“I never liked The Clash”: The five bands Lemmy hated the most
Perched at the bar of his favourite Sunset Strip watering holes, Lemmy told many a whiskey-soaked anecdote, harking back to the feverish days of rock excess, like when he was thrown out of Hawkwind for taking the wrong drugs, how he amassed Nazi memorabilia for shits and giggles, and his drunken days as Jimi Hendrix’s roadie.
Pricking up the ears of the bar staff and patrons alike, these tales were the backdrop of his larger-than-life character as he made his way through his daily bottle of Jack Daniels. Yet, it wasn’t just in the comfort of his favourite haunts that the Motörhead leader would regale listeners with his accounts; he did so in the media, too.
Throughout his career, Lemmy made a name for himself as one of music’s most distinctive masses of opinions. A no-nonsense Stoke native, the culturally northern essence of his hometown and the era he grew up in would feed into his approach to getting his voice heard. He even bashed the Rolling Stones as sordid “mummy’s boys”, proving that nobody was too big to escape his snarling scope.
He was not afraid to question those he felt needed bringing down a peg or two, a natural part of his character that would play a key role in his life’s incredible journey. Likewise, he would use his platform to highlight the stupidity of racism and raise support for smaller venues.
A roadie for Jimi Hendrix, a vital part of Hawkind’s rise before being kicked out for his hellraising, and a pioneer of speed metal, everything that Lemmy accomplished was achieved with a concrete sense of the world around him. He knew what he liked and certainly knew what he didn’t, and this saw him continue to push forward with his art and criticise the acts he thought were fakers or fads and who brought nothing to the cultural conversation.
As he boldly put it, “Apparently, people don’t like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, ‘Oh! Wait a minute – I was wrong.’ I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you.” But maybe you’ll find yourself thinking it about his stern bashing of the bands below.
This discerning, almost suspicious nature would see Lemmy question many prominent acts. Of course, the true extent of his beliefs are only known to those closest to him and the listeners who just so happened to be in the same Hollywood bars at the same time as him, but in the media, he would give an intense flavour of how he regarded music that wasn’t his own.
Find the five bands that Lemmy hated below.
Five bands that Lemmy hated:
The Rolling Stones
As a rock ‘n’ roll lover who grew up in the 1960s, there’s no real surprise that Lemmy was a fan of The Beatles, regardless of his connection to heaviness and the Liverpudlian group’s famously pop-oriented sounds. However, he knew that the ‘Fab Four’ were masterful songwriters in their own league. They also resonated with him due to their working-class nature, which was informed by growing up in the tough dock city on the banks of the cold Mersey.
However, he had a much different opinion of their southern equivalent, The Rolling Stones. According to him, the ‘Gimme Shelter’ band were nothing more than middle-class “mummy’s boys” who were terrible on stage.
In White Line Fever, he said: “Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool (…) a hard, sea-farin’ town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. (…) The Rolling Stones were the mummy’s boys—they were all college students from the outskirts of London. (…) The Stones made great records, but they were always shit on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.”
Radiohead
As a rock ‘n’ roll purist, Lemmy took issue with many of the younger groups that would rise to the top of the pyramid long after he had set up camp there. One of these groups was Oxford’s Radiohead, a band celebrated for their deeply cerebral post-modern sound, who soundtracked the end of the analogue age with albums such as OK Computer and Kid A.
When speaking to Stay Thirsty Media, Lemmy was asked whether he felt that rock ‘n’ roll was starting to blossom once more after a period of being stuck in the cultural mire. He asserted that the sound always comes back because people want to hear what he described as “raucous music”. However, all the “shit” that the magazines pushed was not exciting, or even rock ‘n’ roll, he said, using Radiohead and Coldplay as prime examples. He maintained that as a lifelong rock fan, he knew the good stuff when he heard it, and both groups were not it.
