More from viceland:
“Silver Machine.” That song was kind of a ringer.
They tried everybody else singing it before me and none of them could do it. I got it in like two or three takes. That really pissed them off. Then NME printed my picture alone on the front page. “Hawkwind Goes to Number One” with my picture next to it.
Oh, that will make you some friends in the band.
Yeah. That really upset them. It was a funny bunch of people anyway. We were all cataclysmically stoned all the time. We were not even on a tour bus then, we were in the back of a van with two mattresses and blankets. That’s how we used to travel at festival time.
Jesus.
And it was still a festival when we were going home in the fucking van. In fact, Dell’s festival blanket wasn’t washed for two years. The fucking thing could fucking stand up on its own if you leaned it against the wall.
One band you played in before Hawkwind that I actually still listen to a lot is Sam Gopal.
Oh yeah. You listen to that?
I have it on my iPod. I think someone emailed it to me because you can’t get it.
You can now, apparently. It’s been put out again by somebody.
What was the deal with that? I think it’s some of the sickest music I’ve ever heard.
Well, I wrote all them songs in one night.
Fuck. You sang it too, right?
Yeah. That was in 1968. It was very rushed, obviously. But the speed was very good in those days. I sat up all night and wrote all the fucking songs. Eleven of them, I think.
When was the last time you listened to it?
Years ago.
It’s great. You guys even had girls doing backup vocals.
Yeah. Sue and Sunny were famous backing-group chicks at the time in London. They were on everybody’s record. Like Dusty Springfield, they did all her records. They were really well known.
Oh, you know, that song on there “Season of the Witch,” I didn’t write that one.
But the rest, in one night? Not too shabby.
Not too shabby.
What’s your writing process like?
I get the title first and write around that. It’s like a word exercise. You get on the theme and then you explore every possible avenue. So I’ll get a title like “Overkill” and then figure out stuff to do after that.
I don’t even know how many fucking songs you’ve written.
Plenty.
Who influenced you when you started out?
Everything I hear influences me. I can’t tell you all my influences as a musician. I mean, all the early rock singers like Little Richard, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, are important. All them guys. And all the Liverpool bands too. I was very lucky, man. I got to hear a lot of good shit. I saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club.
I remember reading about that in your book.
And Hendrix. I was working for him as a roadie just because I happened to be sleeping on his bassist Noel Redding’s floor at the time, and they needed an extra guy. I got to watch that motherfucker twice a night for about six months.
So if you had to say what the greatest act you ever saw was…
Hendrix and the Beatles. No doubt. Those two… you will never see anything like them again, because they were at the peak of their game and they came in and fucking wiped everybody out. Even the Stones. The Stones were secondhand next to the Beatles. It was only when the Beatles were gone that they could start calling themselves the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world, which they never were. They were always pretty ropy on stage. Without all that production they do now they would still be pretty ropy, because Keith is pretty ropy, isn’t he?
Yeah.
He is a great rhythm guitarist, but he isn’t a leader.
He is not the liveliest character I’ve seen.
He was livelier earlier on, but Brian Jones was the leader of the band for years. It was his band. He hired Jagger and Keith too, but they paced him out.
I wanted to ask you what your ideas are regarding success and failure. You are totally unchanged.
Why change if you’re on a winner? [laughs]
Yeah. But when Motörhead dropped that first album it seems like the media were like, “What the fuck?”
We couldn’t get released in America for about three years after we were a big hit in Britain. Then we were on fucking Legacy and Eclipse and then we got on Sony, which was actually worse. Then we got lucky. We got with… what was that label called? They got eaten by Sanctuary anyway.
Was it that German label?
No, we’re on SPV, the German label, now. But they just filed for bankruptcy.
It’s a common trend.
I know. Record companies are going under, and they don’t even understand how it happened to them. They are so fucking stupid.
Can you give the industry a grade, like an F to an A+, in terms of the way people have handled Motörhead?
