Motorhead

Suprised eh to see the hairy warted ones here ? Originally to be called Bastard, Motorhead had a definite punk influence. They played with / supported bands such as the Damned and Adverts (Rat Scabies, Lemmy and Gaye Advert opposite) and were the love of my life for a while when I became disillusioned with punk and what it became. Just check out the start of Motorhead / City Kids (1977 Chiswick) to hear the apocalypse ! Influenced many later punk bands in terms of speed etc.

Roger Armstrong of Chiswick Records remembers....Lemmy had an acetate of the album that they had made with Dave Edmunds and that UA had decided not to release. He played it for Ted and then came over to the Soho market stall and played it to me. Ted and I agreed that UA were right. Eventually the word was that they were breaking up, but going to do one last gig in the Marquee. At first we were going to record them live and then got cold feet on that one – what if they had an off night – that sort of thing.

So we plumped for a single. We booked them into a studio that Genesis used for 2 days to do the single. At the end of the 2 days Lemmy rang Ted to say that they had almost finished the album and could they have a couple more days. Of course it dragged on and eventually took weeks to do and cost more money than we had. We managed to bust the tapes out of the last studio and get the record out before the pressure to pay the bills got too big. We put the single out first, and I think that it was the first rock 12". It did OK, but we just couldn’t afford to hang on to them so they went to Bronze. Later on of course we cut the MotorDamned single – Ballroom Blitz came out on the flip of Can’t Be Happy and Over The Top eventually surfaced on the Lost Weekend LP.