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  “Somebody gave me a flag,” recalls Kilmister, addressing how his collection of Nazi accoutrements started, one that turned his Hollywood apartment into a cluttered war museum unto his death. “A couple of girls gave it to me back in 1977. Later, somebody gave me an iron cross. I liked the designs. I think the designs were very attractive. I think they got a hold of a lot of people just through skilfull marketing. Hitler’s auditory skills were great. Hitler said the same thing for 12 years and people just sucked it up. He was such a good speaker and he was really good with his hands. He rehearsed in front of a mirror for hours before speaking. He didn’t have the speech written down; he only had topics. He would get on a topic and just run with it. He was spontaneous. He led the world into hell because he was a good speaker. It is amazing, isn’t it? I hold no grief for the man because he was a boring asshole. His secretaries used to wake each other up when he was talking after dinner. He would just say the same shit every night and once he started in, then no one could get a word in the rest of the night. It was all just listening to Adolf. He had theories and he was surrounded by yes men. With no one around to contradict you, then you just go on believing you are right until you turn into an idiot. He fucked up so badly. It was incredible but for a while there—watch out! The Nazis in America used to hold rallies in Madison Square Garden—did you know that? They had a big picture of Washington in the middle and swastikas on each side of it. You can look them up on the internet. They are called the German American Bund.”

  And prized possession? “I have an air force sword made out of Damascus steel. It is overlaid again and again and again. It was made like the Japanese make swords. It is a beautiful thing. It cost me a couple of months’ rent. I gave Keith Emerson some daggers once. He used to throw knives at his keyboards when he was with the Nice. I gave him the daggers and I told him not to throw them at the organ. He told me that he has since stopped doing that.

  “So yeah, I collect Nazi German stuff,” continues Lemmy. “I’ve got a couple of good flags, a large swastika flag on the red background with a gold wreath around it. I got it in Arizona. They brought everything home, the GIs. I’ve got a lot of daggers, a couple of nice daggers, a couple of nice swords. Beautiful things, you know?” Lemmy made sure he read many a book on the topic as well. “Sure, yeah. I mean, if you’re going to collect you’ve got to keep up on your research otherwise you’re going to get sold turkeys all the time.”

  Besides Keith Emerson and John Sykes (Tygers of Pan Tang, Thin Lizzy, Whitesnake), Ozzy Osbourne was also into it, says Thom Panunzio, who produced records for both Motörhead and Sabbath. “Lemmy and Ozzy, incredible historians,” notes Thom. “Lemmy can tell you more about history. In fact, the History Channel have consulted him on different issues. Seriously. And when Iggy Pop would come over, when Iggy was sober, he would sit and talk about history, and he was captivating. Lemmy was just about Europe, first of all. Not American history. Berlin, back in the day, things like that, where Lemmy knows everything. Even though Lemmy is a Nazi fanatic, he is not a Nazi in his thoughts, and he’s not a racist; actually when I worked with him, he had a black girlfriend.”

  “I’m sick of fucking collecting it,” Lemmy told me in 2006. “If I had known there was this much shit to collect, I wouldn’t have started. I can hardly fucking move in my apartment. What an advantage, you know. It’s kind of a benign sickness. It’s a nice thing to collect stuff. I think most people collect something, even if they don’t realize they’re doing it. Most people have a thing they will buy if they come across it. A friend of mine used to collect elephants. And another one, it was frogs. I mean, it’s much better to have a place full of World War II stuff than a fucking apartment full of frogs, believe me.

  “Yeah, I have thought about it,” reflects Lemmy, on where it goes after he dies—there’s an amusing moment in the Lemmy movie where he almost off the cuff reminds his son, Paul Inder, sitting next to him, that’s it’s getting dropped in his lap once Dad is gone. “Because nobody I know . . . I mean, my son is going to get most of it, anyway, but he’s not got any interest in the thing itself. So I think I’ll just put him on to a good dealer who can consign or sell it for him. But yeah, I’ve got a beautiful Luftwaffe sword, a Damascus steel blade, and I just got a dagger which is a Damascus blade with an ivory handle, and a friend of mine in Germany gave me his uncle’s old sword, which was pre-war, with a Second World War blade on that. That’s a beautiful piece too. They look like they were made yesterday; it’s incredible.”

