The three greatest punk songs, according to Lemmy
In the mid-1970s, a rot was creeping in, and Lemmy felt like music was in need of a change. He’d been a roadie for Jimi Hendrix, but the late guitar god had departed, and as he scowled around the scene, he saw very few heroes to be seen. Motörhead were the inevitable rally cry. “Like the punks, we just swept all that tedious ’70s Rick Wakeman, artsy-fartsy, yellow bell-bottoms, caftans-and-sandals shit aside,” he opined.
In essence, although they might not have been quite so musically roughshod as some of their peers, there was something incendiary about Lemmy Kilimister and his gang. As the Motörhead leader continued to tell Spin, “If you hadn’t seen what we looked like, you would have thought we were a punk band.“ Their long hair and competence might have belied this fact, but the ferocity and spirit had a fierce kinship.
It was both this bold attitude and a sense of freshness that he loved about the movement, reflecting, “I never liked The Clash. They sounded like old music, dressed up as punk. The Ramones were geniuses, though. Joey especially had a nose for rock ’n’ roll.“ They were new, brash and full of riffs. As John Cooper Clarke would remark regarding the New York pioneers, ”They understood that it was better to have clever lyrics about moronic subjects than the other way round.”
That sense of wry power and electric energy is palpable on the anthem ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’, one of the three punk tracks that Lemmy ranked among the greatest of all time. According to the Motörhead man, the song exemplified how Joey “knew the structure of a good rock song“. But at the same time, the stark sense of joviality, irony and juvenalia was something utterly innovative.
The same can be said for another punk track that Lemmy eulogises as a masterstroke: ‘Anarchy in the UK’ by the Sex Pistols. The vehement attitude of the legendary track was always going to be one that Lemmy would take note of, but it was especially resonant given his own personal history with the band. “Sid Vicious lived in my flat for a couple of months, and I tried to teach him bass, but he was hopeless,” he recalled in an interview with Louder Than War.
Aside from stirring up thoughts of tortured neighbours and the state of their asylum-like flat, the quote serves as an interesting insight into the history of punk. “One day, he came rushing into the flat all excited, saying, ‘Lemmy, I got the job with the Sex Pistols,’ and I said, ‘Great, as part of the road crew,’ and I laughed ‘You can’t even play the bass, you’re hopeless’,” but that barely mattered, punk was about having something to say rather than the means to say it, and they’d soon make that clear on stage.
At their first riotous gig, a Frenchman in attendance reportedly heckled Steve Jones by yelling: “You can’t play!” to which Steve Jones replied: “SO WHAT!”. The rest, as they say, is ancient history. And the past was null and void; at least, that’s what John Lydon will tell you. But Lemmy wouldn’t deny him that liberty either. “It was what rock ‘n’ roll needed at that point in time,“ he said.
The last track that completes the triumvirate of necessary anthems in Lemmy’s favoured trio is ‘Neat Neat Neat’ by The Damned. As Lemmy told Planet Rock when selecting these sacred tracks, “I did the first show with them when they reformed. I love The Damned; they were the real embodiment of punk, as far as I am concerned. Look at them, they’re four completely different people, they have nothing in common at all. They get on stage, and it’s like nuts.”
As he later told Paul Du Noyer, ”I always thought we had a lot more in common with The Damned than we did with Judas Priest. I used to love The Damned. The Captain!” That commonality is exemplified by the pure power of personality that both bands embodied. Like punk itself, the emphasis was on blistering bliss, sweet ignorance, and the stern knowledge that blistering bliss certainly didn’t have to the sweetly ignorant either.
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