Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Up to You & Down to Me by lemyh Listen to Lemmy and Würzel on Leader Of Down track Paradise Turned Into Dust. Leader Of Down’s debut album Cascade Into Chaos is to be released later this month. The band was the brainchild of late Motorhead guitarist Michael “Würzel” Burston and bassist Tim Atkinson, who began working on the record back in 2008 with former Fastway drummer Steve Clarke . Those sessions included the track Paradise Turned Into Chaos which was written with Lemmy to sing on, with the Motorhead icon recording the song at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles in 2015 – shortly before his death later that year. Now a video for the track has been released and can be watched below. Lemmy also provides vocals on the album track Laugh At The Devil . The core lineup of the band consisted of Atkinson, vocalist Matt Baker and guitarist Alex Ward, and, following Würzel’s death in 2011, they continued to work on the album, bringing in Phil Campbell, “Fast” Eddie Clarke, Lee Richards, Bruce Foxton and Cliff Evans. As a result, Leader Of Down – named after Würzel misheard the lyrics to Status Quo’s Down Down – will now release Cascade Into Chaos on September 28 via Cleopatra Records. It feels very strange without Würzel being here, and I know he would be thrilled with the final result Tim Atkinson. Atkinson says: “It's a very bittersweet feeling now that the album is being released. It feels very strange without Würzel being here, and I know he would be thrilled with the final result. “It was a real pleasure writing with Würzel as we instinctively knew what both of us were thinking when we put our ideas forward. “We always wanted Lemmy to sing on Paradise Turned Into Dust , and it was a very emotional session in Los Angeles when Lemmy completed the track. I just wish that Würz had been there to see it.” Atkinson adds: “It was amazing that so many friends helped us to finish the album with guest appearances and I can only thank them from the bottom of my heart. To hear Phil playing with Würzel again was absolutely fantastic.” Leader Of Down - Cascade Into Chaos 1. Paradise Turned Into Dust (Feat. Lemmy) 2. Cascade Into Chaos 3. People Say I'm Crazy 4. Serial Killjoy (Feat. Bruce Foxton) 5. Children Of Disease (Feat. Phil Campbell, Whitfield Crane & Lee Richards) 6. Snakebite (Feat. “Fast” Eddie Clarke) 7. Punch & Geordie 8. Feel Good (Feat. Cliff Evans) 9. The Killing Rain 10. Laugh at the Devil (Feat. Lemmy & Fast Eddie Clarke) Lemmy: "Might as well die of something you like than be 120 and bored" “Don’t look at his toe,” says Lemmy’s press guy, Nik. Too late. In a hotel room in London, Lemmy Kilmister is surrounded by empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s and old prescription slips. Lemmy’s done something to his foot, you see, and has been confined to this room for over a week. Before we can look away, he holds his foot up as evidence – his big toe looks like a mouldy old parsnip that’s been lying in a pool of stale milk at the bottom of your fridge. It’s enough to drive you to drink. So we let it. Despite all this – or maybe because of it – Lemmy’s on top form, doling out JD and Cokes all afternoon, playing us tracks scheduled for a forthcoming solo album (Lemmy with guests including Dave Grohl and the Reverend Horton Heat), and holding forth on everything from drugs to marriage to Emperor Hirohito. So hold on to your hats and prepare yourself for the wisdom of Lemmy – what he’s learned in his 59 years of rock and rolling. Or at least what he can remember. All I learned at school was how to dodge fighting and how to smoke. And what girls’ tits looked like. There’s a fine line between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic. Just like there’s a fine line between just fishing and standing on the bank looking like an arsehole. The line is whether the fuck you know what you’re doing when you drink ’cos if you don’t know what you’re doing, you just become a terrible boring drunk. Whereas, if you know when to stop, you become an amazing, anecdotal man of the world. Which is better than being the guy having a shit in the bath tub. I don’t even get drunk any more. A kid once said to me: “Do you get hangovers?” I said: “To get hangovers you have to stop drinking.” Journalists are the worst drinkers in the world. Or were. Rock journalists are a really boring crowd now. Sit around drinking plastic bottles of fucking Evian. The music business is all geared up to stealing your money. It’s just like any other business – they’re out to make money, not to be good people. If you’re a businessman you can’t be a pleasant person. Business is ‘how to be a cunt’, basically. The bigger the cunt, the more successful the businessman. I know what I’m doing. I know what Motörhead’s for. I know who it appeals to. And I know it could appeal to a lot more people if we had the coverage. I’ve never understood why anyone would need a