Oh, it’s an F. It’s the same with any other band that’s a bit different. The industry has always been fucking surprised by the next breakout band. Like when the Liverpool bands went up—the Mersey Sound was a big craze right, and there was a small scene about Manchester, and then there was London with the Stones, and then it came over here with San Francisco, and then they did again with Seattle and Nirvana. After they have one hit with one band, they always run up to that city and sign everyone with a guitar around their neck. Half of them should have never even got a contract.
They were just kids with guitars who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.
They just happened to be from Seattle or from Liverpool. A lot of them industry people—even Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager—didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. He signed about four bands that never had a hit, and then they got cast by the wayside.
But if all the labels embraced you and knew what to do, would Motörhead be Motörhead?
Probably not.
Because you guys are like underdogs and legends all in one.
Yeah. We made sort of a career out of it. We had no choice, actually, because we weren’t ever going to be the overdog. We’re kind of too brutal to be universally popular. I never thought we were going to be that. Being up toward the top of the second echelon is fine with me.
What it must have been like to be in the Beatles or the Stones, man. I cannot imagine. It must have been fucking torture. George Harrison said it was the worst time of his life and the best time of his life.
I’m sure there’s a serious amount of 50/50 there.
Yeah, sure. Everything they did was under the microscope. One British daily paper had a Beatles page in it that was about whatever they did the day before. A mass-circulation paper—the Daily Mirror, it was—which was the biggest-selling paper in Britain at the time.
Do you think anyone could really stand that for a long time?
Stand being that big? No. You have to either give up or change. And the Beatles certainly did that.
I always liked how they were cast as goodie-goodies while the Stones were cast as Satanic tough guys.
The Beatles were from Liverpool. It’s a hard town. The Stones weren’t the hard men. They just dressed up. The Beatles were the hard men. Fucking Liverpool, man. The Stones are from the suburbs of London. Ringo was from the fucking Dingle, which is the worst area, next to Glasgow, that I’ve ever seen in my life. What they did in both those places—they couldn’t reform it, so they just knocked it down. They moved everybody out and razed it and built new housing projects. No way to make it civilized, you know what I mean? It was fucking lawless. The police wouldn’t go in there.
Final part tomorrow.
“Silver Machine.” That song was kind of a ringer.
They tried everybody else singing it before me and none of them could do it. I got it in like two or three takes. That really pissed them off. Then NME printed my picture alone on the front page. “Hawkwind Goes to Number One” with my picture next to it.
Oh, that will make you some friends in the band.
Yeah. That really upset them. It was a funny bunch of people anyway. We were all cataclysmically stoned all the time. We were not even on a tour bus then, we were in the back of a van with two mattresses and blankets. That’s how we used to travel at festival time.
Jesus.
And it was still a festival when we were going home in the fucking van. In fact, Dell’s festival blanket wasn’t washed for two years. The fucking thing could fucking stand up on its own if you leaned it against the wall.
One band you played in before Hawkwind that I actually still listen to a lot is Sam Gopal.
Oh yeah. You listen to that?
I have it on my iPod. I think someone emailed it to me because you can’t get it.
You can now, apparently. It’s been put out again by somebody.
What was the deal with that? I think it’s some of the sickest music I’ve ever heard.
Well, I wrote all them songs in one night.
Fuck. You sang it too, right?
Yeah. That was in 1968. It was very rushed, obviously. But the speed was very good in those days. I sat up all night and wrote all the fucking songs. Eleven of them, I think.
When was the last time you listened to it?
Years ago.
It’s great. You guys even had girls doing backup vocals.
Yeah. Sue and Sunny were famous backing-group chicks at the time in London. They were on everybody’s record. Like Dusty Springfield, they did all her records. They were really well known.
Oh, you know, that song on there “Season of the Witch,” I didn’t write that one.
But the rest, in one night? Not too shabby.
Not too shabby.
What’s your writing process like?
I get the title first and write around that. It’s like a word exercise. You get on the theme and then you explore every possible avenue. So I’ll get a title like “Overkill” and then figure out stuff to do after that.
I don’t even know how many fucking songs you’ve written.
Plenty.
Who influenced you when you started out?
