No Sleep 'Till Whangaroi Mainstreet

Rip It Up, Issue 85, 1 August 1984, Page 10

No Sleep 'Till Whangaroi Mainstreet

STORY BY RUSSELL BROWN

Motorhead Remember me now Motorhead I’m talking to you now Motorhead

“Mind if I catch some sounds, mate?” says the big, blond youth, pointing at my Walkman. Til sit right here,” he says, indicating the seat across the aisle of the bus. There seems no reason to refuse him. He sits down, taps his foot to the Builders’ 'Red Skies’. “I haven't heard any sounds for months, eh,” he explains, taking off the headphones. “You haven't got 'Stairway To Heaven’ on here, have you mate?” Later, when the bus finally arrives in Napier, it’s the blond giant who takes me to the hotel where the Motorhead entourage is staying. " ‘Scuse me if my driving’s a bit rusty,” he grins, slamming the door of the red Honda Civic that has been left for him in a beachside parking lot. ”1 been inside for four months.” He explains how he was sentenced to three months for his part in a brawl with a bikie gang ("protecting the missus”) and then had the bad luck to strike a screw who he had once thrown out of a nightclub when working as a bouncer. “He called me all sorts of names and called the missus a slut. I don’t care what they say about me, but about the missus...” So he hit him and got an extra month behind bars. “Yeah, Napier’s a heavy town, alright," he says as we pull up outside the hotel. “Lots of rapes and things like that. Seeya mate have a good time.” The man to look for is tour manager Graeme Nesbitt. The hotel receptionist takes an apparently welcome break from speaking to a plainclothes policeman investigating some kind of trouble at the hotel the previous week. "Mr Nesbitt? I don’t think he’s here. Maybe you should try the hall the band’s playing at it’s only just across the road.” The detective looks on frostily. Motorhead. As legend would have it, the heavy metal band that storms on where others pull up faster and louder and nastier than the rest. Also the heavy metal band that often as not escapes the usual critical disdain for the genre. The heavy metal band that punks like. The one your mother wouldn’t. The heavy metal band that eschews satin trousers, protracted lead breaks and straining falsettos and all that other bullshit. ■ - ' ' Motorhead were formed by the only original member, lan ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister in the mid-70s, after he had been booted out of British acid rock kings Hawkwind when his predilection for white powders became a problem at Customs posts and the like. This new band, a three piece, didn’t owe much to Hawkwind’s intergalactic fantasies this was the Rebel Yob, not much more than a haircut and a few guitar licks away from punk. And, in fact, relations between Lemmy, guitarist Fast Eddie and drummer Phil(thy Animal) Taylor and the punks were friendly. When he was elected “Prime Minister” by NME readers in 1978, Joe Strummer co-opted Lemmy into his hypothetical Cabinet as Minister of Health and Lemmy once even helped out the Damned for a while. But things started to sour somewhat when Eddie left over philosophical differences (he didn’t like Lemmy recording a version of ‘Stand By Your Man' with the Plasmatics’ Wendy 0. Williams). Replacement Brian Robertson didn’t seem to suit the band and his excessive drinking the reason for his ejection from Thin Lizzy made most live performances shambolic. It was suggested to him that he leave. Then this year Lemmy came up with a new band. This time he had two guitarists, Wurzel

Burston and Phil Campbell, both of whom came from outside the heavy metal musical chairs game, where players change bands like they change strings, and Taylor had made way for former Saxon drummer, Pete Gill. At the first live performances the metal critics raved “like a rhinocerous with rabies,” bigger and badder and louder than ever. Later in the year it was announced that Motorhead would make a tour which included New Zealand.

Graeme Nesbitt emerges from one of the Civic Theatre’s dressing rooms, a room that looks more like it’s about to house the cast of a local repertory society play. He’s helpful and friendly, even though things have gone badly during the day and he’s behind time. He had woken up that morning in Palmerston North to find the tyres of all five vehicles in the fleet slashed. He’s pretty tired. “It’s been a hard tour, particularly for the Kiwis,” he says. "The volume is just exhausting. It's been averaging 120 decibels, which is well past pain level. We’ve all got surgical earplugs but it just shakes everything. And of course doing six gigs in a row is bound to be hard work.” As well as co-ordinating the local and overseas crews and making sure food, accommodation

