“I mean, the thing with us, we didn’t give a shit. We didn’t think about things like that. I remember, I was living in this flat, and I was living in it for years. And the owner spoke to me and said, ‘Do you want to buy it for X amount of money?’ And it was cheap. I thought, what do I want to do that for? You’re rocking and rolling, you just want to carry on what you’re doing, going to rehearsals, writing songs, doing gigs and being on tour, you know? There was nothing else for Motörhead.”
CHAPTER 8
Iron Fist: “It was hard work getting Lemmy out of the pubs.”
With heavy metal all the rage in the U.K., Motörhead were well rewarded, for once, with being in the right place at the right time, issuing in 1981 a blistered raw live album to surprise mainstream success. Now wise sages of the NWOBHM, Lemmy, Phil and Fast Eddie were there to witness the rise of Iron Maiden and Saxon in tandem with their own pint-fueled notoriety. Where they would drop the ball is through not executing the transition to the United States like Maiden and Def Leppard had done, but instead experiencing somewhat the same fate as Saxon, who would continue their goodly run at least into 1984 before falling off the radar.
As well, the all-important follow-up to No Sleep that they were about to make would be greeted with middling reviews and similar response from the fans. And, arguably, the whole thing was subliminally predestined due to the slapdash assemblage of the album jacket: Iron Fist featured a badly lit photo of just that, a true and physical item that might have looked impressive in real life, but couldn’t hold a blowtorch to a Joe Petagno illustration when it came to sticking it on a record jacket. Plus the title felt recycled (and indeed it was—the band had once, for contractual reasons, billed itself as Iron Fist and the Hordes from Hell), and all the type on the album was uniformly rendered in tired fire-engine red. These things matter. Iron Fist looked like one of the many rushed and ill-conceived exploitation hits pockmarking the Motörhead catalog, and many a fan steeled himself, already making excuses and rationalizations, as he lowered the needle for the first time upon the inky blackness of his new purchase.
“We didn’t ever have any that were too bad,” says Lemmy, surveying the entire run of albums, “but the worst one was probably Iron Fist, because we were in the unenviable position of having to follow a live album that went straight in at No. 1. Which was kind of tricky, because you can’t very well do another live album. They’d been waiting for that one for five years, so that’s why it sold so quick so good. And every studio album you’re going to come up with is going to sound tame next to that. And we didn’t do a good studio album anyway. There were a couple of songs on there that weren’t even finished properly, like ‘Bang to Rights.’ It could have been a lot better, and I was sorry that it wasn’t. So I didn’t like that album. Plus we let Eddie produce it, which was a mistake. Like I say, it was also following No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, which didn’t help. The next studio album after a great live album is always going to sound a bit wet.”
After 30-plus years of temporal distance, most fans have come to view assessments like Lemmy’s as too harsh, and one figures the common narrative from Lemmy himself combines years of his own words on the subject with memories of the early reviews, mixed with the way journalists speak about the album today and with fan reaction over 30 years. In other words, the narrative has ossified, in no small part due to remarks from the band itself, and it takes a lot of will to sort through the legend of disappointment surrounding Iron Fist to enjoy the songs for what they are.
May 12, 1982, Toronto—second to last gig for Fast Eddie Clarke as a member of Motörhead.
© Martin Popoff
With the band feeling overworked, further cracks in the armor occurred when Phil decided he didn’t want to work with producer Vic Maile anymore, this after two records, a studio album and a live album that vaulted the band to prominence as English hard-rock heroes, upsetters of the apple-cart, the real deal of British metal at a time when it was a bonafide bandwagon of a genre.
