Lemmy the legend

His natural habitat is the dressingroom and the tourbus. He drinks Jack Daniels "to sober up". Lemmy of Motörhead has lived, slept and breathed rock'n'roll for more than four decades but he's not retiring. RONAN McGREEVYmeets the self-described "63-year-old f**k-up"

THERE IS no more sickly sweet confection than Jack Daniels and Coke, a drink guaranteed to give you the hangover from hell while leaving you strung out on a sleepless caffeine-sugar high. It is best left well alone unless, of course, Lemmy from Motörhead is doing the offering and beckoning you, from behind a wreath of cigarette smoke, to a familiar-looking bottle.

“Have a drink,” he says. By a drink he meant have a Jack Daniels and Coke as there is nothing else on his dressingroom table save an ice bucket, two packets of full-strength Marlboro cigarettes and, rather incongruously, some strawberries and brown bread.

It would be impolite to refuse and, despite his bad-boy image, Lemmy is big on good manners. “It’s more important than anything. There’s enough assholes, right?” Right.

The word “legend” is overused, but, if a legend is a figure who is part-archetype and part-mythology, Lemmy is a legend in spades – if you’ll pardon the obvious analogy.

The hair and omnipresent mutton chops are suspiciously dark and his perfectly-capped teeth are probably the one concession to his home for the last two decades, Los Angeles. He looks great for a man of his vintage (he’s now 63) and for someone who has, by his own admission, taken every illicit substance known to man, with the exception of heroin. It is a drug he detests, having lost the love of his life to it she was just 19.

He’s two years short of retirement age, but looks no more than 50, though he drinks JDs and Coke “to sober up” and smokes like a coal-burning power station. As Ozzy Osbourne famously said, the only creatures that will survive a nuclear holocaust are cockroaches and Lemmy.

With the exception of a job putting washers on Hotpoint washing machines when he was 17, Lemmy’s whole life has been in rock’n’roll. He saw The Beatles playing the Cavern Club, roadied for Jimi Hendrix (a gentleman, a stud and the greatest guitar player ever, he says) and got thrown out of prog-rock ensemble Hawkwind after being busted by the Canadian police. “I was doing the wrong kind of drugs,” he recalls.

Motörhead have been going since 1975, though Lemmy is the only constant. It is difficult to convey how original their aural onslaught was in the days before punk and thrash metal, or how Lemmy reinvented the bass as a rhythm guitar. Nobody showed him how to do it.

He has never stopped since. Motorizer,their newest release, is studio album number 19 and his attitude to touring might best be conveyed in the words from We Are the Road Crew, the song he wrote as a tribute to his travelling entourage: "I just love the life I lead, another beer is what I need, another gig my ears bleed."

“This is where I live, see, in this dressingroom and on the bus,” he says looking around the rather shabby confines of the dressing room in the Ambassador Theatre before his last concert in Ireland.

“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.”

Motörhead reached the zenith of their fame in the early 1980s. A trio of great albums, Overkill, Bomberand Ace of Spades, was followed by their live album No Sleep 'til Hammersmith, their only number one to date. That hot streak, though, has been as much a help as a hindrance. Many of the band's most ardent fans date from that era, but it is surprising how many youngsters turn up to their gigs, unburdened by the received wisdom that Motörhead's prime was past before they were even born.

“When you’re 16 and it’s your favourite music, you have it forever. There’s nothing in your life that replaces that. You can’t, but we’ve got to keep playing it [the newer music] until they [the older fans] finally listen to it. The new album is going to help.

"The younger generation are different. They think our first album is Sacrifice[1995]. You know, I can see three generations out there any time we play. Where else could a 63-year-old fucked up c**t like me get an audience like that.

“I thought about settling down for 10 minutes once. What better life could you have going all over the world and making people smile. It’s a fucking good job.”

He loves the old stuff too, but wishes his fans would move on. On his left arm he's got a tattoo of the ace of spades. It's a reference to a great song, he concedes, but he says he probably wouldn't play it again if he didn't have to and he's dropped Bomberfrom the set much to the consternation of older fans. "I'm grateful for what it did for us, but it isn't all that we do. I wish people would realise that."

He still lives in the same two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles – by choice given his peripatetic lifestyle, and by necessity given his means. “It’s hardly a fucking mansion in Beverly Hills. I’m stuck in the place now. There’s so much stuff in there, I can’t bear to think of moving.”

A lifetime in the music business hasn’t made him rich, he says, and for that he blames the record companies. Motörhead have never been huge album sellers, and tours break even.

For all that, things are as good as they’ve ever been. The present Motörhead line-up of himself, Phil Campbell on guitar and Mickey Dee on drums have been together for 18 years, longer than any other line-up. Though most fans say the original which had “Fast” Eddie Clarke on guitar and Phil “Filthy Animal” Taylor on drums was the best, Lemmy begs to differ.

Motorizerhas sold more albums in the US than any of its predecessors, even Ace of Spades, helped by the World Wrestling Entertainment's choice of Rock Outas its theme tune.

He has also been the subject of a full-length documentary, called Lemmy. In it, a slew of big names including Slash of Guns N' Roses, Alice Cooper, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich his friends Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters and Mick Jones from The Clash pay homage to the enduring legend and man.

“I know a lot of rock’n’roll personalities, and the ones that I admire are the ones that are the real deal. People who live, sleep and breathe rock’n’roll, the lifestyle and the attitude,” Slash says in the trailer, which can be viewed on YouTube.

“There’s only a handful of guys who are still alive like that. Lemmy’s one of them.”

• Motörhead play The Olympia Theatre, Dublin on Sunday, November 8th. Tickets are priced from €49.20