double-necked bass. I don’t even understand why you’d need a five-string. What’re you gonna do? Play bigger chords? Have more room to twiddle on? I hate twiddlers and they hate me. And that’s just fine. Scotch makes me hit people. Bourbon’s a mellow high. I used to drink Scotch but I went off it. I hit a door post once and it really fucking hurt. Who did I miss? Oh, nobody famous. He would’ve been famous if I’d connected. People are much weirder up north, aren’t they? You get real quality shit up there. You don’t get people with affectations: these people are fucking serious. I am a womaniser, but that doesn’t mean you can’t respect people. I don’t understand racism or sexism – I don’t get any of it. As far as I can see, a lot of feminist things that have happened have made men happy, not women. It’s given women unattainable goals to shoot for. The people expounding the thing in the first place are college people, sitting in a studio in the city. But some girl in fucking Newcastle has got no chance of following them. If a girl isn’t strong enough to buck the system, they’re just gonna get married like they would have in any other generation but they’re gonna be even more unhappy because of all this freedom they’ve read about which they aren’t getting. To a lot of people, magazines are like pictures of another world – because they are pictures of another world. That world’s never gonna show up in Cowdenbeath. If a woman likes you, you’re not bothered why they like you. I’m really shallow like that. People say: “Doesn’t it bother you that they just want you because you’re famous?” And I say: “No. Never did. Ever. Not for one second.” They can have me – I’m a whore, always was. In fact they don’t even have to pay me. People would say: “Have you slept with her?” I’d say: “Oh, we didn’t have time to sleep. We were too busy fucking.” Aids wasn’t a wake up call, it was a go-to-sleep call. Love’s a rather miserable condition. Makes you act like an idiot, knocks all your defences down, you tear yourself in knots, and then they leave you. Brilliant. Most love is unrequited, which is where we get all the good songs from. Thank God it’s unrequited, when you look at it like that. If I settled down, I wouldn’t be hungry any more. I’d be thirsty. Monogamy is possible – I’m doing it – but I don’t think it’s advisable. I think polygamy is a really good idea. Nothing works over any extended time. I’m a sucker for romance but the trouble is that you can’t make the fucker last – you can’t have that blaze happening all your life. The William Morris Agency made me take drugs! We did a tour in 1979 – the Bomber tour, which was 53 shows in 56 states – and I don’t care who the fuck you are, you’re not gonna do that without some help. Drugs are very subjective. They’re in the brain cell of the beholder. When I was growing up, drugs were all the go, everybody was doing them, so I did them. Smoking dope and acid. But there was a great innocence attached to them. No one had died yet. Heroin hadn’t showed up and downers hadn’t come in. The deals were a lot better then too. Then came the birth of the rabid dealer – with the gun in his pocket. And that’s what changed it – the money you could make. I would not advise drugs to any person, ever, of any kind. If you think you have to try them then go ahead. I can’t stop you. If you’re thinking about it, you’re going to do it anyway. But drugs are very powerful things – you can’t just try it and go back to the way you were before, because they’re going to change you. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Mostly for the worse. If you’re sticking needles in yourself, then that’s very bad news. Even with my famous rep, not once. Never ever. I used to say that getting married was the only mistake I didn’t make. But the other mistake I didn’t make was to stick needles in myself to get high. You should know who the fuck you are before you start doing drugs. I was 18, 20 before I started doing any dope. At least you had a vague idea of what you wanted to do with your life and who you were. That’s hard to fathom for some kids now because they think they’re adults when they’re 12. I come from a broken home. I broke it. I’m not religious. My father was a priest. Anglican vicar, Church Of England. He left my mother and me when I was three months old, so that let religion down, right there. Then my mother wanted to marry my stepfather and he was Roman Catholic – he’d been devout all his life – so he wrote to the Vatican to get dispensation to marry my mother because she was a divorcee. They sent him a letter – this is the Vatican, right? The fucking Pope – saying that he could only marry my mother if he declared me illegitimate. That’s the church, man. A fashion show for fags, right? So he wrote back and said: “Excommunicate my ass.” And they did. They excommunicated him. It didn’t seem to blight his happiness at all, from what I could see. God’s a crutch for people who don’t know who they are. I’m