Lemmy is one of only a handful of people in the entertainment industry recognizable by only one name, in fact most don’t even know that he has a last one. Unlike Sting, Madonna and Prince, Lemmy never used his one word moniker as a marketing tool. There was no yellow bee like sweater, no simulated sex on an alter and no running around in a pair of golden underwear onstage. Nope, for over thirty years Lemmy has worn a black cowboy hat, black shirt and pants, boots, sported two large moles on his face, had greasy looking unkempt shaggy hair and pounded the shit out of his bass guitar.

As he gets older, he has reached retirement age in the United States, he seems to be ignoring Neil Young’s advice to either burn out or fade away. Lemmy is defying the odds just as he did when he drove a van full of Jimi Hendrix’s gear across England wearing kaleidoscope glasses on his face. He doesn’t play by the rules, he doesn’t like rules and he doesn’t like the people who make the rules. If you look up Sex, Drugs & Rock n’ Roll in the dictionary there is a picture of Lemmy. You can learn all you want to about the man now as there is a new a movie out simply titled, Lemmy. There is also a new Motorhead album titled The World is Yours.

In this interview I chat with Lemmy about the movie, the music and about topics as diverse as drugs, Joan Jett, stealing from the poor and woman who are bastards. Once again, Lemmy Kilmister has given Classic Rock Revisited an amazing chat that promises to deliver big. We look forward to the next one as we are sure we will meet up with Lemmy somewhere out there on the road.

Lemmy: [laughter] It’s not that kind of movie.

Lemmy: I thought it was very flattering. It is quite amusing because everyone says that I’m a nice guy. It is kind of painful in the end. As long as you don’t believe it then you will be alright.

Lemmy: It seems to be. It is good for the band too, you know. It’s okay. It’s just that I am too old now to chase all the woman involved; which just seems a shame. I think they did a really good job with the film. It wasn’t too showbiz and it wasn’t too ordinary. The guys who did the movie were all fans or at least they were when they started it. I don’t know if they still are now [laughter].

Lemmy: We know what we are doing by now. Christ, we should know because we have had a long time to rehearse. There is no filler on this album. We seem to make an album every eighteen months or so and I think every band should do that. We’re not writing Sargent Pepper every time; we are writing straight ahead rock n’ roll, do you know what I mean?

Lemmy: I make them up on the spot but I have a pretty good vocabulary. I can make up a good song and do it pretty quickly. It helps a lot to have a good vocabulary when doing lyrics. The days of ‘moon’ and ‘June’ are over.

Lemmy: Vicious.

Lemmy: When you complain for a long time and nothing ever happens then you just have to complain more. I have no time for governments. You can hear that in the lyrics. And everybody these days is bitching about what bastards men are but woman are just as big of bastards as men are. It is very equal.

Lemmy: I don’t like putting up with bullshit from anybody else so why would I put up with a bunch of bullshit in my own lyrics?

Lemmy: Who said that? A woman, right? [much laughter]

Lemmy: It is a fun recipe called Krakatoa Surprise. You cover refried beans and flour in chocolate and then you cover it in brandy and set it on fire. You eat it while it is still on fire… SURPRISE.

Lemmy: I have done interviews in the past and they cut everything out except for the outrageous line and then they take it out of context. I think that is just about as dishonest as a person giving a bad interview. I despise people like that; they don’t get two tries. It’s all just sensation. It is always bullshit. How many times can a rock star go over the top on drugs? How many times can a rock star be unfaithful to his old lady? It is really fucking boring and that is what they do over and over and over. They just print the same shit.

Lemmy: I hate that shit. It killed off a lot of my generation. It killed off a lot of my friends. Now this generation is getting killed off again. I can’t believe it. How many dead bodies do we need to have piled up?

Lemmy: As far as I know methamphetamines never killed anyone. Heroin will actually kill you. I never saw anybody die from smoking dope, doing acid, doing cocaine or anything else. It is always heroin. They all died on that.

Lemmy: It just all happened. Music had been going on a long time before that. You have to remember that before rock n’ roll there were a bunch of jazz musicians all doing heroin. That shit has been around a long time. Every generation thinks they are stronger than the generation before it. They think, “It can’t happen to me.” In the past people have died making that same mistake. Maybe you should take note. People lose their lives in the drug wars and you don’t have to prove it to yourself because others have proved it for you.

Lemmy: It was both, you know. Eric Clapton wrote “Layla” when he was coked out of his mind. Later on it nearly killed him. You’ve got to try to figure out which is the bigger benefit and which is the bigger loser. It nearly killed him; he was in a very, very bad way for a long time but he came through it. Most people don’t come through it because they don’t have the money to buy the people to look after them. Most people die a miserable and lonely death because they don't have the people to nurse them and get them through it all.

