tour of the States where they're being lauded as Very Good Indeed. Not the most reassuring of events for a fan of the Best Metal Band On The Face Of The Earth, this being the country that drools over middle-aged wimps and retarded hairdressers (Styx, Loverboy— need I go on?) "Motorhead used to say we were the nastiest band in the world. Well, this is the fiercest band in the world," is the official line on Fastway.

The album stresses such un-HMish concepts as musicianship and professionalism; there's even some acoustic guitar on the record (Not By Fast Eddie. Please. There is a certain reputation to consider). It's certainly not a Motorhead Mark Two. But neither is it Journey. The songs are good, classy, late '60s-early '70s bluesy-sounding stuff. Like all good things and athlete's foot, it takes a little time to grow on you. Approximately 45 minutes if you catch them live. The little Irishman's voice, a bit unsure of itself on the record, finds its strength onstage. And Fast Eddie? He can actually play slow. He's confident and relaxed onstage, and his guitar work exudes class. A bit like finding out that Wendy O. Williams can do a great Edith Piaf, or that Jack Lord can act!

"We were in a record store in San Francisco a week aao and they had my Curtis Knight record, which was before I joined Motorhead. And they said, 'why don't we

put it on?' And David, the little singer, was with me, and he heard the guitar playing on this and he said, 'Fucking hell, Motorhead really did take a toll on your playing!' And I was sitting there listening to it thinking,

THE FASTWAY METHOD

'Fuck me, it's really quite good isn't it? Who is this boy?!' I really got stupid as a guitar player. See, as a guitarist you've got to take your chances, whatever opportunities come your way. If you're working on a building site and you're offered a gig, you take the gig. I took it with a good spirit.. .and I never really noticed how badly it affected my

playing.

"I had no room in Motorhead. But I did enjoy it, because I was a third of the band. With this band it's different. I'm still nervous. But with Motorhead I was scared...

"It's much more comfortable than it was with Motorhead." We're getting ourselves comfortable with Smirnoff and beer in the back of the band's touring bus in the Long Beach Arena parking lot. Fastway's doing the dog-shift on a triple bill starring Iron Maiden and Saxon (people, incidentally, who used to open up for Motorhead, but that's the breaks...).

"This time I know everybody's doing their gig. With Motorhead, if a fuck-up happened onstage or something, it could throw the whole thing for maybe 20 minutes, because Motorhead was the type of band that if you didn't hit the groove, that's it, finished, because we're going so fast that Lemmy would be speeding and passing out."

It happened. Believe me it happened. A representative example:

"Lemmy's been up for three days drinking vodka. He's been fucking chicks all day and getting this and that and the other thing happening to him. So we go onstage... we've got 12,000 kids crammed in there waiting for us. All day people have been offering me lines of coke and everything, and I've had one fucking Heineken because I want to be together for this show.

TURN TO PAGE 61

by John Mendelssohn

He's been using speed for years, and he plays in a heavy metal band with the most obnoxious album cover art ever. So one doesn't expect Ian (Lemmy) Kilmister of

Motorhead to be a jerk. One expects him to be a rampaging asshole.

THE MOTORHEAD MODE

His appearance—greasy-haired, potbellied hippie cum biker with the worst bottom teeth in the world—certainly conforms to expectation. Only Mick Fleetwood, all of Blackfoot, and a bunch of Southern guitar armies that one shouldn't have to list look worse. His grammar is willfully excruciating. His jokes are often cruelly misogynistic. And he forgets himself and blows a cloud of cigarette smoke in your face every couple of minutes.

And yet, it's nearly impossible not to like Ian (Lemmy) Kilmister. If everyone were as warm, there would be no more wars. He's generous to a fault. He's a good sport. And he's funnier, as he himself might put it, than shit.

Not everything he says, of course, is a jewel of drollness—much like the captions in this magazine, he often seems to be trying too hard. But at least he makes the effort.

Behold his generosity, and be inspired by it. Hardly had CREEM shaken his hand in a tawdry motel room on the Sunset Strip recently than he offered it a snort of crushed amphetamines, Marlboros, and potato liquor, all that he most avidly treasures.

Behold too the goodness of his sportness. ☆ ☆ ☆

Which member of Duran Duran would you most like to be shipwrecked with on a desert island?

