49% Motherf**ker 51% Son of a Bitch - Lemmy DVD Review

Lemmy

Photo: Mark Marek link

DVD Review

You couldn't make this up. A fledgling career with The Rockin Vickers furnished the band with two hundred quid a week each, clear, cars and a speed boat. But this man's vision went way beyond the Northern supper-club circuit. London, and Hendrix was calling. Both roadie and acid buddy to James Marshall he would get three out of every ten tabs he scored for him. A four year stint with Hawkwind would follow, seeing him ultimately being fired from the band for what he describes as being "70's drug snobbery". His vengeance was to screw three of their old ladies. When weighed up against his age, and because it is not really that many a year he tells us, the nine hundred and ninety seven other women he has bedded since those days is not such an impressive figure.

And there he was at the beginning of heavy metal when armed with his Rickenbacker bass and a legion of Marshall stacks he joined forces with "Fast" Eddie Clarke and Phil "Filthy Animal" Taylor to play a relentless amalgam of metal, punk and rock n roll. It was, and still is some 35 plus years later, speed music. In a career he dismisses as being nothing more or less than controlled madness he has resolutely stuck to his guns and with hammer and anvil and tongs has made the loudest, dirtiest noise this side of Hades.

Fans, friends and the famous, even his boot maker jostle for position in front of the camera to share their views of, and hail their praise upon him. The man's the modern Jesus, one wide-eyed youngster tells us. Another even goes as far as saying that he is actually God. A deity with an old school LA look, perhaps. And there he is, resembling some radioactive cowboy, wandering into a Los Angeles record store looking for The Beatles mono box-set no less. And then again, this time on the slot machines in Vegas. Now he is sat on a barstool at the end of the Rainbow Room in LA playing on the trivia game. Next he is in his apartment, which is full of stuff. Stuff is what happens, he informs us, as we stare at the silver and gold discs adorning the walls, the porcelain figurines of himself and a huge collection of swords, daggers and Nazi memorabilia which was nineteen years in the making. There is even a framed, signed message from the Fuhrer, given to him by Ozzy Osbourne. Happy New Year from Adolf Hitler it says. And no, in case you ask, he is not a fascist. The Germans just had the best uniforms and as if by way of further confirmation, he advises us that he has had six black girlfriends.

He was there before rock n roll and you suspect that he will still be there long after it has gone, propelled along on a staple diet of amphetamines, Marlboro Reds, gambling, Jack Daniels and Coke. And even though he suggests that he is too old to find God now there is also the small matter of the diabetes and blood pressure tablets, just in case. Not dying is the secret of survival, he confides to us as the Jumbocruiser tour bus rumbles on into Moscow, or is it Helsinki? HD video footage is interspersed with 16mm film as we flit between Hawkwind on stage in Dunstable in 1972, the Pistols' "God Save The Queen" performed from the top of an open-decked London bus and him joining Metallica both in the studio and then on stage for a blast of "Damage Case". But don't let me have to tell you all about it, go watch it for yourselves. The band's name is Motorhead and they play rock n roll. And the man's name is Lemmy and this is what he is and this is what he does.

Simon Godley