MOTÖRHEAD Trivia — 27 Entries
27 sourced facts about MOTÖRHEAD.
Trivia
Apart from Lemmy, the longest-serving member of Motörhead was the guitarist Phil Campbell. In its notice of his death the band's site records that he was Motörhead's guitarist for thirty-one years, having joined in 1984, and the longest-serving member aside from Lemmy. Campbell died on 13 March 2026.
The Japanese edition of On Parole Sessions came out on 17 April 2026 from Warner Music Japan at 9,020 yen including tax, catalogue number WPZR-31105/8, and the label's product page lists a poster as its enclosed bonus. TOWER RECORDS ONLINE classifies it not as a domestic pressing but as an import with domestic distribution spec, giving five discs and the number WPZR-31105.
Warner Music Japan's discography lists three Motörhead albums with domestic WPCR catalogue numbers: Under Cöver on SHM-CD (13 December 2017, WPCR-17951), Bad Magic (28 August 2015, WPCR-16754) and The Wörld Is Yours (9 March 2011, WPCR-50301). Aftershock appears on the same list tagged as an import, dated 29 October 2013, which is how one can tell it never received a domestic pressing there.
The Japanese edition of The Manticore Tapes was released by Universal Music Japan on 27 June 2025. TOWER RECORDS ONLINE gives its Japanese title as ザ・マンティコア・テープス and its spec as a domestic pressing, one disc, a cardboard sleeve, catalogue number UICB-15002 and JAN 4988031772201.
Warner Music Japan's product page lists the players on the first studio sessions, recorded across 1975 and 1976 for On Parole: Larry Wallis on guitar, Phil Taylor and Lucas Fox on drums, and Lemmy on bass and vocals. Two drummers appear because Fox was replaced by Taylor part-way through.
The line-up Motörhead are best known for — Lemmy, Fast Eddie Clarke and Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor — first recorded together in August 1976 at Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Manticore Studio in Fulham, London. The band's own site describes the session as a rehearsal at which the three also committed something to tape for the first time.
The Manticore tape then went missing for decades. According to the band's site it was unearthed and restored nearly fifty years later and released on 27 June 2025, timed to the band's fiftieth anniversary. The deluxe bookpack edition carries a twenty-four-page booklet whose liner notes were written by Kris Needs, a long-time collaborator of the band.
The only Motörhead record to top the UK album chart is a live one. The Official Charts Company database gives No Sleep 'til Hammersmith, released in 1981, a peak position of 1, lists the label as Bronze and the catalogue number as BRON535, dates its first appearance to 27 June 1981, and records a chart run of sixteen weeks, from 27 June to 10 October.
In 1984, Phil Campbell's first year in the band, Motörhead played "Iron Fist" for ITV's Saturday morning children's show The Saturday Starship. The band's site notes that the performance took place in the car park of Central TV's Birmingham studios, and that it led to complaints from nearby residents about the decibel levels.
Even in 1984, the year the band became a four-piece, there were nights when only three of them played. The band's site explains that Volume 8 of The Löst Tapes documents a 1984 show at the Winter Gardens in Margate, performed by a rare early three-piece line-up of Lemmy, Pete Gill and the newly recruited Phil Campbell, because Würzel was in hospital in Newcastle with a kidney illness.
After Lemmy's death, Phil Campbell formed a band with his three sons. The band's site records that he was blessed to form Phil Campbell and The Bastard Sons with Todd, Dane and Tyla, and that the group recorded and toured together for years.
In October 2024, nine years after the band ended, "Lawman" gave Motörhead a new UK Top 10 single. On their own site the band published the rest of that year's figures alongside it: over 320 million streams globally, twenty million listeners on Spotify and more than 112 million views on YouTube.
On their own site the band state that they played live to millions of people and sold more than twenty-five million albums over their career. In the same sentence they add that they stand proud of continuing to inspire and attract a new generation of young fans.