The dead one, 'cause then I wouldn't have to talk to him about music. I think there's two dead ones actually, maybe even three.

Having recorded a duet with her, what do you know about Wendy O. Williams that

other fellows don't?

That she's an acid casualty. She seems to me like she had too many trips, although now she's a health freak. And the average man hasn't seen her walk away from him which is really good. When she turns around and walks back toward you, that's even better. She moves real good. She's built to last. She's got muscles like steel ropes. And I think she's got a good voice as well. It just takes her a while to get into things. You've been known to, uh, experiment with psychedelics yourself, haven't you?

(Proudly) Yeah, I took about 1,000 trips between '66 and '69. Those were definitely the days, before we found out what was going to happen later, and all the psychiatric cases started happening. Since they started putting strychnine in it, I've prefered speed, which I think is what cocaine is supposed to be. I think that coke is a sad hype on the world—for a lot more money, it does less than speed, and for a shorter time.

One almost gets the impression that you're

endorsing a substance that destroys the central nervous system.

"They know rm on speed, so they think they can get away with this!" - Lemmy

(Illogically) Well, it ain't destroyed mine. Mind you, I know people who can't handle speed—I've seen some go over the top in a single week. But the central nervous system wasn't built to handle breathing out there [in Los Angeles on a frightfully smoggy Monday afternoon] either.

If, on your return to England, you discover"■ ed that you'd been appointed Prime Minister in your absence, what would your first three official acts be?

(Groping) I'd close down all the foreign money reserves, confiscate 'em, and resign. I'm sure they wouldn't really do it anyway— they'd only tell me I was the Prime Minister just to wind me up. They know I'm on speed, so they think they can get away with this! But they can't, 'cause I'm the Prime Minister! I'll have the geezers that appointed me executed, and dance on their bodies! And then resign. And have them strangled as well.

Where did your parents go wrong?

(Recovering, but appalling us with his misogyny at the end) They got married. If they hadn't, it would have been much easier to deny that I was theirs. My father left my mother anyway when I was three months old. He was a vicar, you know. This was in North Wales, where the gorse grows thick and the women ugly.

Who, then, made such a mess of your upbringing?

(Trying too hard again) What upbringing? I had to claw my way up. If I'd been brought up, I'd be taller, wouldn't I? But I'm not, am I? Having a vicar for a father isn't easy. Someone's always trying to baptize you. I had to fight tooth and nail to stop them. I thought he left after three months.

(Recovering, and how!) Yeah, but those three months was hell.

TURN TO PAGE 62

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 46

"Fifty-five minutes into the set, right, Lemmy disappears backwards, collapses on the stage. So me and Phil are furious at the end of it. We're going 'You let us down, you cunt.' And he was saying, 'Me being up for three nights has nothing to do with it.' The fact that he was up for three days getting blowjobs or whatever had nothing to do with the fact that he collapsed onstage. Of course not!"

Motorhead, muses Eddie, had an attitude problem. It caused him to leave once before, in 1975, when they started drinking away their record company advance instead of doing an album. It caused him to threaten to leave many times afterwards. If Wendy O. Williams hadn't happened, he'd probably have had to invent her.

"It had gone back to being a joke. When I joined Motorhead, we were the worst band in the world, right—that's what the papers said. So we fought through that and got up to a real good status. We came through the punk thing—mind you, the punk thing helped cover our tails; on the bad gigs it was 'better than any punk band I've ever seen!'—and it was going back downhill again."

Quite the opposite with Fastway, who are making a much bigger impact (esp. in the States, where the BHMBOTFOTE were never treated as the demigods they are in Britain) and much quicker (the aforementioned outfit was bankrupt for the first four years of its existence) than Motorhead ever did. All this by putting class back into heavy metal. So what's wrong with the tough stuff?

"Nothing. But I don't think of Fastway as in any way a heavy metal band really. The whole emphasis of our band is dynamics and vocals and the songs should have some meaning. HM bands don't do that. They go woaaarrggghhh baby love you get on the motorbike drive down the highway and kill yourself on the nearest brick wall or the sun is shining on my steel, that sort of thing."

Which brings tears to my eyes.