responsible for what I do. And I’ll take responsibility for everything I’ve said and done. I don’t need to hide behind the devil. “The devil made me do it!” Well, you shoulda put your fingers in your fucking ears! God would’ve helped you put your fingers in your ears, wouldn’t he? Might have even put His Holy Fingers in your ears. Religion’s just spiritual insurance. Put a few quid in the plate every month and then you think you’re going to heaven later. Everybody that’s good goes to heaven? Must be fucking crowded up there! How are you going to find your loved ones? Are they gonna post a notice? “Coming up this week…” I’m going to Hell – that’s where all the pool tables are. You can’t imagine a pool table in Heaven, can you? If I believe in anything, I believe in reincarnation. Because you have these flashes of memory of something you’ve never known before. And then you have periods of history you’re really interested in and other periods you couldn’t give a shit about – even though they’re just as interesting as a period. But you just don’t have a connection with them, somehow. Other bits you have a connection with, and I think it’s because you were alive in those bits. That makes sense to me. But then, who says it has to make sense? That’s just wishful thinking of another kind… It always killed me about Japan. The Emperor Hirohito – he’s the son of heaven. Why did he need glasses? It’s obviously ridiculous right there, but no one dare question it because he’s the emperor. You may as well die of something you like. Or you’ll live to 120 and be bored shitless. If you’re gonna rail at me for smoking a cigarette in a restaurant but let cars drive by outside, then just fuck off, OK? You’ve got these people on pavement cafés, doggedly not smoking, and the traffic’s three feet away! Fuck off! If you wanna ban cars and have rickshaws and shit then – fine – I’ll stop smoking. But don’t fuck around. I’m proud to be English, but I can’t live here now. I don’t know how anybody can afford to live here now. I went to America to live, right? The sun belts down all the time. The chicks wear less clothing because of that fact. And everything’s half price. Any questions? There’s a line that you do not cross. It’s like your own personal Alamo. Some shit you know is shit, so you don’t do it. If it gets to the stage that you’re gonna be ashamed of something, then you don’t do it. You think: “If I was 14 and I saw Eddie Cochran doing this, would I be embarrassed for him?” If the answer’s yes, then turn the motherfucker down. Motörhead songs use violent images but to promote non-violence. I don’t believe in wars. Why don’t they get the guy who’s in charge of the insurgents in Iraq and George W Bush and get them to fight it out in an arena? You could sell tickets to that motherfucker. I pretended to like jazz for about three years, but it cost me dear. The last time I went to a jazz concert, my mate was a sax player and he got up and he played the most appalling bunch of crap I’ve ever heard in my life. And before he was finished the audience was on its feet and I thought: “This is the blind leading the fucking blind. He can’t play, and they can’t hear.” Free-form jazz gives you a licence to shit in the street. I don’t think Pete Townshend will ever speak to me again. Do you remember when he impaled his hand on the whammy bar of his guitar? The Who did a show at the Albert Hall and I went down to see them and went backstage and Pete says: “Oh, hello Lemmy.” And I shook his fucking hand! He gritted his teeth – he was a man about it – but I don’t think he’ll forgive. I’m sure he reads Classic Rock , so: sorry, Pete. I’ve got the foot now if you wanna come and stamp on it. Archive of Our Own beta. This work could have adult content. If you proceed you have agreed that you are willing to see such content. Proceed Go Back. If you accept cookies from our site and you choose "Proceed", you will not be asked again during this session (that is, until you close your browser). If you log in you can store your preference and never be asked again. Up to You & Down to Me by lemyh. Fandoms: Teen Wolf (TV) Mature No Archive Warnings Apply M/M Complete Work. No Archive Warnings Apply. Summary. The connection didn’t go off every time someone stubbed their toe or had a normal headache. It had been so touchy to begin with that it took some getting used to now that Stiles no longer had to prepare for the flare up whenever he stubbed his toes or jammed his fingers on a day to day basis. Archive of Our Own beta. This work could have adult content. If you proceed you have agreed that you are willing to see such content. Proceed Go Back. If you accept cookies from our site and you choose "Proceed", you will not be asked again during this session (that is, until you close your browser). If you log in you can store your preference and never be asked again. Up to You & Down to Me by lemyh. Fandoms: Teen Wolf (TV) Mature No Archive Warnings Apply M/M Complete