What songs were recorded by both Hawkwind and Motörhead?
Despite joining the band late and being dismissed only a few short years later, Ian ‘Lemmy‘ Kilmister’s tenure in space rock band Hawkwind marks their classic era.
Forming an essential feature of the Space Ritual line-up, Lemmy’s aggressive bass attack and throat-dragged vocals kept Hawkwind’s cosmic acid explorations anchored to the streets, a crucial bridge between the hippies and punks.
Along with Stacia’s often naked, interpretive dance, Dik Mik’s electronic sirens, and the extra lyrical finesse from sci-fi writer Robert Calvert, Hawkwind cut an infinitely more arresting and electrifying mark on psychedelia far removed from the lofty excesses of the day’s prog monsters.
Lemmy would coast to the charts with Hawkwind’s most commercial hit almost by accident. Written by Calvert, 1972’s Pataphysics bike ride ‘Silver Machine’ was initially sung by its writer and recorded live at a Greasy Truckers benefit gig at The Roundhouse in London. Deeming his vocals too weak for a single, the band looked to their new bassist to take a stab at their transportive psych garage. “[Calvert’s] vocal was fucking hopeless, but he never realised it,” Lemmy confessed in 2004’s The Saga of Hawkwind. “That’s how mad he was. It sounded like Captain Kirk reading ‘Blowing in the Wind’. They tried everybody singing it except me. Then, as a last shot, Douglas [Smith, band manager] said, ‘Try Lemmy’. And I did it in one take or two”.
How Lemmy’s time in Hawkwind gave birth to Motörhead
‘Silver Machine’ would peak at number three in the UK and even grant them a performance on Top of the Pops. Rejecting the idea of miming in front of an audience more interested in David Cassidy than a rabble of acid-fried misfits, and certainly not having Pan’s People jive to the cut in their absence, a promo was provided of a July show at Dunstable Civic Hall with ‘Silver Machine’ overdubbed. Featured as frontman, Lemmy would endure as the face of the band beyond their dedicated fanbase.
Reaching their immortal peak with the Space Ritual live document, Lemmy would lend his bass on the studio albums around it, Doremi Fasol Latido, Hall of the Mountain Grill, and just about Warrior on the Edge of Time. Fired one day before the latter’s release in May 1975, an arrest at the Canadian border while on tour for suspected cocaine possession—in fact healthy amounts of amphetamine—resulted in Hawkwind firing Lemmy despite his lack of charge.
The differing taste for drugs had inspired Lemmy’s most fortuitous cut. In the aftermath of Hawkwind’s dismissal, Lemmy sought to indulge in his love of rock and roll and corral a new group to play a more blistering variant of raucous attack that nicely anticipated the emerging new wave of British heavy metal bubbling away alongside punk at the end of the decade.
After toying with the band name Bastard, Lemmy reached into the Hawkwind B-side ‘Motorhead’ from 1975’s ‘Kings of Speed’ single, written as an ode to his favourite recreational chemical over the band’s penchant for bucketloads of LSD. Adding an umlaut, Motörhead had their name.
After the ‘Leaving Here’ cover, they also had their first original single. Leading 1977’s eponymous debut, ‘Motörhead’ was plucked from his bag of Hawkwind compositions along with ‘The Watcher’ and ‘Lost Johnny’, the latter co-written by The Deviants’ Mick Farren. Lemmy’s boot from Hawkwind would prove to be the best thing that happened to him, Motörhead swiftly eclipsing his former “Star Trek on drugs” band both in fame and fortune but never harboured any bad blood, Lemmy still occasionally joining them on stage and memorably playing the 2000 Hawkestra event in Brixton Academy, reuniting the majority of the Space Ritual line-up one last time.