  ~

  “Bomber” was issued as a single from the album, reaching No. 34 in the U.K. charts, with the album as whole rising to an impressive No. 12. As was expected and respected within the band’s punting class of fans, the B-side to the single, the boogie rockin’ “Over the Top,” offered value through its non-LP status. The initial 20,000 pressed of the single were blue, before it reverted to black. “Yeah, we used to go out of our way to not put an album track on the B-side,” notes Eddie. “Because we felt that the kids, they’re buying a single, which is on the album, so to do them justice, we used to stick something different on the B-side. So we used to write them specially for the B-side.”

  Perhaps lacking the notoriety of Overkill and for sure the smash star quality of its follow-up, Ace of Spades, Bomber’s significance is enhanced in the public consciousness through fond memories of . . . a lighting truss. There had been an Overkill backdrop with flashing eyes, plus for the next album, there’d be the short-lived lit-up ace of spades, but it is the band’s ersatz “bomber” for Bomber that would live on in infamy—forever Motörhead’s most remembered prop.

  “I seem to remember sitting in the office, and we were all talking about what we could do, there were no good props for previous tours,” recalls Eddie, “and it was like, well, why don’t we have some sort of wings across the stage? Across the stage, with lights on, amongst the equipment, the back line. We were talking on those terms. We hadn’t really got into the flying idea. And then the lighting guy, Pete Barnes, and them started to come up with an idea of why don’t we make a lighting truss out of a wing? So that all the front spotlights and everything would be on these sort of wings, in front of a plane.

  The bomber lighting rig flying over Stoke-on-Trent, August 1981.

  © Alan Perry/IconicPix

  “And then of course it went from there to a whole plane, and then it was, why don’t we fly the fucking thing on chain hoists? Which was actually quite dangerous, really, because there was no safety in them days. We didn’t have a safety thing on it. Sometimes they said they did do a safety, but they never did, I don’t think. So it was just on four chain hoists, well, three chain hoists, one at each wingtip, and one at the back. And they were hand-operated. The fucking . . . you’d be standing under the bomber thinking, fucking ’ell, you know.”

  “It was a very, very expensive building project, because it had to be built out of aluminum that was highly, highly expensive,” recalls Doug. “Otherwise health and safety wouldn’t pass it. Not only that, all the motors that controlled it, health and safety had to inspect. So we had to have health and safety in there every gig to make sure those motors were okay. I mean, it worked fantastically; it was my idea but it was designed by Patrick Woodroffe, the guy who has done all the Rolling Stones stuff. He came up with building the bomber, because originally, what we were going to do was build a bomber that wouldn’t do what we finally ended up with. It was his suggestion that, why don’t we skip that and turn it into a lighting gantry? And that’s what we did. And then we were able to mount lights and all the rest of it.

  “I remember Eddie’s first comment, when we had it all rigged and ready. We erected it in a studio, had it all set up, and Eddie walked in and said, ‘It’s got nothing covering it! What the fuck is it? It’s a fucking skeleton! Fuckin’ ’ell. You’ve got to sort it out, Doug. It’s got no sides!’ So it took a while to convince him that it would work.
r />   “But yes, it was expensive. It had motors and the whole thing was on safety chains, so that if the motors broke down and the thing collapsed, it would have safety chains to pick it up. This is for insurance. Insurance companies want to know that we are putting in stuff that is safe. But the funny story about that is that the one that they used years later is not the original. The original was stolen by a bunch of didicoys—didicoys are gypsies. Because they saw it in our lighting company’s yard, and at night they nicked it. The aluminum was very valuable, and they could get a lot of money from the scrap dealer for it. So that was rebuilt at extraordinary expense. But we did have it insured. In fact, I think the lighting company had it insured and they had to rebuild it.”

