The 1979 song Lemmy forced himself to write: “I had to come up with something”
1979 was the year that the metal world was given a hard slap by Motörhead.
Not that they ever saw themselves in the metal vein. Most live nights, frontman and bassist Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister would take the stage, tilt his head back and bellow “We are Motörhead, and we play rock and roll” before kicking off the show.
As far as Lemmy was concerned, his Motörhead juggernaut simply carried over Little Richard’s original R&B beat, dragged through the rawer turbo rock of the Detroit garage, and spiked with his notorious taste for amphetamine.
Whether he liked it or not, Motörhead absolutely stood as one of the leading forces of the new wave of British heavy metal, while managing to forge a respectable cowboy boot in the world of punk. Such a marriage of two underground camps would find its essential document on 1979’s immortal LP twofer, Overkill and Bomber, establishing the Motörhead assault and heralding their classic tenure through their defining Ace of Spades top ten.
Ambitions were expanding for the band. Having cut their debut in a blistering three days, Motörhead holed up in London’s Roundhouse and Sound Development studios across a six-week stint from December 1978 with producer Jimmy Miller, interspersed with their heavy touring commitments. Having shaped much of their material on the road, the band were able to enter the studio and blast through their material with the confidence of having nurtured them on stage repeatedly into the final, belligerent forms.
Save one number. It turned out that a burst of cinematic inspiration would compel Lemmy to pen a number to quickly sketch out a much-loved Overkill cut that never shared its genesis on stage like the rest of the album.
“To be honest, we were one song short,” Lemmy once stated. “So I had to come up with something literally overnight. I remember going to a cinema in Portobello Road that night; they were screening the classic Metropolis silent film from the 1920s, which was directed by Fritz Lang. That gave me the creative boost I needed. So, I went home, wrote the song, took it into the studio and we did it on the spot.”
A penchant for sci-fi was never above Lemmy. As longtime fans will know, the Motörhead frontman first came to real prominence slinging his growling bass for the rag-tag space rock ensemble Hawkwind, adding that hard rock heft to tales of cosmic travel and writer Michael Moorcock’s ‘The Eternal Champion’ around their Space Ritual era. He’d lift his own formerly far-out ‘Motörhead’ and ‘Lost Johnny’ from Hawkind for his heavy successor, and even appear in 1990’s dystopian thriller Hardware.
Metropolis’ German expressionist reach towers across cinema, but the silent movie’s immortal tale of class conflict in the futurist cityscape managed to rear its head potently in Lemmy’s terse lyrics, clearly the result of a night’s furious creative writing but still capturing the themes starkly, “Metropolis, the worlds divide / Ain’t nobody on the other side.”
Suddenly, Lemmy was able to pluck a slice of sci-fi and hammer the material into his own image, that of outlaw rebellion against the Man the ‘Ace of Spades’ bellower was more than an authority on.