Everything I hear influences me. I can’t tell you all my influences as a musician. I mean, all the early rock singers like Little Richard, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, are important. All them guys. And all the Liverpool bands too. I was very lucky, man. I got to hear a lot of good shit. I saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club.
I remember reading about that in your book.
And Hendrix. I was working for him as a roadie just because I happened to be sleeping on his bassist Noel Redding’s floor at the time, and they needed an extra guy. I got to watch that motherfucker twice a night for about six months.
So if you had to say what the greatest act you ever saw was…
Hendrix and the Beatles. No doubt. Those two… you will never see anything like them again, because they were at the peak of their game and they came in and fucking wiped everybody out. Even the Stones. The Stones were secondhand next to the Beatles. It was only when the Beatles were gone that they could start calling themselves the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world, which they never were. They were always pretty ropy on stage. Without all that production they do now they would still be pretty ropy, because Keith is pretty ropy, isn’t he?
Yeah.
He is a great rhythm guitarist, but he isn’t a leader.
He is not the liveliest character I’ve seen.
He was livelier earlier on, but Brian Jones was the leader of the band for years. It was his band. He hired Jagger and Keith too, but they paced him out.
I wanted to ask you what your ideas are regarding success and failure. You are totally unchanged.
Why change if you’re on a winner? [laughs]
Yeah. But when Motörhead dropped that first album it seems like the media were like, “What the fuck?”
We couldn’t get released in America for about three years after we were a big hit in Britain. Then we were on fucking Legacy and Eclipse and then we got on Sony, which was actually worse. Then we got lucky. We got with… what was that label called? They got eaten by Sanctuary anyway.
Was it that German label?
No, we’re on SPV, the German label, now. But they just filed for bankruptcy.
It’s a common trend.
I know. Record companies are going under, and they don’t even understand how it happened to them. They are so fucking stupid.
Can you give the industry a grade, like an F to an A+, in terms of the way people have handled Motörhead?
Oh, it’s an F. It’s the same with any other band that’s a bit different. The industry has always been fucking surprised by the next breakout band. Like when the Liverpool bands went up—the Mersey Sound was a big craze right, and there was a small scene about Manchester, and then there was London with the Stones, and then it came over here with San Francisco, and then they did again with Seattle and Nirvana. After they have one hit with one band, they always run up to that city and sign everyone with a guitar around their neck. Half of them should have never even got a contract.
They were just kids with guitars who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.
They just happened to be from Seattle or from Liverpool. A lot of them industry people—even Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager—didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. He signed about four bands that never had a hit, and then they got cast by the wayside.
But if all the labels embraced you and knew what to do, would Motörhead be Motörhead?
Probably not.
Because you guys are like underdogs and legends all in one.
Yeah. We made sort of a career out of it. We had no choice, actually, because we weren’t ever going to be the overdog. We’re kind of too brutal to be universally popular. I never thought we were going to be that. Being up toward the top of the second echelon is fine with me.
What it must have been like to be in the Beatles or the Stones, man. I cannot imagine. It must have been fucking torture. George Harrison said it was the worst time of his life and the best time of his life.
I’m sure there’s a serious amount of 50/50 there.
Yeah, sure. Everything they did was under the microscope. One British daily paper had a Beatles page in it that was about whatever they did the day before. A mass-circulation paper—the Daily Mirror, it was—which was the biggest-selling paper in Britain at the time.
Do you think anyone could really stand that for a long time?
Stand being that big? No. You have to either give up or change. And the Beatles certainly did that.
I always liked how they were cast as goodie-goodies while the Stones were cast as Satanic tough guys.
The Beatles were from Liverpool. It’s a hard town. The Stones weren’t the hard men. They just dressed up. The Beatles were the hard men. Fucking Liverpool, man. The Stones are from the suburbs of London. Ringo was from the fucking Dingle, which is the worst area, next to Glasgow, that I’ve ever seen in my life. What they did in both those places—they couldn’t reform it, so they just knocked it down. They moved everybody out and razed it and built new housing projects. No way to make it civilized, you know what I mean? It was fucking lawless. The police wouldn’t go in there.
Final part tomorrow.
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