(Credits: Far Out / Alejandro Páez)
Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister is one of those people who could have only ever been a musician. The Staffordshire-born songwriter looked right at home on stage, with a bass guitar in hand and a gravelly voice to boot. It’s difficult to imagine him in a ‘normal’ job, selling you insurance or coming around to read your electric meter. It seems as though Lemmy was born to be a rock and roll star, but the trigger for that realisation came in an unlikely form.
Coming of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lemmy had a front-row seat for the birth of rock ‘n’ roll as we know it. Over the course of his life, the bassist was known to repeatedly espouse the genius of early artists like Little Richard and, of course, Elvis Presley. Inevitably, though, these global superstars took a while to travel from the rock haven of Memphis to the tranquil surroundings of Staffordshire, so a young Kilmister had to look a little closer to home for his early inspiration.
Within the confines of the United Kingdom, there were few rock stars as prominent as Cliff Richard during the early years. Although the singer now holds a reputation as a pretty boring, old popstar whose music is largely confined to the unwanted LPs in the corner of a charity shop, he was originally marketed as something of a rock ‘n’ roll rebel. Even during the early years, many listeners could see through that image, but his role in introducing mainstream UK audiences to the revolutionary sounds of rockabilly is certainly worthy of commendation.
Reportedly, it was Richard who first inspired Lemmy on his path to musical greatness. “I always knew what I wanted to do,” he told The Word in 2006, “I used to watch the TV show Oh Boy!. Cliff Richard was the resident singer, and he was immediately surrounded by all these birds screaming and tearing his clothes off. So I thought, ‘That’s the fucking job for me!’”.
Despite the inspiration he provided, Kilmister was less than complimentary about Richard in later life. “His gimmick then was that he never smiled,” he recalled, “doing the moody Elvis thing,” before noting, “But you couldn’t stop the cunt smiling now with a crowbar, could you?”. Admittedly, it is difficult to think of two musicians as far apart as Cliff Richard and Lemmy Kilmister. Richard went from teenage rock star to elderly stalwart of pop, largely devoting his music to Christianity, whereas Lemmy was endlessly tied to the dark worlds of rock and heavy metal.
Of course, man cannot survive on Cliff Richard alone. During his formative years, Lemmy found inspiration in a variety of places. “I used to trek up to Liverpool and see The Beatles at the Cavern,” he remembered, “But Billy Fury was the first live show, another Scouser, in his silver lamé suit. That was a great bill, with Marty Wilde, Mike Sarne (Come Outside), Peter Jay & The Jaywalkers at the Llandudno Odeon.”
Upon listening to the bassist’s defining tracks, like ‘Ace of Spades’ or ‘Iron Fist’, it is often difficult to hear the lineage of early rock stars like Billy Fury or Cliff Richard. Seemingly, Kilmister used the modern sounds of artists like Richard to spawn his own rock revolution, only he took a much more abrasive approach to the genre.
