The best female-led rock song Lemmy ever heard: “Fuck me”
Lemmy was, of course, a rock and roll icon – but perhaps he wasn’t exactly the most politically correct person you could ever come across in your life.
In a feisty competition of who wears the crown of embodying the mantra of sex and drugs and rock and roll the most brazenly, he could certainly have a strong claim to the throne in the standards by which he lived his life – doing whatever he wanted, when he wanted it, and not giving one single fuck what anyone else may have thought about it. Of course, that’s certainly a mantra to live by, but it equally landed him in a bit of hot water from time to time.
Famed for sleeping with 2,000 different women – or at least somewhere around that number, he was never entirely sure – it was clear that the Motorhead frontman had a skewed view of women which didn’t exactly line up with the standards of modern feminism that many might have now come to expect. Musically, the rock leagues have stereotypically been very much a man’s game – so it really took a bombshell of female talent to turn Lemmy’s head away from the gutter.
“The first time The Runaways played in Britain, Joan Jett wore my bullet belt onstage. The Runaways were really the first all-girl band to really strut their stuff and say, ‘Fuck you’,” he proclaimed, in a statement enough to prove just how much he really did admire their sonic abilities. In many ways, a band like The Runaways were the exact antithesis to everything that a man like Lemmy stood for, so the fact that he took their music as gospel was a true testament to their might.
“‘Cherry Bomb’ was the best song for a girl band to sing,” he enthused. “It was just outrageous at the time. There were American families sitting on the sofa watching television going, ‘Fuck me’. It was great fun.” Once and for all, The Runaways proved that women were not just simply an accessory to the lore of rock music, but a force to be reckoned with in their own right. Joan Jett, in particular, was an alpha leader of that pack – and with a legacy in rock and roll as seismic as Lemmy’s, she too could compete for the crown with the rest of the boys.
Being exuberant, brazen, and outrageous is a real staple characteristic you need to possess in order to make waves in the industry, even if it doesn’t necessarily come naturally to one’s true self. In this sense, Lemmy and Jett had more in common than you might have first been led to believe – because although they were both titans of the scene, they had to fake it until they made it, in order to truly reap the rewards of the roaring personae they perpetuated.
As such, Lemmy wasn’t just all talk when it came to his view of women. Sure, he could be smutty and degrading and hardly what you would consider a shining example of gender equality, but deep down, he knew talent when he saw it, and The Runaways were no different, regardless of which gender their members were. They were the best of the best, and that was the only thing that mattered.
