White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Lemmy Kilmister

We really had no equipment, no one did in those days. I remember we played at Halifax town hall, supporting the Pretty Things, and we had one 30-watt amplifier. Can you imagine that? The two stacks I’ve got now are 100 watts each – back then, it was everyone, bass, two guitars and vocal, hooked into one 30-watter about the size of a practice amp.

Lemmy in Halifax

So we got there and sure enough, the first time the curtains opened across the stage, it was all, ‘AHHHH! REMMY!’ Blian got a bit upset by that. ‘Blian Lobertson’ – that’s rather unfortunate, isn’t it?

Ha Remmy

I was beginning to do quite nicely financially, after more than a quarter of a century in the music business. A good portion of this was thanks to the Ozzy Osbourne album, No More Tears. That record sold millions, and I wrote the lyrics to four songs on it (I’ve since written more, and a couple appear on Ozzmosis). That was one of the easiest gigs I ever had – Sharon rang me up and said, ‘I’ll give you X amount of money to write some songs for Ozzy,’ and I said, ‘All right – you got a pen?’ I wrote six or seven sets of words, and he ended up using four of them for the songs ‘Desire’, ‘I Don’t Want to Change the World’, ‘Hellraiser’ and ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’. I made more money out of writing those four songs for Ozzy than I made out of fifteen years of Motörhead – ludicrous, isn’t it!

Songwriting