"Which is all well and good, but it's not music. There was a banner of the back tonight that said, 'Fast Eddie still got no class.' I thought that was a bit fierce! Yes, I want to put a bit of class back into rock 'n' roll... The whole idea of building this band was to make it into a rock 'n' roll band, but heavy rock 'n' roll. Fierce rock 'n' roll. Somewhere between heavy metal and the Stray Cats if you like. I think HM's in a bit of a state at the moment. It's taken bands like ZZ Top to come back on the board and kick some ass. There's only three of them, but they're fierce.

"I went to Pete when we started, 'We'll form a band and go back to the early '70s, late '60s, the Deep Purples, the Who Live At Leeds, the Get Yer Ya Yas Out; we're going to get back to that. Because there's all these kids out there, they've never heard none of that. All they've heard is that bludgeoning rock and get-your-ears-pinnedback stuff."

Which brings us back to Motorhead. Have Eddie and Lemmy spoken since the Wendy Williams (er) bust?

"I got onstage with him about four weeks ago in London. He still calls me 'cunt.' He said to me at the show, 'Do you miss me?' I said, 'Of course I miss you, man.' And he said 'Because I hate you, you cunt, but I miss you!' Very touching stuff, isn't it?"

Talking of touching, life on the road has been notably lacking in the Motorheadish debauchery department, now that they've got a singer who's only just, literally, reached the drinking age.

"If I ever caught him with a cigarette or drink in his hand...! He drinks honey and lemon and tea before he goes on! There's no bottle of vodka before he goes onstage. Like Motorhead, we used to demolish the dressing room down our necks to go on, and he doesn't need any of that. He could do it in the morning. He could get out of bed and give you a fucking tune off the balcony of the hotel! David is actually very cleanliving. That doesn't mean to say he doesn't get about a bit—but he doesn't do anything before showtime. David's got such a great voice that if he fucked it up it would be a shame.

"In Seattle, David pops out to have a look at Saxon, and he's being chased down the corridor by six chicks and he's being pushed up against the wall by them ^ind they're grabbing hold of him and kissing him and forcing their tongues down his throat and he's going 'Aaaggh!' And he comes into the dressing room white as a sheet. You've got to remember, I took David out of Dublin." A complete unknown, on the dole; Eddie even had to phone his mate's mom to pass the message on offering him a job, because he wasn't on the phone.

"Funny thing was, he was backstage at the last Motorhead gig we did in Dublin, getting my autograph a year before..."

So a final word. Fastway reckon you deserve a bit of "dynamics and quality" in your music and they're going to give it to you, like Cream, Zeppelin, and Bowie and the Spiders before them. "All those bands have died. There's nobody now. All these bands come out with fucking six-foot high platform shoes going 'Eyyy motherfuckers. ' I can't stand that. I want us to be like a breath of fresh air."

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 47

How plentiful are the fruits of your own loins?

(Paternally) I've got two kids. I've never seen one of them 'cause he was adopted. He must be 19 by now. His mother had to take her graduation exams in the maternity ward! Most embarrassing. I almost got prosecuted for that 'cause she was underaged. My other son's got hair longer than mine, but blond. He looks just like me, but without the moustache and sideburns. He's got a band in England called the Paul Linder Band. He plays guitar real good.

Do you worry about being the last person in the world with connected moustaches and sideburns?

(Indignantly) I'm not the last person. There's that guy in England who grows roses, right? And that guy in The Waltons, he's got them too. I'm the last good-looking guy, but that's because I've had my teeth fixed, or at least the top ones, and I'm having the new bottom ones put in when I get home. If they [the moustaches and facial hair, not the teeth] go gray, though, I'll have to shave them off 'cause I can't afford Grecian Formula on the money we're getting for this tour.

What happened to your teeth?

(Blithely) Speed rots them. It takes the calcium out of your blood.

[A note to impressionable young readers: Heed the foregoing well. Lemmy's an exception to the rule. If you take a lot of speed, the chances are overwhelming that you'll turn into a rampaging asshole that only other rampaging assholes will be able to stand. And habitual speed use is preferable to habitual coke use only in the same way that being killed instantly in a car crash is preferable to drowning.]

Do you live with the mother of either of your sons?

(Incredulously) Good God, no! I don't live with nobody's mother. I've got a couple of people who might be interested in the job if I offered them enough money, but I'm not going to tell you about them. You're from a national publication, for Christ's sake, and in the mood you're in, who knows what you'd write?