and transport all work smoothly, it’s Nesbitt’s job to look after all the minor details. Like trying to find an extension cord long enough to reach into the crew room so the jug can be boiled for cups of tea. "And who stole the Marmite yesterday?” Meanwhile, the stage setup begins to take shape. The big lighting truss, strung with dozens of “cans," inches towards the roof, winched up by two of the road crew who straddle the uneven bars. Standing below supervising is the band's own lighting technician, Cubs Cobley, his arm in a sling after a 40-foot fall from the truss two days earlier in Wellington. The PA system is switched on and local man Peter Grumley sends INXS’ 'Original Sin’ booming through the empty theatre, checking the front-of-house mixing desk. A short time later come the test pulses beeps and whistles designed to check the responses of the PA bins, horns and onstage monitors. Setting the show up is a lengthy process but it's done well before the show is due to start and most of the crew go back to the hotel for dinner. The crew with support band Strikemaster have to return early, and as they do their setting up

there’s an ironic, almost uncomfortable silence in the air.

Outside, a few of the faithful are already sitting outside the doors, facing two police vans. The police presence will be heavy, following a stabbing the previous night and some trouble the night before in Wellington. Who knows what might happen in Napier? The atmosphere in the nearby streets is undeniably heavy. Fords and Holdens growl past and a dozen or so gang members stand outside a bottle store, the stretch of footpath they occupy their own. Not a good place for a merely medium-sized individual wearing a leather jacket... Eventually, however, the concert goes off almost without incident. About half of the 60 or so policemen who have come down leave again. Others stand around the edges of the auditorium, looking decidedly unhappy. “I asked them if they’d brought their earplugs and they said not to worry, they had cotton wool,” Nesbitt grins mischieviously, ”Cotton w001'..."

The sight of the grim blue statues is made even more absurd by the space around them. Only about 300 have forked out the $18.50 for a ticket. The poor attendances on the tour are a novelty for Motorhead, a band that usually packs out the largest of indoor venues. Backstage, the band prepares to go on. Lemmy is in jovial spirits, cracking jokes with the crew. He’s a big man, his physical presence punctured slightly by a small beer belly. "The bells! The bells! Do you hear them too?" he laughs, hunching up into a Quasimodo posture in front of Grumley as the small audience does its best to hail the band. Seconds later he’s on stage and the almighty bloody noise has begun. In the near-empty theatre it produces a slightly unreal effect. The impression is of a small-town cinema on a Saturday night where suddenly the characters have stepped out of the screen, large as life and twice as loud and the youths in the audience have run cheering to the front while others remain immobilised in their seats. The ultimate rock ’n’ roll fantasy Mr Hyde to Footloose' s Dr Jekyll. The crowd response is led by the dedicated headbangers up front. It’s actually more a matter of head shaking than banging but apparently the previous night had seen fans deliberately bashing their foreheads, either together or into the stage, until they bled. A blond-haired, denim-clad couple sit on the edge of the stage, waving their fists. Lemmy exchanges some banter with the male. "That your old lady? She deserves better than you!” The young man kisses his girlfriend, obviously overjoyed at the compliment to her. He knows the apparent slight to him is all part of the game.

Up onstage it’s louder, if anything. The huge backline of Marshall amplifiers produces a quite awesome roar and monitors are really only necessary for drums and vocals. Nevertheless the monitor mixer toils constantly over his desk, a smaller version of the one out front. The relationship between Motorhead and their crew is a warm one and the roadies seem to be enjoying the show as if it was the first they’d seen. Silly hats and funny faces are the order of the night and, as he does every night, Lemmy calls on one of the crew to introduce 'We Are the Road Crew’. Tonight it’s Eagle Dobbie, who echoes Lemmy’s earlier vehement abuse of those who are sitting down. "WASSAMATTA? Got yer fingers up yer bums?”

Out front Phil and Wurzel dip and dive with their guitars, to the obvious delight of those pushed up against the stage. Their antics are less evocative of phallic posturing than of those of a pair of travelling minstrels. They smile almost constantly and catch eyes in the crowd. But it’s Lemmy who’s undoubtedly the centre-

