The classic rock band Lemmy referred to as “mummy’s boys”
Motörhead frontman Lemmy seemed so hard he even looked like he was made of stone. There are rumours that he stuck the spike on the top of the Shard and snapped the limbs off of a Michelangelo sculpture because he didn’t like how it was looking at him when he brought heavy metal to Rome. The fired-up musician even brought this attitude of true grit to his work.
However, when it came to one classic rock band, Lemmy seemed to think that their style was manufactured. Keith Richards might have said that David Bowie’s act was “all fucking posing”, but that much was obvious; he had a lightning bolt on the side of his head and was pretending to be a space messiah, nobody was hiding behind any posturing.
However, Lemmy thinks that The Rolling Stones were guilty of a spot of it themselves, the type that bellies their rock ‘n’ roll image and implies a lack of sincerity. It’s well-regarded that Mick Jagger went to The London School of Economics, but for the most part, aside from his slightly public Tory-leaning politics, the band have managed to swerve questions regarding their grit and rouse a stance as rebellious radicals in the annuls of the arts.
Lemmy wasn’t having it. “The Rolling Stones were the mummy’s boys,” the Motörhead rocker reckons, ridiculing their image in his memoir, White Line Fever. “They were all college students from the outskirts of London,” he writes. “They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability.”
He clearly felt that this artifice also symbolised the lack of true roots in their actual music. His cutting remarks continue: “I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles – not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always shit on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.”
He even says he gave them a chance, too. “I went to go see the Rolling Stones in the park and they were awful, completely out of tune. Jagger wore a frock,” he recalled of their famed London Hyde Park show in 1968. But aside from the odd anthem he loved, like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, he thought they were closer to a Cliff Richard pool party than a group of “hard men“. He even claimed that his covers of the band “beat them. I thought we beat it to death. I mean, I like the Stones’ version, but I like ours better.”
Interestingly though, while Lemmy might refer to them as ”mummy’s boys” when he rekindled his relationship with his own mother, she could often be found backstage at his shows, a prim fan who he diligently kept safe from any antics, even when he was the perpetrator of them. Yes, the late rocker was an eternal enigma, once strangely gifting a fan with a Nazi artefact to cash in for $2,500 in the controversial act of charity ever committed, but for all the dichotomies he displayed, he was undoubtedly hard.
