Lemmy’s dark hobby: why did he collect Nazi memorabilia?
Along with providing the new wave of British heavy metal with some of the movement’s most enduring hard rock cuts, Motörhead frontman Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister was known for his exhaustive Nazi memorabilia. In addition to the Iron Cross medal affixed to his Rickenbacker 4000 bass and pseudo-SS sartorial flair, Lemmy’s West Hollywood apartment was packed with Swastika flags, Reichsadler eagle monuments, ceremonial Wehrmacht daggers and countless more trinkets and relics of The Third Reich, totalling hundreds, nearly dominating an entire room.
A fascination with Nazism, whether indulging in crass aesthetics or immersing in its ideology with darker intrigue, has dogged popular music over the years. Bryan Ferry landed in hot water and lost his modelling contract with Marks & Spencer after praising Leni Riefenshal’s propaganda features and Alber Speer’s architectural works in the German Welt am Sonntag, and David Bowie infamously wallowed in his The Thin White Duke character so deeply he extolled Adolf Hitler as “one of the first rock stars”.
Other examples are just queasy bouts of idiocy, from The Sweet bassist Steve Priest’s SS get-up while performing 1973’s ‘Block Buster! on Top of the Pops, to Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious’ desire to piss off mum and dad with swastika armbands.
While eliciting slaps on the wrist or embarrassed apologies at best, pop’s flirtation with history’s most evil regime seemingly can get away with a lot, so long as there’s a reliable trust that the artist doesn’t harbour sincerely fascistic views underneath the provocateur silliness. You can be Brian Jones donned in full Wehrmacht regalia, treading on a toy doll and call it “satire”, but Kanye West celebrating Hitler rightfully will kill your career irrevocably.
“It’s not my fault the bad guys had the best shit,” Lemmy protested to Independent in 2010, noting, “But by collecting Nazi memorabilia, it doesn’t mean I’m a fascist, or a skinhead. I’m not. I just liked the clobber. And let me tell you, the kind of people who do collect this stuff, they aren’t yobbos either. They are people with masters [degrees], they are doctors, professors. I’ve always liked a good uniform, and throughout history, it’s always been the bad guy who dressed the best: Napoleon, the Confederates, the Nazis. If we had a good uniform, I’d collect ours as well, but what does the British Army have? Khaki. Makes them look like a fucking swamp frog…”
There’s never been any real indication that Lemmy harboured private sympathies with Nazism. The Motörhead captain had a long history of rejecting bigotry and racism across numerous interviews in his life, as well as penning numerous songs about resisting authority and the perils of ideological extremities, albeit lyrically lacking political rigour.
Lemmy’s mistake, as was many of his generation, was thinking that Nazi-style fascism had been eternally quashed and its insignias entertained free of their hideous legacies and philosophies as mere curiosities or fodder to fuel boorish antagonism. In an age where authoritarian sentiment is excreted by prominent faces of the political class, fascist symbols, be it the Nazi Swastika or Francoist Yoke and Arrows, feel ever more prescient after years of serving as ironic playthings for the misguided and frankly stupid.
Lemmy felt the full arm of the German law. Contravening articles 86 and 86a of the country’s penal code, a photo taken to promote Motörhead’s slot at 2008’s Wacken Rocks Seaside show in Aurich was nearly pulled by the authorities due to his donning a Waffen-SS cap.