  Back again, get it?

  “Our first ever tour was with Motörhead in 1979, on the Bomber tour,” recalls lanky Saxon lead singer Biff Byford in late 2015. “We’d just written Wheels of Steel, and we went on tour with them, and it was a long, long tour, actually, a massive tour of England. And from that we jumped straight on Judas Priest. Those first two were our first two major tours, really. So we spent a lot time with Motörhead. We traveled on the same bus, stayed in the same hotel; we were pretty close, and still are, actually. The bomber was cool. I think they’re using it on this tour we’re starting in a week or two [with the planned Girlschool, Saxon, Motörhead campaign that was sadly not to be]. It’s just a mangle of bits, really, the bomber. It’s not like our eagle, which is actually a fully assembled eagle. I think the bomber is more . . . they bolt it together at the gig. So I think it’s a little bit more sensible than ours. Those images stay with people, don’t they? Because they’re such huge live effects. They’re legendary and people want to see them. We don’t use ours every tour and neither does Motörhead. So when we bring it out, it’s something special.”

  Expounding on Motörhead’s musical oeuvre, Byford figures, “They were quite heavily influenced, like we were, with the punk thing. They wanted to write fast metal, fast songs, because they were a bit of a speed band, weren’t they? Playing fast and taking speed as well. But coming from the Hawkwind thing to Motörhead is a huge jump, and it was a new style that those three guys created.”

  Asked to assess the personalities of the Motörhead guys, Biff says first of Taylor, “A great guy, to tell the truth, a bit of a cheeky chap and a bit of a Jack the Lad, Phil. Northern boy, really. He lived in London, but he told you how it was if he’d got anything on his mind. But I liked him; we were good friends. And Lemmy, with all people that sing and write lyrics, I think we’re quite complex. So I think basically what you see is, it’s not all what you get, you know what I’m saying? But Lemmy is a great lyricist, for the style that he writes in. It is a bit like me, really. He tells stories and they’re history based, often. So yeah, I think the early Motörhead, with Fast Eddie—who is a great friend as well, actually; I see Fast Eddie quite a lot—they were a force to be reckoned with, and like us, they’ve been through ups and downs and survived.”

  “It was the most wonderful thing, I’d have to say,” reflects Fast Eddie, putting himself back in the Bomber days and underneath that big rig, which Lemmy describes as 40 feet by 40 feet of heavy aluminum tubing. “I think it gave me more pleasure than anything else, was seeing the kids, when that bomber used to start moving. We used to start the show with it. Of course, this is like 1979. Things hadn’t really been done like that. You know, this was for our kids. We could get it in Hammersmith Odeon or anywhere. It was just something spectacular. You’ve got the fucking aircraft lights going at the beginning and the Lancasters flying over, and it added a whole thing to the show.”

  Asked for more specifics on how it was used through the pacing of the show, Eddie explains that “Basically, in the beginning, before we came on stage, it was nose down, with the aircraft lights and the Lancasters going over. It was in the dark then, and it just had the propellers and aircraft lights spinning. So they were just spinning. So what would happen was, it would be sitting nose down, right on the front of the stage, with its ass in the air. It would slowly rise up at the beginning, and once it was up in the air, we would be onstage in the darkness, and bang, we were off. And then we didn’t really use it much after that. It used to tilt side to side a little bit during the show—that was at the lighting guy’s discretion. And then of course, in ‘Bomber,’ at the end of the show, it would come down and start moving.

  “I tell you, if the gig wasn’t going that well, or you might be in France somewhere and it’s snowing badly and you’re thinking, oh, fucking ’ell, this ain’t going well, you’d think, well, wait for the bomber to come down. And sure enough, the bomber would come down, and it would transform the last 15, 20 minutes. It was absolutely brilliant, mate. What can I tell you?”