piece, it all swings around him. From a few rows back it's easy to see he’s a character of his own creation the bandido on the cover of Ace Of Spades, the incorrigible rock ’n’ roll outlaw. From the first song his voice is a hoarse growl but it never gets any rougher or any smoother. It's perfect. As his bass leads the band into the song 'Motorhead' and it all crashes together it’s possible to feel the joy of playing among the four. They finish, appropriately enough, with 'Overkill'. Motorhead can’t quite warp reality but they’d do it if they could. As the houselights go up so does a deliberate howl of feedback, which is in turn replaced by a wash of white noise which gives way to a siren that levels out into a piercing tone for at least two minutes before trailing off. Pure noise ending. And a very efficient way to get most of the people out the door. A few fans have already found their way backstage and about a dozen more sneak through. They include two excited boys of about 10, led by an older brother who is obviously using them as a premise to meet the stars himself. After a period of grace most of them are ushered into an empty dressing room and Lemmy goes in to talk with them. Among those in the room are the denim couple who sat on the stage. After a while small circles of enthusiasts gather around all the band members. Lemmy wanders over to talk to a somewhat older and more intoxicated group that has gathered on the other side of the stage. The fans stay round and stay round and after an hour or so the band members, particularly Lemmy, begin to turn their attention towards the minority of women who have ventured back. They direct conversation towards them while their male companions dart around the edges, getting in on the chat where they can. Lemmy returns to the original dressing room

and a row of hilarity and singing, mostly led by him, starts up. There’s an extra loud burst of laughter and then Lemmy’s voice: “You spill these drinks on me and I’ll spill a lot more shit on you!" He emerges with two glasses of vodka aod orange. He is followed out by the male of the denim couple.

• “He kissed my girlfriend!” he calls out several times, pretending to be annoyed but still obviously flattered. Things are becoming a little tense there are two or three of what they must see every gig, drunk types who can’t be told outright to leave without risking the possibility of their turning nasty. They look like leaving several times, only to wander back into the way of the crew and eventually into the band’s dressing room. “Just leave 'em and they’ll get bored soon,” sighs Nesbitt. “About two or three hours after we did.”

Meanwhile, two middle-aged women have come down to the front of the stage. They’re looking for their sons the two small boys. They’ve been sitting outside in their car since the concert ended. They’re not really worried but it is getting late.

Meanwhile the packdown has been proceeding. Breaking down every piece of sound and lighting gear, packing' it into road cases and loading it into the.truck parked outside. It’s here that the pecking order among the crew establishes itself. First finished are the English crew, then the local technical crew, the ones with skills the heavy lifting is left to the “luggers” who get the least sleep and probably the least pay. A packdown is not a good place to be for someone who does not have a job in it. The thing to do is stay out of the way, but that’s not always easy. The roadcase you sit on is always the next one to be loaded. The space you stand in will always put you in the way of someone. Apart from the awkwardness of standing around among a crowd of people with jobs to do it also gets boring. “That’s why I got involved,” grins Melanie, that rarity, a female roadie. “I got so bored with sitting around after gigs.” In an almost exclusively male domain she pulls her weight and is accepted with barely a second glance. Eventually it’s left up to the luggers and the band and most of the crew return to the hotel and set up in the house bar. By that time the light-coloured stage is littered with black gaffa tape. As well as holding down leads and speakers, gaffa is a panacea for every road ailment from a loose plug to torn jeans. It’s pretty costly and the real stuff can be hard to obtain in this country (as opposed to simple bookbinder’s tape which gets lumped in under the title but simply isn’t the same), so much so that there’s almost a mystique about it. It’s also very effective and will be hell’s own job to get off in the morning. Back at the hotel the management has made an exception to allow the jeans and T-shirts of the Motorhead entourage into the house bar. The band and crew reciprocate by passing a good sum of money over the bar. The barman and other patrons get into the swing of things and general hilarity develops including a demonstration of the legendary Dance of the Flaming Arseholes. Eventually a

long day tells and I accept Nesbitt’s offer of the spare bed in his room. He is awake for several hours more working out tour accounts.

"I’ve been managing to get in six miles a day on tour, which isn't too bad,” says Nesbitt as he packs his bag. An addictive runner, he was up at 6am for those six miles. After breakfast it’s off to Rotorua in the Stetson Productions minibus along with the local sound and lighting crew. A sleepy trip ends at the Rotorua TraveLodge, where the others check into their rooms and I meet up with photographer William West. We depart for more budget-priced accommodation.

Can’t get enough And you know it's righteous stuff Goes up like prices at Christmas

Rotorua’s Municipal Theatre is about 60 metres away from both the police station and the local RSA. It is newer than the Napier venue and its behind the scenes facilities somewhat more sophisticated. The four Motorheads sprawl out in their small dressing room, backs to the makeup mirrors that won't see any use tonight. Lemmy asks the others if they want to stay for the interview. It’s perhaps because they stay that he clowns it up a bit someone to perform for. It doesn’t make him an easy subject.

