Killed by Death: Lemmy remembered

 

 

 

When Motörhead's  Lemmy Kilmister died in December 2015 part of rock music died with him. Lemmy was the only really, true rock n roll star. The rest have only ever been pretending.  

 

Since I was about 14 I've been listening to Motörhead and Lemmy week in week out.  I was a typical scrawny kid with a cheap cassette recorder listening to badly recorded music on dodgy tapes but I've always loved rock music and it's Lemmy and Motörhead who have, rather discordantly and bombastically, been the sound track to so much of my life. Like so many fans of the band, it a life long thing, it's part of you. You don't grow out of it or move on to quieter more sensible or conventional music. As your tastes change, so they stay the same....

 

When you went to a Motörhead concert it was like the annual gathering of a strange, dark tribe beneath a pyrotechnic sky of swirling lights and amidst a primordial storm of volume. It didn't matter who you were or where you came from, whether you were a hustler, or a brain surgeon, a biker, an anarchist or an auditor. You were part of the tribe.

 

Lemmy seemed indestructible and uncompromising in a horrible, vulgar world, impoverished with its vapid fashion and  cheap shallow instantly disposable music. He was a snarling voice of anger cursing an increasingly Orwellian world that would like to decide how each individual should think and act and speak. It's free speech for all as long as we as we all agree that none us disagree. He was no respecter of all those systems and beliefs that we fool ourselves into thinking give us purpose and order in our over managed, over cautious, over insured and under-lived lives. His voice was a gruff roar, with his bitter telling lyrics curled around snarling low slung riffs, monster-clanking bass runs and the thrashing beat of the world's most terrifying drummer.

 

Yet we knew this moment was coming. His frailty over the last 2 years of his life was a haunting but very real harbinger of what we knew was inevitable. He was fading away before our very eyes. This pale and drawn old man, standing on stage, in a way bidding his goodbyes with each passing show in the only way he knew how. Even from within the maelstrom of the music the final silence was not far away.

 

Motörhead have played their last show now and Lemmy is long gone. Yes, we will still play those songs but there will be no new music. This is not just a silence that is the absence of decibels. This is the sadness of memories that stretch over a life back to a 14 year old kid sitting with his best friend trying to decipher the lyrics to a hysterically bad Top Of The Pops recording of Ace of Spades.

 

Lemmy was once asked what the secret to a long life was. The typically pithy response was "not dying". Tragically, in 2015 he ignored himself for the last time. The world is a sadder, and slightly quiter place as a result.....

 

"You know I'm going to loose, and that gamblings for fools, 

But that's the way I like it baby,

I don't wanna live forever......"

 

 

Lemmy Kilmister 24 December 1945 to 28 December 2015.