Lemmy's Right Hand
Part 1 of my interview with Motörhead guitarist Phil Campbell
Happy November, Jagged Time Lapsers!
I first saw Phil Campbell on stage 35 years ago tomorrow night, when he was playing guitar with Motörhead on Slayer’s 1988 World Sacrifice Tour. I don’t think either of us had any idea at the time that he would still be in the band 27 years later, or that he’d ultimately become the longest-serving Motörhead member aside from the late, great Lemmy Kilmister.
Of course, no one could have predicted back then that Motörhead (or Lemmy himself, for that matter) would last another decade, let alone nearly three, or that they would experience their greatest commercial success in the US during the final half-decade of the band’s 40-year existence. But then, the laws of nature and the standard trajectories of rock n’ roll never seemed to apply to Lemmy or his band; written off countless times by critics and the music industry alike, they just kept battering away until the world finally surrendered to their bloody-minded high-volume brilliance.
In late 2021, I worked on a special Motörhead issue for Revolver magazine, in which I penned a 12,000-word history of the groundbreaking, earthquaking British band that involved talking to a number of folks who knew and worked with Lemmy over the years. One of my favorite interviews for that project was the one I did with Phil Campbell, who turned out to be as humble and charming as his Motörhead guitar contributions were ballsy and blistering.
Of course, as it often goes with pieces of this sort, I wound up using only a handful of Campbell’s quotes for my feature, and filed the rest of our conversation away in my archives. But I’ve decided to share our entire interview here with my paid subscribers — in two parts, actually, since we spoke for over an hour. Our chat not only offers some welcome (and in some cases, completely unexpected) insights into Lemmy and various other Motörhead bandmates, but should also give you a much greater understanding of how and why Campbell turned out to be Lemmy’s ideal right-hand man…
Note: Campbell joined Motörhead in 1984, when the band’s career was at a relatively low ebb. But he’d originally met Lemmy over a decade before, when the latter was still playing bass with psychedelic warlords Hawkwind. So I figured we’d start the interview there.
Is it true that you first met Lemmy when you were a 12 year-old Hawkwind fan?
That's correct. It was at Cardiff Capital Theater in 1973. It was the first time I saw Hawkwind; it was with the full light show and everything, and it really freaked me out, actually. It was pretty scary for a 12 year-old! [laughs] And I was just hanging about in the foyer after the show, hoping I might see some band members come out. Lem was the only one that came out, and he signed my program; I still have it somewhere. If somebody told me that night I'd be in a band with that guy for over 30 years, I’d have thought they were crazy — but sometimes strange things happen.
Were you already playing guitar at this point?
I think I started when I was about nine, or something like that. I was a big music fan in them days; I liked Hawkwind, Deep Purple, Zeppelin and Sabbath and all them bands.
Were you a Motörhead fan from the get-go?
Yeah. Nobody did anything quite like it at the time. For want of a better word, it was like this big, overkill sound, with everything just distorted and loud — and then the singer, nobody'd ever seriously tried to sing like that before. [laughs] So yeah, it made a big impact; you had to sit up and take notice.
Everything about it was just quite unique. It was a pretty filthy, disgusting-looking threesome in them days. [laughs] It was great, you know, just to see someone with that image — especially the Ace of Spades cover, where they were dressed up with like bandoleros and whatever. That was great! They looked like they were out in the Wild West somewhere, but it was actually a building site in North London! [laughs]