  CHAPTER 6

  Ace of Spades: “It wasn’t that it was the best we did; it was that it was the best they heard.”

  Motörhead greeted 1980 enjoying, apparently, their golden years, if the name of their fetching new rip-roarin’ four-track EP, which was released in May, was to be believed (the title was suggested by Lemmy as a joke). Live renditions of “Stone Dead Forever” and “Dead Men Tell No Tales” were set against a crushing non-LP metal number called “Too Late, Too Late” and A-side oldies cover “Leaving Here.”

  Notes Eddie, “Trevor Hallesy was the engineer at the time. We didn’t use Jimmy on that. Trevor did that one, although we kind of did that ourselves, which was fine. It came out okay. ‘Leaving Here’ had come from Lemmy and was on the original album, On Parole. It’s a great song by Holland and Dozier, and it worked well.”

  The effect of this spot of product was to continue to place the band in the minds of fans as aiming to please, in the traditional sense, namely knocking out an old song everybody knows, or could learn between pints. From a management point of view, this sort of thing keeps the band in the papers between albums, and even on TV, in this case, Britain’s best show for widespread exposure, Top of the Pops.

  Phil and Lem catch wind of the Bingley Hall gig.

  © George Bodnar Archive/IconicPix

  One memorable gig was the so-called Heavy Metal Barn Dance, at Stafford Bingley Hall, on July 26, 1980, featuring, at the bottom, Mythra, Vardis and White Spirit; in the middle, Girlschool and Angel Witch; then second to top, Saxon, headliner being Motörhead. The show stood as the first big gathering of NWOBHM bands.

  “Motörhead were just absolutely brilliant,” recalls Angel Witch bassist Kevin Riddles. “Bingley Hall, in Stafford, was basically a cattle shed. It’s where they used to hold cattle auctions. They used to sell horses out of there and it holds about twelve thousand people when it was empty. Sadly, it took about a week to clean it, to get rid of the smell of horse and bullshit. And so we were due to play there on the Saturday. On the Friday night, we were playing further north in England, and to get there, we had to drive overnight. We walked into this place about 8 o’clock in the morning, and this huge PA was set up, and there’s a huge crowd of people at the other end of the hall. And all of a sudden, I saw an arm come out. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any of the King Arthur or Camelot or Excalibur type films, where the arm comes out of the lake, holding the sword? So that’s what this looked like, except he was holding the biggest bottle of Smirnoff blue label vodka I’d ever seen. And this gravelly voice just said, ‘Morning Kev, fancy some breakfast?’ And, of course it was Lemmy himself, who obviously hadn’t been asleep the night before, and he was just surrounded by sort of acolytes and all that. It was just fantastic. And that’s exactly what they were like. Philthy Animal was just like that too; he was an animal, just brilliant. And of course Fast Eddie was in the band then and he was the musician out of the band. And we had a great relationship with all of them, I have to say.”

  And three months later came Ace of Spades, the album considered by the widest swath of fans, casual and serious, to be the band’s crowning
achievement. Still, it’s more debatable than common practice would suggest that the music all over Motörhead’s penultimate studio album, Ace of Spades, was leaps and bounds better than that of Bomber. And once we bring Overkill into the conversation, then the band’s kerranging catalog begins to blur even further into one sonic maelstrom, the fierce selection of songs from all three serving, essentially, as interchangeable.

  No doubt, Ace of Spades was a hit record, albeit localized to the U.K., and no doubt that it set the stage for an even bigger hit in the live album. But there’s something more important to this moment in Motörhead history, in that with Ace of Spades, the legend of these three outlaws emboldens and expands, as suggested by the album cover and title, beyond association with bikers and war, toward band as bandit heroes, gamblers in the game of life and all that entails.

  Quite simply, the world started to love Motörhead as personalities on this record, and something like that starts innocently enough, by dressing the guys up as Mexican banditos and sticking them front and center on the band’s next record jacket. Visuals have always mattered, and here was a bold one.