“A terrible thing”: the musical bereavement Lemmy never got over
Lemmy’s attitude towards death was pretty simple – why worry about the inevitable? Just enjoy the present.
“You can think about dying if you like, but it doesn’t fucking matter,” he said, quite abruptly, “You’re going to die anyway.”
This is probably best reflected in how Lemmy approached the final days of his own life – he was on tour with Motörhead, and while it was clear that he wasn’t in good health, the idea of cancelling shows never entered his mind, and as the bassist says himself, you’re going to die anyway, and so rather than cancel shows, he decided to make adjustments and keep playing.
Mikkey Dee, the band’s drummer at the time, remembers that Lemmy was sick, but admired the fact that he wanted to keep playing and taking their shows to audiences around the world, saying, “Instead of arguing with Lemmy, trying to get him off the road, let’s just help him instead… I remember shows where we had to adjust a lot of stuff, but I think we, and he, did fantastic. Our last show was December 7th in Berlin, and then a couple of weeks later, the man is gone. Trust me, me and Phil put in 150%, Lemmy must have put in 300% to get through the sets.”
That being said, just because Lemmy had a blasé approach to death a lot of the time doesn’t mean that it didn’t affect him every now and then – for instance, when Motörhead guitarist Michael ‘Würzel’ Burston passed away, there was no escaping the impact it had on him, and while Würzel wasn’t the first Motörhead guitarist, he was the one who brought a real difference to the band when he injected a new level of enthusiasm into them that had previously been missing.
Lemmy thought their album Orgasmatron was one of their very best because of this level of excitement. “Enthusiasm,” he said. “That’s the main difference. It’s such a relief to be with three geezers who want to be in the band, in Motörhead, as a thing – all together, us against the world. The others got really jaded about the whole thing. You had to put a pistol up their arses to get them to play any of the old songs. Even Motörhead, for fuck’s sake.”
Unfortunately, this enthusiasm didn’t last, as Würzel opted to leave the band thanks to exhaustion and a general lack of interest. Motörhead definitely missed him to the extent that the band didn’t even try to replace him; however, he and Lemmy stayed in touch and remained friends until Würzel passed away in 2011. Despite Lemmy’s attitude towards death, there was no escaping just how much the loss of his friend impacted him.
“We were calling each other and texting each other a bit,” said the Motörhead bassist. “He was really down. But he became this raging alcoholic, which was a terrible thing. I watched it all the way through from beginning to end. I dunno…”
Motörhead were set to play the Sonisphere on the day that Würzel passed, and reports from the crowd state that you can tell Lemmy was grieving, as he looked incredibly drunk and struggled to get the words to his own songs out at times. Lemmy is right in that we shouldn’t worry about death, because it’s coming whether we like it or not; however, that doesn’t take away from how much it stings when someone we love passes.