Lemmy: Pure dumb luck. Also, I never did heroin.

Lemmy: There are a lot of them, for sure. I climbed down the outside of the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn once just to surprise one of my crew by getting on his balcony and knocking on his window.

Lemmy: I haven’t made many in my career; you can see that just by looking back at it. It has been a series of disasters ever since 1982. It really helps that I never wanted to do anything else.

Lemmy: I should write a musical about it shouldn’t I?

Lemmy: Yeah, yeah [laughter]. We could wear straw hats while dancing down the road, you know.

Lemmy: That’s true. We sent in a tape. It became kind of a fad in the late ‘70’s to try to help people wake up out of comas by hearing things that they liked. A lot of kids were laying around in comas due to accidents and things. I remember we sent out about six tapes. We heard that we were this one kid’s favorite band so we sent a tape that said, “Hey this is Motorhead. It’s time to wake up.” We sent out tapes to the others but they didn’t wake up. It was worth it just to have one kid wake up. I got to meet him after he woke up.

Lemmy: A kid got killed but it didn’t have anything to do with us. It was a gang thing that happened in the parking lot outside. One of the gang members set fire to his hair during the show. One of the rival gang members met up with him outside in the parking lot and killed him. It is a drag, really. You remember it but shit man…what can I do?

Lemmy: That is how I feel. It really hits home with you that it didn’t have any effect on these people. They were just as intent on fucking killing each other as they were before they came to the show. It was just fate, you know. I guess when you’re young you have tunnel vision on that shit.

Lemmy: Probably the ‘60’s because there were hardly any rules and heroin hadn’t shown up so people hadn’t started dying. It was incredibly upbeat and we almost did change the world. I guess that was the best one…the ‘70’s were pretty good too. I have been lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.

Lemmy: I shook hands with George and Ringo a couple of times but I wouldn’t say they would ever remember me.

Lemmy: The Beatles had an influence on everybody. They changed the way you looked at things. You have to realize what an incredible explosion the Beatles were. You really had to be there but I will try to tell you. They were the first band to not have a lead singer in the band. They were the first band to write their own songs in Britain because we always just covered American songs before that. Everybody was singing at the same time and the harmonies were great. The Beatles really turned the whole thing on its head. Daily papers in England used to have an entire page of the paper dedicated to what the Beatles had done the day before. When George died the guards at Buckingham Palace played a medley of George’s songs during the changing of the guard; that sort of thing never happens.

Lemmy: He was really a good guy. I never could get over how incredibly little he was. He was little like Ronnie James Dio, they were little guys but they had a lot of heart. You would never believe that voice came out of Ronnie James’s body. It was the same way with Randy because he had small hands because he was a little fellow. Boy, could he play guitar. He became an even better guitar player after he died. It is a well-known mystery that guitar players suddenly get better once they are dead. Buddy Holly was the first. Stevie Ray Vaughan is known by a lot more people than had ever heard of him when he was alive.

Lemmy: The first time the Runaways played in Britain at the Roundhouse, Joan Jett wore my bullet belt onstage. They were the first big all girl band. Girlschool came along about two years after them. The Runaways were really the first all-girl band to really strut their stuff and say, “Fuck you.” “Cherry Bomb” was the best song for a girl band to sing. It was just outrageous at the time. There were American families sitting on the sofa watching television going, “Fuck me.” It was great fun. I loved Cherie Currie and she really upset a lot of middle aged men back then. I saw her the other day and she is doing great. You know she is a twin don’t you? She has a twin sister and they are absolutely identical.

Lemmy: They were great. They couldn’t afford to tour over here. If I hadn’t been living here do you think we would have gotten a Grammy? No chance.

Lemmy: I think so too. It was just a mercy fuck as it was our 30^th anniversary. They gave it to us for a cover of somebody else’s song. It would have a lot more meaning if it had been for one of our songs. We were nominated once before for our album 1916. We were up against Metallica at the time and they had just sold a quarter of a zillion albums.

Lemmy: That’s true.

Lemmy: We never played China, India or Africa. We also haven’t played Russia enough. I would love to play those places. I would love to have some sort of hit in America before we go.

Lemmy: You can as long as you are not married.

Lemmy: Is this your second time around?

Lemmy: [laughing] I bet that goes down well. She probably hates you.

Lemmy: I have never been married but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t mate.

Lemmy: I can’t really say. As you get older you get too many bad habits. Who is ever going to put up with me?

Lemmy: Well yeah. Then we got a benefactor who bought us a van. It was a second hand van. That was back at the beginning. We never nicked stuff from other bands because that was a no-no because we were all in the same boat. You don’t steal from the poor because let’s face it, they're poor. There is no sense in that.