The comedy legends that Lemmy Kilmister called “really boring”
You don’t get much crazier than Lemmy. The former Motörhead bassist and frontman was known for being something of a wild one, with crazy antics of sex, drink and drugs fuelling some of his most uninhibited moments. If any rockstar thought they were capable of doing things in excess, Lemmy Kilmister could handle several times more, putting the Keith Richards and Keith Moons of the world to shame.
To provide a few examples of just how unhinged the metal icon was, the man born Ian Kilmister was known for having drunk a bottle of Jack Daniel’s every day, regularly embarked on drug binges that included staying awake for two weeks on amphetamines and hallucinating for another fortnight after repeatedly ingesting LSD. Not only was he capable of doing this, but during his life, he claimed to have slept with over 2,000 women, an unfathomable amount for even the most seasoned sleazeball.
His ridiculous escapades go on and could take up the entirety of another article, but his life of overkill was something that caught up with him on a number of occasions. He was fired from his first band, Hawkwind, for excessive drug use, and the number of substances he had poisoned himself with over the years prompted him to try and get a full-body blood transfusion in 1980, which doctors told him wouldn’t be possible to carry out due to the fact that it would have killed him. He quit drinking Jack Daniel’s in 2013, a day nobody thought would come.
It’s not exactly an insult to be called “boring” by Lemmy; it’s nothing more than a fact as far as his standards are concerned. Having made a cameo alongside his Motörhead bandmates Phil Taylor and Phil Campbell in the 1987 comedy film Eat The Rich, he would have been in the presence of some of the UK’s wildest alternative comedians at the time, such as Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson and Jennifer Saunders, as well as some notable stars from the world of music such as Paul McCartney, Bill Wyman, and Shane MacGowan.
In a 2002 interview with In Music We Trust, Lemmy was asked about his time on the set of the film, and what it was like to be in the company of the eccentric The Young Ones actors Mayall and Edmondson, with interviewer Randy Harward attesting that “it must have been wild”, but Lemmy’s response couldn’t have been further from Harward’s prediction.
“No, they were really boring,” replied Lemmy. “Believe me. They were really fucking boring. Left-wing college bores.” While Edmondson’s character Vyvyan in The Young Ones might well have been a lampoon of the punk ethos that Lemmy lived by, and Mayall’s stuck-up anarchist character Rick would have likely turned his nose up at the antics of Kilmister, you’d think that they’d have still shown some level of warmth towards the Motörhead musicians and perhaps found some way to bond, but evidently there was little camaraderie between the two parties.
This wasn’t the only time that Lemmy appeared on the screen, having also made appearances in the adult film John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut, various horror B-movies from production studio Troma Entertainment, and even cameoing in The Young Ones and The Comic Strip Presents… prior to appearing in Eat The Rich, making his dislike for Mayall and Edmondson all the more confusing. Either he was too blasted out of his mind with fellow debauchee Shane MacGowan to have cared, or was unusually lucid during the filming that he finally realised where he was and didn’t enjoy a single moment on set, but the fact remains that the iconic comedy duo are officially boring, as certified by Lemmy himself.