Bad Magic is Motörhead's twenty-third and final studio album. The band's site uses that description when introducing the 2023 reissue Seriously Bad Magic, and explains that "Greedy Bastards" is the second rare gem found in the recording session vaults for it.
Motörhead's fiftieth anniversary falls across two years. Warner Music Japan's product page explains that 2025 marked fifty years since the band formed and fifty since their first live show, and would have been Lemmy's eightieth year, while 2026 marks fifty years since the first recording they completed in early 1976 — which is what the release of On Parole Sessions commemorates.
The band took its name from a song. uDiscover Music Japan records that Lemmy named his new group after a song he had finished writing for Hawkwind shortly before they sacked him. The same article notes that one other name was on the list — Bastard — and that it was not the one chosen.
The band began with a sacking. A Classic Rock feature notes that Lemmy was fired from Hawkwind at the Canadian border in 1975, and that he did not set foot in America again until the Ace of Spades tour five years later — by which time, the piece adds, he had already decided he wanted to live there one day.
The riffs on Ace of Spades came out of the hours nobody was rehearsing. Eddie Clarke told Classic Rock that when the band went down to Rockfield Studios in South Wales early in 1980, Lemmy was not much up for rehearsing; Clarke and Phil Taylor liked playing, so once the fishing and the rest of it was done with the two of them would have a bash, and that, he said, gave them the chance to work out some riffs.
An earlier shape of "Ace of Spades" survives. Louder reports that the band cut the song as an instrumental at Rockfield and added vocals and overdubs back in London, and that this first incarnation surfaced on the 1989 odds-and-sods album Dirty Love — without two of the things that define the finished record: the steel-plated central riff, and the breakdown Lemmy called the tap-dancing section.
Vic Maile, who produced Ace of Spades, had previously worked with Hawkwind — Lemmy's former band. Louder writes that he played a large part in fixing both of the things the early version lacked: the central riff and the breakdown.
Lemmy's bass sound was hard to play alongside. Eddie Clarke told Classic Rock that there was no bottom end to it at all — and in those days a bottom end was how a bass was played — which made life very tricky, and that the band only got the hang of it on Ace of Spades because the producer, Vic Maile, insisted on it.
The gambling language in "Ace of Spades" is exact rather than decorative. Louder notes that "snake eyes" is double one on the dice, and that Lemmy himself explained the "dead man's hand, aces and eights" as the hand Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was shot.
Radio was barely on Motörhead's side while they were climbing the British charts. Louder records that Bomber, released in 1979, peaked at No. 12, and that the four-track live EP The Golden Years, out the following summer, lifted the band into the Top 10 for the first time despite getting near-zero airplay.
Released as a single in October 1980, "Ace of Spades" went into the UK chart at No. 15 with, again, little or no airplay. Louder describes the result: another Top of the Pops appearance and more front covers in the music weeklies. What really hit home for Lemmy, the piece says, was the album going straight into the chart at No. 4.
The band's biggest seller was not an album but a collaboration. In February 1981 Bronze released a three-track EP pairing Motörhead with Girlschool, St Valentine's Day Massacre, and Louder records that it reached No. 5 and sold more than 200,000 copies. The two bands were billed as Headgirl, and the lead track was a cover of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates' "Please Don't Touch", a personal favourite of Lemmy's. The other two were Motörhead playing Girlschool's "Emergency", with Eddie Clarke singing, and Girlschool playing "Bomber".
Lars Ulrich of Metallica, a former president of the American Motörhead fan club, told Classic Rock that Phil Taylor was the first drummer he ever heard play that double bass drum thing. The first time he heard Overkill, he said, it blew his head off — he could not believe what he was hearing, and of course he then wanted to play like that too.
Motörhead won a Grammy once, and not for a song of their own: the Recording Academy's records show them taking Best Metal Performance in 2005 with "Whiplash", a Metallica cover. The category that year honoured recordings released between 1 October 2003 and 30 September 2004.