The 1976 song Lemmy put in the same league as The Beatles: “Unbelievable hooks”
In Ian ‘Lemmy‘ Kilmister’s estimation, nothing in the world of rock and pop trumps the immortality of solid songcraft.
The fact was, the Motörhead frontman was always tethered to the elemental foundations of rock and roll more than he was to heavy metal or even hard rock. They weren’t lacking on the latter. Straddling a febrile bridge between punk’s garage attack and the new wave of British heavy metal, the Motörhead machine wielded blistering levels of turbo-speed reflecting Lemmy’s longstanding taste for amphetamines.
Lemmy was already a rock veteran by the time he kickstarted his Motörhead gang. He’d not long been slinging bass for London space rockers Hawkwind across their classic Space Ritual era, but before that, he was flatmates with Noel Redding and winning a roadie gig with the Jimi Hendrix Experience after several years on guitar touring Europe with The Rockin’ Vickers and countless dates in the UK’s northern clubs as early as 1962.
His foundation was pop’s big bang itself. A child of the 1950s, the likes of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard all set a standard in style and performance Lemmy would follow for the rest of his life, routinely announcing his band’s arrival to the stage by bellowing to the craned-necked mic “We are Motörhead, and we play rock and roll” as a nod to his formative heroes and a clear affirmation of the tradition he felt he belonged to.
Once The Beatles arrived, a teenage Lemmy was catching the Fab Four in their earliest Cavern days, later developing his guitar chops trying to imitate 1963’s Please Please Me debut.
Those early witnesses to rock and pop’s primordial developments would shape Lemmy’s values as an artist and music fan, as well as prompt the curious celebration of an unlikely 1976 single standing as tall as his beloved Beatles. Talking to Classic Rock in 2008, the Motörhead bassist reeled off his list of “perfect songs” with two choice selections of ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Please Please Me’ from Liverpool’s finest, and one ‘Dancing Queen’ from Sweden’s premier pop heavyweights.
“[They’re] stuff that sticks in your head,” Lemmy surmised. “’Cos even if you hate ABBA, you’ll be singing that song walking down the road. They’ve got unbelievable hooks. They were obviously doing something right because their records sold all over the world.”
He wasn’t wrong. Sweden’s biggest-selling artist by a country mile, with over 150million claimed album sales under their glittered belt, ABBA’s glowing pop songbook has shone a light all over disparate corners of the rock world, from Gene Simmons, Pete Townshend, Dave Grohl, and even the Sex Pistols, counting second bassist Sid Vicious as an ardent fan and the guts of ‘SOS’ shaping the ‘Pretty Vacant’ riff.
Just as deeply held was Lemmy’s admiration. It’s unclear if Lemmy was ever known to blast ABBA on the tour bus as the Pistols were known to do, but his veneration for the eternal pop song would have no doubt seen in the Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson hit factory the same timeless musical canon as the John Lennon – Paul McCartney songbook. It’s the universality that does it for Lemmy, spotting in ABBA’s celestial ‘Dancing Queen’ the same alchemic formulae in the rock and roll and Merseybeat of his youth that he couldn’t help but admire.
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