Brandit Men's Motörhead Urban Legend Shorts Cargo

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This was the very next day. Phil Alexander was at the gig and remembers ‘Robbo came on wearing shorts, seemingly playing a different song from the rest of the band as the opener. It was terrible’.

When my mum and my stepfather married we moved to his house in Benllech, a seaside resort on Anglesey. It was about this time that I began to be known as Lemmy. It was a Welsh thing I believe… I’ve been known as Lemmy since I was around ten.’ The gig was a massive success, the crowning point of the ‘classic line up’s’ (Lemmy on bass and vocals, ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke on guitar, Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor on drums) imperial period. Motörhead’s first UK gig since Clarke’s departure was to be on July 24th 1982 at The Racecourse, a venue which showed the kind of numbers that were expected. It didn’t happen. As the Wrexham Evening Leader reported, ‘the large open spaces on The Racecourse tell the story of a festival that turned out to be a flop… the expected 10,000 crowd never materialised and the festival was attended only by an estimated two thousand people’. At the start of the decade Lemmy was to return to Stoke, then north Wales in successive years, to headline football stadiums with his band. The two gigs would go very differently.

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Technically he was a better guitarist than Eddie but ultimately he wasn’t right for Motörhead’ Lemmy admitted. As Phil Alexander says ‘the whole band felt wrong… their popularity waned massively at that point because the Iron Fist tour hadn’t gone too well and the arrival of Robbo. He just didn’t fit the band and fans felt it immediately. The reports from the shows in the US was that the band was a mess with him on board’. Twisted Sister had it’s first ever performance in England (sic)’ recalled the band’s frontman Dee Snider in 2015. ‘No record out, nobody had ever seen the band there…was opening for Motörhead at a football stadium…huge show.. Motörhead were huge… and we had to go on in the daylight…never done that before…we’d heard that bands that wore make up had been unceremoniously bottled off stage. We were pretty terrified….and Lemmy, he knew the smell of human excrement! He came in and said ‘I wanna introduce you guys’, which I thought was the most gracious thing for a headliner to do’.

All over the world, Motörhead would play venues that suited the band’s sound – and persona – much more than football stadia, cementing their status as the most beloved of cult heroes. As Lemmy wrote in White Line Fever, ‘not being a huge success doesn’t bother me – after all, I have been there and done that.’ With forty years under his belt as lead singer and bassist of Motörhead, Lemmy made a name for himself and was in very high demand for collaborations. Lemmy worked with many artists, including Doro, The Ramones, Slash and Airbourne, although Probot was one of the most well-known albums Lemmy was involved in. It was a heavy metal side project put together by Foo Fighters' lead singer Dave Grohl.

The following year No Sleep ’til Hammersmith became the first live album ever to go straight into the UK album chart at number 1, although the band were in the USA at the time, supporting Ozzy Osbourne. So perhaps, despite the low crowd, perhaps the Racecourse gig of 1982 was ultimately beneficial for Motörhead going forward. This was a crushing disappointment to the band’s fans. James Hetfield certainly wasn’t the only one to feel so strongly about the ‘Three Amigos’. As future Kerrang! and Mojo editor Phil Alexander says, ‘we loved Eddie and the classic line-up and seeing it fall apart felt sad’.