Work. No Archive Warnings Apply. Summary. The connection didn’t go off every time someone stubbed their toe or had a normal headache. It had been so touchy to begin with that it took some getting used to now that Stiles no longer had to prepare for the flare up whenever he stubbed his toes or jammed his fingers on a day to day basis. Lemmy: ‘Apparently I am still indestructible’ The Motörhead frontman has changed his lifestyle – he has switched from whiskey to vodka – in the battle for health. As the band release their 22nd studio album, Bad Magic, he explains how 50 years of hard rocking have taken their toll. Lemmy traces his approach to music back to the first wave of rock’n’roll. Photograph: Getty Images/Jake Walters. Lemmy traces his approach to music back to the first wave of rock’n’roll. Photograph: Getty Images/Jake Walters. Last modified on Mon 3 Dec 2018 15.34 GMT. L emmy is as much a collection of myths and legends as a man. In the popular imagination, he’s made up of equal parts Jack Daniel’s, amphetamine sulphate, Nazi memorabilia and extreme-velocity noise. The myths and legends cloak him as surely as the black shirt, the black jeans, the custom-made boots, the cowboy hat with its “Death or Glory” insignia and the Iron Cross around his neck. Some of the legends he has tired of – he’s fed up of being asked about being Jimi Hendrix’s roadie, being sacked from Hawkwind – for what, at heart, appeared to be taking the wrong kind of drug (speed, rather than the hallucinogens the rest of the band preferred) – and about the Nazi memorabilia collection (anyone who has seen the documentary about him will know how extensive it is, seemingly taking up most of his apartment in West Hollywood). Then there are the myths: the story that circulated school playgrounds in the early 1980s – that he had an orgy with all of the Nolan sisters backstage at Top of the Pops; or the one that he can’t stop taking speed because his body would collapse without it (“I won’t talk about drugs,” he says, gruffly, when I ask about it). And there are the stories from those who have encountered him: the member of the British rock band with an equal enthusiasm for chemicals who spent an afternoon nose-deep in powders with him at the Rainbow Bar & Grill in LA, playing Tetris – “I love it when I’ve been playing for hours … that’s when the swastikas start appearing,” Lemmy is reputed to have said. Lemmy performing with Hawkwind in Amsterdam, 1972. Photograph: Redferns/Gijsbert Hanekroot. The Lemmy who sits before me this afternoon to promote Motörhead’s 22nd official studio album, Bad Magic, seems stripped of myths, though. In 2013, he underwent an operation to implant a cardioverter-defibrillator into his chest, a device that helps prevent an irregular heartbeat turning into no heartbeat. Then, shortly afterwards, he suffered a hematoma. Earlier this year, Motörhead were forced to cancel shows after he suffered a gastric illness. Four days before we meet, when Motörhead played at Glastonbury, they followed Ace of Spades with Overkill, but Lemmy continued to sing Ace of Spades. “It was a mental block,” he says. “I’ve sung those songs so many times. First time I’ve ever sung Ace of Spades to it, though. We did it the night before and it was fucking terrible, and I swore I’d never do it again. But we did. Obviously.” While the all-black uniform is present and correct this afternoon, Lemmy has lost a lot of weight, and appears pale and drawn. His hands aren’t wholly steady, and he says that these days he has to walk with a stick because “my legs are fucked”. Nevertheless, he insists: “Apparently I am still indestructible.” He has changed his lifestyle – he’s down to a pack of fags a week, and has swapped from Jack and Coke to vodka and orange, apparently to help with his diabetes, – though his assistant wonders whether swapping from one 40% spirit topped with sugar to another 40% spirit topped with sugar is really going to help. “I like orange juice better,” he says. “So, Coca-Cola can fuck off.” A full bottle of Absolut is put in front of him for the interview, and a full bottle of Jack Daniels is given to me – which seems a bit optimistic, given Lemmy sets an interview limit of 25 minutes, which he will extend by five minutes if he likes the questions (we get up to 33 minutes). Lemmy’s approach to music – across his 40 years leading Motörhead, and the 10 years before that spent with Hawkwind, Sam Gopal, and the Rockin’ Vickers – has been simple: it traces its roots back to Little Richard and the first wave of rock’n’roll. That’s the music that fired him up with the desire to transcend his life in north Wales. “Rock’n’roll sounded like music from another planet,” he says. “The first time around, we had people like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis – all them people. And they were gone within two years. Chuck Berry was in jail [for transporting a minor across a state line for immoral purposes]. Jerry Lee’s career had