How large a tip should the modern traveler leave for the maid who cleans his hotel room?

(Candidly) I never leave one. Why should you? They get a wage. I mean, if they're in the room when you're leaving you might, but then they always think that you think they're hookers. Which they often are. You've described yourself as someone who'd make a person's lawn die if you moved in next door. Did you steal that from Frank Zappa?

(Tersely) No, from Dr. Hook.

The character in Peter Pan?

(Impatiently) No, Dr. Hook. You know the difference between Dr. and Captain, don't you? The doctor doesn't have a rifle, and cuts people up. The captain shoots from a distance and tells everyone else to go get killed first.

Would you enjoy living in a society composed entirely of people just like yourself?

(Emphatically) No!

That's it?

(Table-turningly) Yeah. How'd you like to live in a society composed entirely of people like yourself?

I think it might be nice.

(Lemmily) You could write to each other, I suppose, being writers.

We could write. We could phone. We could reach out and touch one another.

(Disapprovingly) White trousers and a pink shirt. It's a good thing you're not in San Francisco. That's all I can say. Well, that's not really all I can say, I suppose.

One hopes not, in view of there being several more stupid questions. Was it your idea to have journalists interview you at a sewage dump on the Thames just before this tour began?

(Laughing proudly, as well he might) Yeah! We were going to do another one in a sausage factory. I think journalists and chopped liver may have more in common than either realizes.

What did you enjoy most about puberty?

(Triumphantly) Afterwards!

Do you ever phone the person with whom you had your first sexual experience, and if not, why not?

(Morbidly) Because I don't have her number, and she's probably too old for me now anyway. She was older than me at the time, and probably still is, unless she's dead. You tend to catch up on age very quickly when somebody dies.

Besides possession of drugs, what's the most interesting crime you've committed?

(Guiltily) Possession of an offensive weapon—a little penknife that said, "A present from Norway. A policeman got very upset by it. He'd wanted to do me for drugs, but I didn't have any, so he settled for that. "You're nicked," he said. "You're coming with me." He'd handcuffed me, so I had to agree. I could have tried dragging him down the street, but he had a whistle and walkietalkie. We probably would have been incompatible anyway.

What are those unsightly round things on your face?

Moles, but not the underground kind. People say they're warts, but I don't have warts anymore since I got rid of the ones on this hand.

Oh, you're lefthanded.

(Ambiguously) No, I'm not. Except at cricket. But l never play cricket, so it never arises. 'It does come up sometimes when I watch baseball, though, 'cause in England baseball's a girls' game called rounders. You've refused speed and vodka and cigarettes. How about some throat spray or Freon?

Thanks, no. What about being the infamous Lemmy do you got most tired of?

(Wearily) Interviewers asking the same fucking questions about things that you've already answered in your biography. If I had a dollar for every time I'd been asked about Eddie leaving the band since he left, I'd be retired by now living in two mansions. What are your feelings about being twice as old as most of your audience?

(Anciently) I feel that I listened to a lot of great music that they missed, so the joke's on them really. What the fuck is youth for anyway? To feel good. Well, I do. I refuse to grow up! I'd rather stay pubic. As long as it keeps going up and down, I'll keep letting it.

What about your personal life would surprise your fans most?

(Unglamorously) I don't know that they'd be surprised by anything except how boring most of it is when I'm not on the road. And I'm sure they'd be surprised as well by how boring it is backstage. "Why'd you want to come back here," I always ask them, "when it's all happening out there? Backstage we just sit around throwing potato chips and bits of cheese at the wall and not drinking the beer that's provided.

How do you feel about having been passed in the race toward wealth and fame by much younger musicians like those in Def Leppard?

(Anti-Semitically, but ironically so) They had better management and promotion. You've slipped a serious question in, haven't you? I knew you were sneaky the second I saw the earring. "This guy's a sneaky Jew,"

I said to myself, "a fucking side winding kike.

A fucking hook-nosed Red Sea pedestrian without any scruples." I'll bet ypu don't print all of that.

I'll bet you're right.

(Determinedly) I was very disappointed to be passed by, obviously, but it's not going to stop me. What the fuck are you going to do? ^