Lemmy asserted: “And all the shit that these magazines like is not exciting. Like, Jesus, Radiohead, you know. Fuck me, you know. Coldplay. Jesus. These are not rock bands. These are sub-emo, you know.” That comparison alone is likely enough to make Thom Yorke wince.
While he did comment that both bands had released some decent material, it still wasn’t rock as he knew it: “I mean, they did some good stuff. Fair enough. But it’s not rock ‘n’ roll. I know fucking rock ‘n’ roll when I hear it. I’ve been listening to it since I was 12, you know? So fuck off!”
Limp Bizkit
When the fleeting zeitgeist of nu-metal emerged in the late 1990s, Lemmy was quick to decry what he saw as terrible music and the gimmicks. Speaking to Ear Candy in 2000, Lemmy slammed nu-metal, and while he lambasted Slipknot and Tool, he criticised Limp Bizkit the most.
“People like Limp Bizkit, I don’t understand it,” he said. “I don’t understand their success.” He wasn’t phased by people enjoying it, but seemed genuinely confused as to why their music appealed. “What the fuck is this, it’s just rubbish!” he baulked. “You’re just garage attendants with fucking gas masks on. And I mean, I don’t mind kids having their own thing, I’m all for it. When you’re 17, you want a 17-year-old band to play for you, you don’t want these old fuckers like me.”
“Everything there is fad-driven,” he told Hot Press about the American wave of bands in another interview as the MTV era continued to whip-up a commercial-first age of rock ‘n’ roll. “Limp fucking Bizkit and Tool and all that. It’s just fucking hopeless. If that’s the future of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s suicide for me.”
Elsewhere, when talking to Aural Innovations in 2001 about Metallica, he directly sent for controversial Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst by questioning his mental capacity. He said: “I like Metallica. I think they are an excellent band. I think that people overlook them now. I think they have become too successful for their own good. But they are right about that Napster bullshit. That fucking idiot from Limp Bizkit. Yeah… please come steal my money.”
The Who
Lemmy wasn’t afraid to slam his peers from the classic rock period. Something of a giant killer, The Rolling Stones weren’t the only world-famous and widely influential group from the 1960s in his crosshairs. Ironically, one of his most concise takedowns was of The Who, the group that vocalised his era’s rebellion with ‘My Generation’.
Famously, The Who were known for their raucous music and equally as vibrant shows in their heyday. However, as time and the trappings of fame wore on, the quality of their output would be severely diminished, with the final nail in the coffin for many fans being the tragic death of drumming wizard Keith Moon in 1978.
The group would push through the mire with releases in the 1980s and beyond, but Lemmy, like many of those who had been there from the start, believed they should have given up years ago. This point was bolstered by the death of their bassist, John Entwistle, in 2002, a tragedy they are still trudging on from today. Lemmy simply said: “The Who are f*cked. I don’t know why they still bother without John and Keith, you know? They should have broken up in 1978.” But they didn’t follow Led Zeppelin’s lead on this front, and Lemmy always argued that they were never the same band again.
The Clash
Lemmy enjoyed punk, with the movement spiritually similar to Motörhead. Whether it be the leather, anger, or pure rock ‘n’ roll that fuelled the sonic character, the parallels were there, and naturally, the ‘Ace of Spades’ songwriter liked a lot of music of this period. He made it clear that his favourites were American pioneers, Ramones. However, he said numerous times that he didn’t think much of their British counterparts, The Clash.
“I never liked The Clash,” he told Spin in 2009. “They sounded like old music, dressed up as punk. The Ramones were geniuses, though. Joey especially had a nose for rock’ n’ roll, and we were friends, although we weren’t close when he died. I hate to see people on the way out; I prefer to remember him as he was.”
Only a couple of years later, Lemmy affirmed his point about The Clash by drawing a distinction between them and Ramones in Louder Than War. “I never had time for the Clash and their pretend politics, but the Damned and the Ramones were great rock ‘n’ roll bands,” he said. Although he did have time for punk in general, he once even welcomed Sid Vicious as a lodger and taught him how to play bass.
