From wikipedia.org / © Mark Marek
Following the recent death of singer and guitarist Chris Rea, whose 1986 song Driving Home for Christmas has become something of a festive-season classic, a mate of mine observed that this was yet another example of a ‘musician who’s associated with a perennial Christmas song’ expiring at Christmastime.
To support his thesis, he mentioned George Michael (responsible for 1984’s Last Christmas and died on Christmas Day 2015) and Shane MacGowan (co-singer and co-writer of 1987’s Fairy Tale of New York and died on November 30th, 2023 – okay, not quite in the festive season but I’m sure the Christmas lights were already up in Dublin at the time). Referencing the singers of Merry Christmas Everybody (1973) and I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day (1973) and the perpetrator of Mistletoe and Wine (1988) and Saviour’s Day (1990), my mate concluded, “…Noddy, Roy and Cliff better take extra care in Decembers to come.”
Well, today is the festive-season day of December 28th, 2025. And it marks the tenth anniversary of the death of a titan of popular music: Lemmy, front-man with one of heavy metal’s most brilliant bands, Motörhead, and a general all-round role model for how to live your life (i.e. loudly, always disreputably and occasionally downright badly).
I was going to say that Lemmy’s passing at Christmastime disproves my mate’s theory that only the singers of Christmas songs die during this period. But I’ve just checked and discovered that, though Motörhead never recorded a Christmas song, in 2008 Lemmy did get together with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl and made a cover version of Chuck Berry’s Run, Rudolph, Run (1958) for the same year’s album We Wish You a Metal Christmas and a Headbanging New Year. (Google AI informs me the song’s vibe was ‘heavy, aggressive and sinister’.) So maybe there’s something in it after all.
Anyway, Lemmy. What an amazing career he had. Legend has it that he managed the remarkable feat of being thrown out of Hawkwind for taking too many drugs – though more likely he was thrown out for taking the wrong sort of drugs, i.e., amphetamines, which the other, hallucinogenic-loving band-members looked down on. He tried to teach Sid Vicious how to play bass (with a predictable lack of success). He composed the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song ever, Ace of Spades (1980). He also gave rise to the greatest joke ever – “If Lemmy had a fight with God, who would win?” “It’s a trick question: Lemmy is God.” – which was funny because it was true.
Here, by way of a tribute to the great man, is a review of a Motörhead concert that I wrote back in 2008 for the University of East Anglia’s student newspaper, Concrete. It’s an excitable and breathless piece of writing but, well, I had just been at a Motörhead concert. Reading it now, I have a few regrets. I should apologise to the late Ronnie James Dio – in the years since, I’ve come to realise I like ‘strutting spandex-clad idiots singing songs about elves and wizards’. Plus, Ronnie was no idiot.
And obviously, I regret the fact that the prediction made in the final sentence didn’t come true.
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MOTÖRHEAD
UEA, November 21st, 2008
If the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm ever creates a Nobel Prize for Heavy Metal, surely its first recipient will be Lemmy, singer, bassist and general driving force of Motörhead.
Founded in the 1970s, a decade when heavy metal consisted of strutting spandex-clad idiots singing songs about elves and wizards (e.g. Rainbow) or about their abilities in making vigorous love to the ladies (e.g. Whitesnake), Motörhead were a revelation.
Lemmy’s hoarse roar was stuck onto a racket of guitars played at the loudest possible volume and at the fastest possible speed, a sound that helped to spawn the speed and thrash metal sub-genres and supplied Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and co. with at least 666 tons of inspiration.
Lemmy was also an early and crucial champion of Girlschool, the groundbreaking all-female metal band who helped the music to shed some of its reputation for sexism. And in the segregated pre-grunge era, when heavy metal and punk fans weren’t supposed to associate with each another, Motörhead was the one metal band it was okay for punks to like. Lemmy and the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious were good mates and he even tried to teach Sid how to play bass guitar – unsuccessfully, it must be said.
Taking the stage tonight after a short-but-well-received set from Toronto band Danko Jones and a ludicrous-but-loveable one from Saxon – ironically one of those hoary old-style metal bands that Motorhead helped to make obsolete – Lemmy, guitarist Phil Campbell and drummer Mikkey Dee went to work with their usual, blistering single-mindedness. Old favourites like Bomber (1979) and Killed by Dead (1984) got blasted out alongside items from their new album Motörizer – though unsurprisingly the new stuff didn’t sound entirely different from the old stuff.
Apart from a blues pastiche where Lemmy displayed some unexpected harmonica-playing skills, this was business-as-usual in the best sense of the phrase. Rounding off a perfect evening for the head-grinding crowd was an encore containing Ace of Spades, surely the most brain-batteringly brilliant song in heavy metal – and possibly in 7000 years of human civilisation as well.
The big heavy-metal news this week was that Guns n’ Roses had finally put out Chinese Democracy – an album so named because it’d taken so long to record that democracy could have feasibly come to China by the time of its release. From tonight’s showing, however, Motörhead will be going strong long after China has taken over Wall Street, bought up Coca Cola and put a man on the moon.
From blabbermouth.net / © Pedro Alonso
