When Lemmy Kilmister died, a new era began. There were the years before his death when it was impossible to imagine that he would ever be gone. He was way too tough, way too special. The comparison with the cockroach, which cannot be killed despite tons of poison, was justifiably obvious. Since December 28, 2015, it’s the time after Lemmy. The upheaval provided an opportunity to take a look at the rock ‘n’ roll clichés that Lemmy had largely helped create. At the same time, he was the exact opposite of these stereotypes. A paradox? Not really. The dividing line is thin, but it exists. She is responsible for Lemmy becoming a legend during his lifetime.
Lemmy and the contradictions
Life fast, the young is the first cliche that Lemmy debunked. He lived quickly, no question about it. The excess, the alcohol, the cigarettes and all the other substances are inextricably linked to Lemmy Kilmister, but they didn’t lead to early headlines like: “Rock star dies young of overdose”. Of course, it cannot hide the fact that Lemmy struggled heavily with the consequences of his lifestyle. In 2015, several Motörhead performances had to be canceled because Lemmy complained of breathing problems. He also suffered from diabetes and had to be treated for a hematoma in 2013. After all, Lemmy had recently told the British Guardian that he had reduced his cigarette consumption to one pack a week and replaced whiskey-cola with vodka-orange.
However, he showed contradictory traits towards his Motörhead band members when it came to drug consumption. In an interview with Loudwire Mikkey told Dee about Lemmy’s strict rules. Due to health problems, Lemmy Kilmister stopped taking drugs in 2013. But his bandmates weren’t even allowed to start: “Lemmy said to me, ‘The day you do drugs, you’re going to get fucking fired.’ I have never experimented with drugs. I drink my beer, but Lemmy made sure I never did drugs. If I had done that, I wouldn’t have been in the band anymore.” said Mikkey Dee.
An outsider from the start
Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister was born on December 24, 1945 in Stoke-on-Trent, England. His father was a field chaplain in the British Army and his mother was a librarian. Just a few months after Lemmy was born, his father left the family. At the age of ten he moved to Wales with his mother and her new husband, which made him an outsider as the only Englishman among his Welsh schoolmates. Lemmy later said it was interesting from an anthropological perspective, but it was by no means easy. At fifteen he was expelled from school without a qualification. In the following years he made ends meet with odd jobs.
Taking a detour from Manchester, he landed a job in London as a roadie at the Jimi Hendrix Experience, among other things. Lemmy discovered his love for rock ‘n’ roll early on. In 1957 he got his first guitar to pursue his goal at the time – to impress the girls at school. In general, Lemmy Kilmister had a special relationship with the female gender. According to his own statements, he slept with over a thousand women, always driven by a longing that he could never really satisfy. One reason for this may be the death of his great childhood sweetheart, Susann Bennett. At nineteen she overdosed on heroin, which also significantly influenced Lemmy Kilmister’s attitude towards the drug. Not once did he take heroin or inject anything else, although he tried every drug imaginable. All these years he has criticized the British government for failing to control heroin. Some will therefore accuse him of black and white thinking.
Hawkwind and Motörhead
He developed his penchant for amphetamines and LSD while playing bass in the space rock band Hawkwind. He had actually hoped to become the group’s guitarist, but his mind was changed. Throughout his life, Lemmy’s characteristic bass playing was due to his background as a guitarist. He plays chords, not individual notes, and continually strums the strings with his right hand like a guitarist. Between 1971 and 1975 he celebrated some notable successes with Hawkwind, but their time together quickly ended. On a tour in Canada, he was caught at the border with amphetamines, thrown in jail for a few days and fired from Hawkwind as a result.
Shortly afterwards he founded Motörhead, named after the last song he wrote for Hawkwind. Motörhead’s 40-year history has been marked by an astonishing consistency. In “Thunder & Lightning,” Lemmy sings about it: “I always wanted the noise and the light …/ I always wanted the dangerous life”he grumbles, and: “I never wanted to be nowhere else.” “Fast and mean” was what he wanted to sound like, which is why Motörhead are considered heavy metal pioneers, even if they never wanted to have anything to do with the genre. Rather, their hard rock was influenced by punk – and by Lemmy’s early heroes, the rock ‘n’ rollers of the 50s. Their biggest hit remains “Ace Of Spades” from 1980, which Lemmy doesn’t consider to be his greatest song (“He prefers Broken”), but it is his Live almost-Setting as succinctly as accurately summarized: “You know I’m born to lose and gambling’s for fools/ But that’s the way I like it, baby/ I don’t wanna live forever.”
The Last Days of Lemmy Kilmister
He once said about obituaries that it bothers him that everyone is suddenly glorified: “An asshole is still an asshole even when he’s dead. Then it’s just a dead asshole.” Lemmy wasn’t an asshole, he was a sincere, determined man who never gave up. People like to say that, but with Lemmy it was actually true. In an interview with ROLLING STONE editor Birgitt Fuss in the summer before his death, he said: “If I die tomorrow, I can’t complain. It was a good life.”
Lemmy Kilmister died at the age of seventy, just two days after being diagnosed by his doctors with aggressive and incurable prostate cancer. Heart failure and cardiac arrhythmias were also determined to be the cause of death. As Motörhead announced on their Facebook page, their frontman died surrounded by his loved ones while playing a few rounds on a game console. He used his favorite device – a JVL iTouch – which he received as a gift from his local pub, “The Rainbow”. Kilmister was considered a passionate gambler who never missed an opportunity to sit in front of slot machines in bars, even while on tour.
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Farewell to his friend Ozzy
In the days that followed, Ozzy Osbourne spoke about the final moments he would have liked to have spent with Lemmy Kilmister on his deathbed. And the ones he was actually able to spend with the Motörhead boss – even if only on the phone. Osbourne spoke to Lemmy, even though he was no longer able to articulate words. “I called him the day he would later die”the singer recalled. “I knew he would leave us. However, he didn’t recognize my voice.” But Osbourne persisted. “I said to him, ‘It’s me, Lem, Ozzy’.”
However, Kilmister was only able to produce a kind of gurgling sound. That was the deciding factor for Ozzy to act. “Hell, Lemmy, I’m leaving now!” Ozzy wanted to get his wife along for the ride. “I said, go ahead, Sharon, get in the car. We race to his apartment. As we left she held me. ‘He’s already passed away’.” Osbourne continued: “Oh my God. That hit me extremely hard.”
Commemoration from the music world of Lemmy Kilmister
Numerous other musicians expressed their dismay at Lemmy’s death. Radio DJ Eddie Trunk was one of the first to spread the word. Lemmy’s close friends Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne followed shortly afterwards.
Josh Homme, frontman of Queens Of The Stone Age, had special words: “Actually, I’m pissed because Lemmy’s dead. This sucks. One of the last REAL rock’n’roll ‘motherfuckers’ is gone and I miss him”, Homme wrote in his message. But the singer was most impressed by how honestly and truthfully Lemmy Kilmister lived the rock world. “He was unquestionably honest. He knew there was simply no other way… Unique, sharp-tongued… stylish, funny, straight-talking and a badass–bandleader”, said Homme.
More than 300,000 people watched Lemmy Kilmister’s funeral in Los Angeles via stream in his home country of Great Britain. Among the guests were Lemmy’s son Paul, Slash, Rob Halford and Dave Grohl, who in a eulogy once again acknowledged what a lovely person the singer was.