Motörhead

“Once we'd cracked the formula of how to work together on Overkill," said Eddie Clarke, that's when we really started to take off.” And it was all thanks to Phil Taylor's new drum kit.

- Mick Wall

By November 1978, when they headlined their first show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, the venue that was to become such part of their mythology, Motörhead were still considered little more than a curio. A self-titled debut album, recorded in just three days in April, had been released in the summer of 1977, but it was a mongrel; Hawkwind-meets-Pink Fairies in a hasty redo of an earlier rustbucket (later released as On Parole). Only the title track – street slang for ‘speed freak’, itself a redo of an old Hawkwind B-side – made an impression when it was released as a single: NME advised to check for structural damage in your home after playing it, while Sounds declared Lemmy to be “the Lee Marvin of megadeath rock”. Only after a frankly half-arsed version of Louie Louie got confused for new wave and landed the band on Top Of The Pops, in October ’78, did it suddenly feel like maybe Motörhead had something. So began a four-year period in which virtually everything Lemmy and Motörhead touched turned to gold – or at the very least, silver.

“Lemmy was still finding his feet as a lyricist,” guitarist ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke told me. “My job was giving Lemmy something to sing over.” The trick was: “You’re bombing along having a fucking ball, then you put a couple of little changes in and the next thing you’ve got a song.”

Drummer Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor was always credited as an equal co-writer because, said Eddie, “We knew if we did make it we didn’t want Lemmy and I coming to work in Rolls-Royces and Phil on a pushbike.”