Sunday, Lemmy and Me, Part Two
“There’s two kinds of music — music you like, and music you don’t like; music that moves you, and music that doesn’t. That’s all there is.”
This quote, from my marathon 2002 interview with Motörhead mailman Lemmy Kilmister, pretty much sums up where I’m at these days, both in my own listening and in what I’m doing with Jagged Time Lapse.
An old friend and longtime colleague of mine recently suggested that, in light of the wide range of music that I love and write about here, I devote an upcoming JTL newsletter to music I hate. And while I would have been totally game to do something like that once upon a time — and while there’s plenty of stuff out there that I truly cannot stand — these days I feel like my time on earth (and on Substack) is better spent spreading joy and sharing stuff I love, rather than slagging bands and picking fights.
Which is not to say I don’t enjoy a bit of spirited debate about music that I genuinely care about, which is why I had such a blast recording the first episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, my new monthly music podcast with
. That episode, which was released a few days ago, finds us discussing The Jam’s Setting Sons album and how its running order was weirdly flipped for the US release — a change which, heretical though it may be to say, actually makes the album make more sense to me. CROSSED CHANNELS is available to all paid subscribers of my and/or Tony’s Substacks…
This continuation of my epic Lemmy interview is also a special treat for my paid subscribers. In Part One, we talked his first guitars, his days as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix (including the time Jimi gave him 10,000 hits of Owsley acid), and why bands should support each other instead of engaging in petty rivalries. Now, in Part Two, we get into his early band The Rockin’ Vickers, getting fired from Hawkwind, violence at shows, and why he feels Motörhead has always had more in common with punk rock than heavy metal…
The Rocking’ Vickers covered songs by The Who and The Kinks. Were you guys mods?
No, we were longhairs. We had vicars’ collars and the black shirts, right? Finnish national costume smocks, which were bright blue with all this felt embroidery; skintight white jeans with a lace-up fly, which was very awkward if you had to piss before the show; and Laplander reindeer skin boots. Those were my favorite — I tried to keep them after I left the band, but they weren’t going for it. We looked weird, you know? This was before acid, even, and we looked fuckin’ weird.
We used to come onstage and do this high-powered set, and then we’d smash all the equipment up and fuck off with it whining. That’s where I got the “guitars whining” thing from… We had cabs with false speakers in ‘em, and we used to just smash the guitars through the middle of that, and leave them hanging there screaming, and just walk off. Great band, you know?
But having said that, it was just up north of England; south of Birmingham, nobody’d ever heard of us. In the north of England, we were getting 200 pounds a night, which in those days was big money. We was doin’ good, man — big fucking flat in Manchester…