You Don't Have to Love Lemmy's Voice to Love Motorhead

Ian Fraser Kilmister had one of the most distinctive voices in rock history. Whether you find it compelling or abrasive depends entirely on your tolerance for a growl that sounds like gravel being fed into a cement mixer at high speed. A significant portion of the world finds it compelling. Another significant portion finds it actively unpleasant. Both groups can agree on one thing: the music underneath it is extraordinary.

Motorhead is not about Lemmy's voice. Motorhead is about the riff. The tempo. The three-piece power trio locked into something so loud and so fast that the genre labels fell off. They were too punk for metal and too metal for punk and too rock and roll for either, and Lemmy spent forty years refusing to resolve the argument.

How Lemmy Got There

Ian Kilmister was born in Staffordshire, England in 1945. He was a roadie for Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s — Hendrix gave him a Hagstrom 8-string bass that Lemmy kept for the rest of his life. He joined the space rock band Hawkwind in 1971 as a bassist, playing with a pick and an aggressive, midrange-heavy approach that treated the bass more like a rhythm guitar than a conventional low-end instrument. He was fired from Hawkwind in 1975 — arrested at the Canadian border for drug possession, and dismissed while still in custody — and immediately started Motorhead.

The name came from the last song he had written for Hawkwind. "Motorhead" was slang for a speed freak. He intended the band to be the fastest, loudest rock and roll band in the world. He was not wrong about this.

The Classic Lineup

By 1976 the classic Motorhead lineup was assembled: Lemmy on bass and vocals, "Fast" Eddie Clarke on guitar, and Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor on drums. None of them were particularly well-known. Clarke had been playing in minor bands for a decade. Taylor had almost no professional experience. What they had together was chemistry and an understanding that the goal was not subtlety.

Clarke is the underrated element of the classic Motorhead story. His guitar work on the early records — Overkill, Bomber, Ace of Spades — is genuinely brilliant: fast, economical riffs with an instinct for groove that kept the songs from becoming pure aggression. His solo on "Ace of Spades" is compact and perfectly placed. His rhythm playing on "Overkill" is as good as anything in hard rock from that period. He is not celebrated the way he should be because Lemmy's personality consumed all available oxygen in any room the band occupied.

Taylor's drumming was the engine. He played double kick before double kick was a metal convention, and his work on "Overkill" — the song, not just the album — is a demonstration of how to make a drum kit sound like a machine that is approaching structural failure without actually falling apart. He and Clarke gave Lemmy a platform that elevated what he was doing on bass from interesting to physically threatening.

Murder One and the Rickenbacker

Lemmy's gear is inseparable from the Motorhead sound. He played Rickenbacker basses — primarily the 4001 and later the 4003 and the custom 4004LK — chosen for their naturally aggressive midrange character. He modified them constantly, swapping pickups, changing hardware, eventually settling on Rickenbacker's own HB1 humbucker after years of experimentation with Gibson Thunderbird and DiMarzio pickups.

His amplifier was a 1976 Marshall Super Bass 100-watt head that he named "Murder One." He used the same unit for thirty years — from the late 1970s until Marshall built him a signature version in 2007 modeled after it. His EQ settings were the opposite of conventional bass wisdom: bass rolled all the way down, treble rolled all the way down, midrange cranked to ten. The result was a distorted, cutting mid-heavy roar that sat on top of the mix rather than underneath it — more like a second guitar than a conventional bass, which is why Motorhead as a three-piece sounded as big as most bands with twice as many members.

He played with a pick, used heavy gauge strings, and strummed chords rather than playing individual notes. Everything about his technique was designed for maximum attack and minimum subtlety. It worked completely.

Ace of Spades

The 1980 album is the one that matters most, and the title track is two minutes and forty-eight seconds of everything Motorhead had spent five years building toward. The opening riff is one of the most recognizable in rock — not because it is complicated, but because it is perfectly right. The tempo is exactly as fast as it needs to be. The production by Vic Maile is raw without being muddy, loud without being distorted beyond recognition.

The song is about gambling and dying, written with the kind of philosophical brevity that Lemmy brought to most of his lyrics. He did not overthink it. The words serve the riff and the tempo, and the riff and the tempo serve the listener's adrenal gland. It reached number fifteen in the UK. The NWOBHM was in full swing and Motorhead were its loudest and fastest practitioners.

The rest of the album holds up as well as the single. "The Hammer" is proto-thrash before thrash existed as a named genre. "We Are the Road Crew" is a love letter to touring life that doubles as one of the great rock grooves. "Shoot You in the Back" and "Fast and Loose" demonstrate that Clarke's range was wider than the title track alone suggested.

What They Built

Motorhead did not invent heavy metal or punk. What they did was prove that the two were not mutually exclusive — that the aggression and speed of punk and the riff-heaviness of metal could coexist in the same three minutes without one canceling the other out. The thrash and speed metal bands of the 1980s — Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax — absorbed this lesson completely. Metallica covered Motorhead. Slayer's early tempo and attack is unthinkable without Motorhead's example. The entire lineage of fast, riff-driven metal runs through Lemmy's Marshall stack.

Lemmy died on December 28, 2015, four days after his 70th birthday. Clarke had died in 2018. Taylor had died three weeks before Lemmy, in November 2015. The classic lineup is gone.

What remains is the records, the riff, and the instruction Lemmy delivered from stages for forty years: we are Motorhead, and we play rock and roll.

He was not lying. The voice is optional. The rest of it is essential.

Explore Motorhead, the Rickenbacker 4001, the Marshall Super Bass, and hard rock on Sonic City.