This tour’s obviously been a change for you, with smaller venues and even smaller crowds. Have you been enjoying that? “Yeah,” says Lemmy. “I enjoy it if the people that are there go beserk. It doesn’t matter if there’s only five people there if they go nuts clawing each other to bits and taking each other’s clothes off it’s fine.” Have you found yourself playing harder to make up for the empty spaces? “No. When you play to the max all the time you can’t play any harder if you want to.” What made you plump for two guitarists for the new band? “I couldn’t bear to tell either one of them he hadn’t got the job (laughs). They were both really good and I couldn’t choose between them.” How has it affected the sound, bearing in mind that Motorhead has always had that classic power trio thing? “Well, there’s more sound for a start... ” “It’s got more scope now,” puts in Phil. “It’s tighter, more powerful... ” “I think it’s the best Motorhead there’s ever been,” Lemmy continues. “I keep saying that but this is more like what I had in mind for Motorhead to do originally. I wanted a five piece originally but we couldn’t afford to pay five people so we ended up with three.” Was there anything in particular you were looking for in guitarists? “I was looking for lunatjcs really. Because the old Motorhead had gone a bit stale, it was getting like a job with the others. I mean, nothing against Phil Taylor, ’cause he’s a longtime associate, but it just wasn’t interesting anymore, it didn’t give you any fire up your back anymore. And this lineup immediately gave us all a twinge in the spine, y’know?” Is the writing process still the same all the band working out songs together?

“Yeah, it seems to be working better than ever. In fact, everything seems to be better maybe it’s just that with Brian it went into a real dip. It took me a while to get out of that because I was so bored. I mean, he was fine musically if you could actually get him to stand up. We’ve got a video of one of the gigs on the last English tour and it’s horrifying like watching a man being crucified.” Would you agree that No Sleep Till Hammersmith sums up Motorhead better than any studio album ever could? “Yeah, I think so definitely. I mean, when this lineup does a live album it’s going to be fuckin’ murder.” Is there one planned? “Yeah. We’ve just done some studio tracks for a Motorhead compilation called No Remorse and next we’ll do a studio album. After that we’ll do a live album. I’ve never been in a live band like this one and I’ve been in lots of bands. The early Motorhead with Phil and Eddie is the closest I’ve come but it wasn’t as good as this.” There are going to be a lot of new songs coming into consideration for live performance soon are you going to be able to keep all those old favourites in the set? “Well ... I used to love the Beatles and Little Richard and people like that. If I went along to a Little Richard concert and he didn’t do ‘Long Tall Sally’ I’d be thoroughly pissed off. Wouldn't you? You wanna see that fucker do 'Long Tall Sally’, right? And if he doesn’t do it you're gonna go home feeling shortchanged. So we'll keep on doing the old stuff. Anyway, when we go into ‘Bomber’ or ‘Overkill’ it’s just like the first time I played them. I’m not trying to be big time and say, ’I wrote such a good song, I never get sick of it,’ but I just never get sick of it.” Will Motorhead continuing be a matter of looking into new things or just honing what there is now? “There’s all this stuff about progress. I think' people progress because they think other people expect them to. I don’t think it’s progress a lot of the time, I think it's floundering. Desperately trying to create new stuff. I mean if you do something this well why shouldn’t you keep doing it?” Some people say Motorhead play too loud ... There’s laughter and Wurzel speaks up: “Our amplifiers have got 10 on them. If they’ve got 10 on them then that’s a nice round number and you should probably use it.” "It's like if they don’t want you to do 100 miles per hour in a car why does it have 100 on the speedo? Why does it do 100 miles per hour? Why not just plan ’em to 60?” Lemmy continues. “But now, they keep putting it there and people keep driving at it... ” Do you ever worry about your ears? “What... ?” Your ears. “No, not at all. I mean, you get two, if you’re lucky and you just go through it as best you can.” What about the fans’ ears? “I don’t give a flying fuck about the fans’ ears, actually. If they don’t like it, if it’s too loud, they can always put their fingers in their ears can t they?" There were quite a few fans backstage last night. Is that important? “Yeah none of the bands I wanted to go and •see backstage let me go backstage and I remember how pissed off I was. You can’t do it all the time of course there can be hundreds waiting for you and you can’t talk to all of them. There was the time in California when we said, ‘Well, you’ve been such a. great audience and you’ve been so nice to us over here, we’re going to invite you to a party’. And they all turned up back at the hotel! Well, about half of 2500. Guess who wasn’t buyin’ the fuckin’ drinks.” On this tour you’ve gained this reputation as corrupters of youth and whatever else. The violence aspect has been emphasised in the media. Does that happen elsewhere? It’s obviously a subject dear to the hearts of the whole band and Phil answers first: “Whatever you’ve got long hair, loud music, images like we’ve got, Mums and Dads are gonna put that sort of thing round. And that’s where it starts, the parents, not the kids.” “It’s like this kid in Palmerston North who went in and stabbed a geezer, right?” says Lemmy. “Now he went in there carrying a knife already. We never gave it to him. We never told him to stab anybody in the arse.” “We read in the paper after one gig we did that they’d searched a guy’s bag at the door and found assorted large rocks, padlocks and large batteries in his bag. And he was going to throw them at us ... ” frowns Phil. Why would he have wanted to do that? “Because they think that’s what heavy music is supposed to do to you and they try and live up to a lifestyle that’s imaginary, a lifestyle they have imagined we have,” answers Lemmy. Where do you think they get that impression from? The media? “Yeah because the-media love to push something sensational, right? And there’s nothing more sensational than violence and they equate heavy metal with violence. But you meet half these heavy metal bands and they’re (assuming a high voice) ‘Hello, pleased to meet you ... spandex trousers and all that. At least we’re sort of honestly idiotic we don’t have fights and that but we don’t swagger around town wearing bicycle chains it’s all bullshit, isn’t it?”

