About 20 years ago I was at a loose end in Los Angeles and decided I’d track down Lemmy from Motorhead for his first interview since a health scare.

He had been taken ill some six months earlier in the middle of a tour and, according to reports, had been ordered by doctors to make radical adjustments to a lifestyle built around the prodigious consumption of bourbon, amphetamines and nicotine. This would be his first interview since then.

I learned that Lemmy was rehearsing with his band out near Burbank Airport, so I made an appointment, drove up there and located the studio in a quiet street with disused railroad tracks at one end and the airport runway cutting horizontally across at the other, where it looked as if planes were landing between the buildings.

The studio was a single-storey series of soundproofed bungalows with no office and no sign of who was in which room. I crept along, pressing my ear to the sides of each one in turn, trying to make out sounds. In one or two I could detect faint noises and was about to start randomly knocking on doors when I came to the last and heard something that sounded more like construction work. I had found my prey.

Knocking on the door proved as futile as I expected, so I opened it and the racket emanating from the darkness within ground to a halt as sunlight entered the room and the three figures inside shrank away, like a scene from Nosferatu or Dracula when dawn breaks at the castle.

From the darkened recess of the room, a familiar black-clad figure waved a greeting and approached me, growling courteously: “Fancy a drink?”
Pouring from a bottle of Jack Daniels, he filled two plastic half-pint glasses almost to the brim before splashing Coke into the small gap at the top, and stepped into the sunshine to light a Marlboro red from a packet stuffed into the breast pocket of his black shirt.

“I thought you’d been told to pack up smoking?” I asked. “Yeah,” he growled in that familiar Yorkshire rasp, “I’m down from 60 a day to 40.” And what about the booze? “One bottle of Jack a day instead of two,” he replied, taking a large gulp. “It’s shit. Doesn’t work.”

Anyway. That was the last time I saw Lemmy. The first time – the first of many – was in Finch’s on the Portobello Road in the mid-Seventies where he could reliably be found on any given day, including market day on a Saturday, playing pinball, dressed exactly like Lemmy in black jeans, black boots, black T-shirt, black biker jacket and bullet belt, and battered black cowboy hat.

I saw Motorhead live for the first and possibly last time in 1977 and they were louder and faster than anything or anyone else, even after I’d seen The Ramones.