So the old joke can be finally laid to rest: “When the nuclear holocaust comes, all that will be left will be cockroaches and Lemmy”.
The cockroaches will always be with us, but Lemmy is no more. He is dead just four days after reaching his 70th birthday.
Both facts are hard to believe. Lemmy always played up to his hard-living image, but he put his relative longevity down to a life-long aversion to heroin. A girlfriend, Susan Bennett died from it. It was a drug he despised so much that he even gave testimony to the Welsh Assembly about it 10 years ago.
Lemmy’s career was a triumph of both style and substance. He was a complete original with his mutton chops, those warts and all, Rickenbacker bass and penchant for Nazi memorabilia (he was attracted to the image not the ideology). The Motörhead logo, the snaggletooth, is one of the most identifiable in hard rock. One suspects like The Ramones, their punk equivalent, Motörhead sold more t-shirts than records in recent years.
He lived the rock and roll lifestyle with all its attendant pleasures and dangers. as the valedictory Thunder and Lightning on the last album Bad Magic, released earlier this year, can testify.
“All of your dreams can really come true
All of your nightmares are waiting there too
I always wanted the dangerous life
I always wanted the outlaw delight”
I interviewed him in Dublin six years ago. He was in his dressing room at the Ambassador Theatre on one of those interminable tours that Motörhead did at the time.
“This is where I live, see, in this dressingroom and on the bus,” he told me. “I’ve just been home for a month. It nearly drove me out of my fucking mind because when you get off the tour you say: ‘I need a rest. I’ll put my feet up’. Three days later you’re crawling up the walls.”
For many he became the personification of rock and roll, but he backed it up with a huge work ethic and a suite of albums that have endured - Overkill, Ace of Spades, Bomber, 1916 and, for me, the band's masterpiece Aftershock only released in 2013 among them. Aftershock, more than any album, demonstrated there was more to Motörhead than the foot to the floor.
Even when Lemmy's lifestyle caught up with him in recent years, Motörhead still found the time and energy to release a last album, Bad Magic, a decent effort given his health problems at the time. In total Motörhead released 23 albums in 40 years.
Lemmy was no rock and roll dilettante. On one of his recent appearances at the Olympia in Dublin, he was clearly under-the-weather and could barely raise a croak, but carried on anyway.
His long-time friend Dave Grohl testified to the authenticity of Lemmy in the documentary Lemmy: the Movie released in 2010.
"Fuck Keith Richards, fuck all those dudes who survived the sixties. Flying around in private jets, living up their gunslinger reputation as they fuck supermodels in the most expensive hotel in Paris. It's like: you know what Lemmy is doing? Lemmy is probably drinking Jack 'n' Cokes and writing another record."
Lemmy's life spans the whole history of rock and roll. He was born on December 24th, 1945 in Stoke-on-Trent. His father was a British Army chaplain, ostensibly a pillar of society, but he left Lemmy, born as Ian Kilmister, and his mother when Lemmy was just two. He never forgave his father describing him as a "nasty little weasel".
Lemmy would often recall a time before rock and roll, before The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and youth culture as we understand it today.
He saw The Beatles in the Cavern Club and one of his first jobs in music was to be a roadie for Jimi Hendrix.
Lemmy joined Hawkwind in the late 1960s. Their meandering, psychedelic vibe was the opposite of what Motörhead would become.
He was kicked out of Hawkwind for committing the cardinal sin of drug abusers - he got caught.
In 1975 he founded Motörhead. It is hard now to remember how original Motörhead were at a time when punk and heavy metal were both in their infancy. Lemmy wanted to play fast and hard, his inspiration was Little Richard and not any of the nascent metal outfits at the time. He never liked the label heavy metal and always regarded Motörhead as a rock and roll band.
Lemmy, with his talent for the pithy one-liner, coined the memorable phrase about Motörhead. They would play so loud that “if we moved in next door, your lawn would die”.
The original and best line up of Motörhead consisted of Lemmy, 'Fast' Eddie Clarke on guitar and Phil 'Animal' Taylor on drums. They tore it up. Metal fans loved them and they became the only 'metal' band punks would listen to.
They inspired a generation of speed and thrash metallers. Without Motörhead, there would have been no Metallica and a dozen other bands of lesser substance.
He was a decent bloke at the back of it all with a talent for enduring friendships which included the likes of Dave Grohl and Slash. When asked in Lemmy: The Movie what was his greatest achievement, he pointed to his son Paul.
You couldn‘t make Lemmy up. He was one of the last links to the origins of rock and roll. In a world where music seems to be getting progressively more ineffectual and controlled, Lemmy was a throwback. Truly, we will never see his likes again.