“We’re not violent people at all,” concludes Phil. “We just go out and give our all.” Does it ever get hard to give your all every night? “Not once you’re on stage,” says Lemmy. “Once you're out there it’s great. Just before you go up on stage you might be a bit tired but once you stagger out there and the kids start screaming then it’s great.” Wurzel sums it up: “I think you forget everything when you're up there for that hour. It’s just complete tunnel vision. And that’s what we do it for, for that hour on stage.”

Rotorua isn’t quite as good a gig as Napier. There’s not as much noise from either the audience or the band. “It’s not very good, is it?” says Lemmy, standing by the monitor desk as the calls for an encore waver. “Motorhead ... waiter ... ” This night security is tighter and the only people to make it backstage are three young women who have hitchhiked from somewhere remote to come and see. the band. Lemmy talks to them in the corridor. He disappears into the dressing room and comes back with a bottle of Russian vodka.

“Right, where’s the lads?” he says, heading out towards the front of the stage where 20 or so youths have gathered. If the fans can’t come to him, he’ll come to them.

By now it has already been decided to play two nights at Auckland’s Mainstreet rather than one in Auckland and one in Whangarei. Mainstreet is smaller than the original venue, the Logan Campbell Centre, and the sound is LOUD. Not that it hasn't been on the rest of the tour, but... Friday night is a success, 1000-plus people, an enthusiastic crowd. It follows that Saturday night should be similar. Not so. One source reported a total of 46 paying customers that night and a somewhat larger number of free passes and names on the door. Ticket prices seem the obvious factor to blame for the miserable attendances here and elsewhere the Auckland fans who were expected to go twice. Awareness may have been a problem, or maybe metallers prefer to listen to the records. Or maybe there simply aren’t very many of them. It’s hard to know what impressions of New Zealand Motorhead took away. Both their road manager Kevin Harrington and, later, Lemmy on stage, said it had been an enjoyable tour regardless of the crowds. Phil and Wurzel were heard to wax lyrical about the quality of the scenery and the meat pies.

It’s not often you meet a character as strong as Lemmy. If the parameters of his world are strictly drawn he still fills the space between them completely. Lemmy knows what he wants to be. He can be arrogant, competitive ("Born to lose Live to win,” reads the tattoo on his left arm) and sometimes overbearingly macho. He’s also friendly, motivated, funny and quite unpretentious. A good bloke. The periphery of the Motorhead circus is much the same as that of most ongoing rock tours a mish-mash of humour, grind, partying, excessive drinking and institutionalised sexism. It would be wearying or even offensive if that was all there was to it.

But the music ... Motorhead is something to plug into, and forget everything else. What they meant when they told you to kick out the jams. It’s easy to see why the band do it it's a damn good kick. . Lemmy was once quoted as saying that Motorhead were the sort of band that if they moved in next door your lawn would die. If Motorhead moved in the neighbours would die. Simple.

Sky high and 6000 miles away Don’t know how long I been away

Every bloody night Russell Brown