been destroyed by the British press [for marrying his 13-year-old cousin]. Elvis was in the fucking army.” He then ponders the early 60s and offers his summation: “And then we got Bobby Rydell and all them cunts. It took us a couple of years to get rid of them, then the Beatles showed up. That was all right.” Lemmy is at his most enthusiastic talking about the records and bands that enthused him a long, long time ago. The Birds, Ronnie Wood’s mid-60s freakbeat band, whose arrangement of the Motown standard Leaving Here was a staple of Motörhead sets for many years; or Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, whom he travelled round the country to see. He’s withering about groups who were great and who he believes betrayed their talent. “The Who are fucked. I don’t know why they still bother without John and Keith, you know? They should have broken up in 1978.” Or Free, “who unfortunately became Bad Religion. Was it Bad Religion? No, Bad Company. That was a terrible thing.” One of Bad Company’s singles opened with the line: “Here come the jesters, one, two, three / It’s all part of my fantasy,” and you can imagine Lemmy listening to it and demanding: “Jesters? What kind of fucking fantasy is that?” Though Motörhead are routinely hailed as the inventors of thrash metal, not least by thrash metal bands, Lemmy has always insisted they are a rock’n’roll group, and there’s more to them than metal – they just happened to become aligned with metal at a point in the late 70s when it was becoming commercially successful, and they were swept along with it. But, for their first few years, they were more a monstrously overdriven version of the 60s bands Lemmy loved, covering John Mayall’s I’m Your Witchdoctor, Johnny Burnette’s Train Kept a Rollin’ and the Velvet Underground’s I’m Waiting for My Man, as well as Louie Louie and Leaving Here. With metal band Girlschool, they had a hit with a version of Johnny Kidd’s old British rock’n’roll hit Please Don’t Touch. Also, they emerged not from the hard-rock world, but from the west London underground squat scene that bequeathed the world Hawkwind, the Deviants and the Pink Fairies (whose Larry Wallis was in the first Motörhead lineup). “I was half and half going in,” Lemmy says of the split between being part underground and part hard rock, “and then I became this monster. I was really at home with that squat scene, because I didn’t have to pay rent. We was living in squats in Battersea when we started with Motörhead. And we lived with the Hell’s Angels in this flat. They were always around.” Motörhead were formed – he wanted to establish a British equivalent of MC5 – after Lemmy’s expulsion from Hawkwind in 1975. He’d been arrested in Canada for possession of cocaine, which turned out to be speed, meaning he wouldn’t face a custodial sentence. But the band chucked him out, anyway, after five years during which he’d sung on their only hit single, Silver Machine. He was furious and bitter at the time, but their decision was what enabled him to become the Lemmy the world knows and loves. He still took his revenge, though: “I came home from America and fucked all their old ladies. Except for [Hawkwind frontman Dave] Brock’s. I couldn’t get his. I had a good time with all them chicks – they were really eager.” Lemmy performing with Motörhead at Glastonbury, where a ‘mental block’ saw him sing Ace of Spades when the rest of the band were playing Overkill. Photograph: WireImage/Shirlaine Forrest. The “chicks” have been one of the great boons of being a rock star. “You get all these birds fastening themselves upon you. And you get a lot of drinks and a lot of presents. So, it’s pretty good. You get everything for free – I’ve got money now and I never have to spend it.” And, for Lemmy, it has never been all about the music, but it has never been all about the rest of it, either. “I didn’t really want to be in the lifestyle without the music. And I didn’t want to be in the music without the lifestyle,” he says. Rock’n’roll’s changed now, he says. It’s not as much fun as it was in the days when everything seemed a bit homemade and bands would come out of nowhere for 15 minutes of infamy. The days when he would spend his evening hopping between Dingwalls and the Music Machine in Camden Town, watching bands, catching up with friends – and drinking, taking speed and playing the fruit machines – were glorious times. Nowadays, in LA, he has even cut down on his visits to the Rainbow – he goes twice a week, and he doesn’t miss it when he’s not there. And, through it all, Motörhead rumble on, a reminder of rock’n’roll’s primal scream, of the noise that a guitar, a bass and a drum kit can make when all their owners want to do is holler “Awop-bopaloobop-alopbamboom”. Death, he says, is the only thing that can stop them. “As long as I can walk the few yards from the back to the front of the stage without a stick,” he says, then laughs wheezily. “Or even if I do have to use a stick.”