Lemmy

Lemmy — Ian Fraser Kilmister, born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1945 — founded Motörhead in 1975 and was its only permanent member for forty years. Before that he had been a roadie for Jimi Hendrix and the bassist of Hawkwind, from which he was sacked in 1975 after being detained at the Canadian border for drug possession. The dismissal created the band: he assembled Motörhead immediately afterwards, with the declared intention of making something faster and dirtier. His bass does not function as a bass. Lemmy played chords rather than root notes, with distortion and through guitar amplifiers, which produced a wall of sound and did away with the conventional division between foundation and harmony. That is why Motörhead sounds larger than a trio ought to. He sang with his head tilted upward into a microphone set above his face, and the voice — hoarse, shouted, with no melodic pretension whatsoever — was less an instrument than a statement of method. That combination produced Overkill (1979), Bomber (1979), Ace of Spades (1980) and the live No Sleep 'til Hammersmith (1981), which reached number one in Britain. Motörhead is routinely treated as a forerunner of thrash and speed metal, though Lemmy rejected every classification and repeated that the band played rock and roll. He collected German military insignia from the Second World War, a subject he was questioned about for decades and to which he always answered that he collected the objects, not the ideology, declaring himself anti-racist. He died on 28 December 2015, aged 70, four days after being diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and two days after his birthday. He kept the same way of living — whisky, cigarettes, the road — to the end, and the band ended with him.