“Well, unfortunately, Phil, after the success of Ace of Spades, he got himself a brand new drum kit,” explains Fast Eddie. “And this happened to Jerry Shirley in my band Fastway, as well, as it happens. Because a brand new drum kit, it’s his pride and joy: ‘I love it, I love it, I love it.’ And unfortunately with Vic, it didn’t work very well in the studio. Vic couldn’t get it down good in the little studio where we had done Ace of Spades, as it was possibly a bit big for the room. I don’t know what the row was about because I wasn’t present, but they had a row about it and I know Phil was unhappy with the sound. And Vic, he was only a little fellow, but if he got the bit between his teeth, he could be quite belligerent. So they had this standoff situation, which I didn’t think was that serious. But once Phil said, ‘Man, I can’t work with Vic anymore.’ I said, ‘Come on, sit down, it can’t be that bad, what’s the matter? What is this about never wanting to work with Vic again?’ So that was that.”
“He was generally cavalier,” answers Eddie, asked if this was in character or if he was usually pretty easygoing about sounds, as one would surmise given Motörhead’s excessively rough productions. “But there were certain things he got really uptight about. The sound had to be right; everything had to be right for him. I can remember one time, ‘My high hat is not quite in the right place,’ you know, right in the middle of a recording. So believe it or not, as Motörhead, we were very—it doesn’t sound like it—but we were actually right on the money when it came to trying to get things right. People probably laugh at that, but I mean, Phil, I know he spent a lot of time on his drums and I spent an awful lot of time on my guitars, changing the strings, trying different sounds.”
And so it would fall upon Fast Eddie himself, of all people, to produce Iron Fist, Eddie having proven his stripes by working with Motörhead-like NWOBHM upstarts Tank on their Filth Hounds of Hades debut.
“If you really want to know, that was very difficult,” begins Eddie, on this odd turn of events. “I had obviously done the Tank album, and not thought much of it. The management wanted me to do it. I wanted to do the Girlschool album as well, because I’d done the demos. But Gerry Bron wouldn’t let me, because he didn’t want to interfere with Motörhead. Well, Doug Smith, the manager, he had his foot in the door with Tank, and I think he didn’t give a fuck. He wanted his guys to sell, so if they could use me as a lead, they would. So at first we had got set up with Vic Maile and then Phil had his falling out with Vic Maile. I must add that Vic didn’t like the kit much, and as I said, Phil and him had a fucking barmy, and Phil refused to work with Vic Maile anymore. So we needed to find a producer. I said, well, I don’t want to produce it. I can’t produce and fucking play on it, you know? So that was how that went.”
“So then we talked to Chris Tsangarides,” continues Eddie, on the hot NWOBHM hand at the time, particularly through his work with Tygers of Pan Tang. “We had a chat with him. Nice guy, you know, sort of dope-smoking hippie type. And we had a drink with him, me and Phil; Lemmy wasn’t there. Lemmy was very strange at this time. I don’t know why, but Lemmy had got the hump about something. But looking back, I see that there was a problem. He had a problem with me, and I don’t know what that was. He later claimed that it was some girl I was shagging that had something to do with him, but that wasn’t true. I had a girlfriend, so I don’t know what he was talking about. He’d got the hump with me, and I think the Tank thing might have upset him. Anyway, if I missed it, I missed it completely. But of course, Chris Tsangarides wanted ten thousand pounds. Well, ten thousand pounds to us was a fucking fortune. Because we’ve only got a couple of hundred pounds a week, you know? And so, yeah, when somebody says, ‘Well, I want ten grand,’ well, fuck off. Because it’s all very well you made your kip if we’re all on small money. But if one side needs to be paid seriously, we don’t go for it, because it’s too much money to us. And then we had another guy, John Antony, who we went to meet in th
e King’s Road; all three of us went for that, and he wanted twenty thousand pounds. He used to work at Trident, and he was engineer on the Queen stuff. We were desperately looking for somebody to produce us but of course he also wanted too much money.
“In the end, the record company was really pushing us to do this fucking Iron Fist. Because the record company was in trouble. And they needed us to put a record out, so they could make some money. The record company was going skint and they needed a Motörhead album. We weren’t ready. And, so they’re pushing us and pushing us. In the end, the management, said, ‘Why don’t we let Eddie do it?’ And I didn’t really want to. Phil says, ‘Yeah, Eddie can do it. He did the first album on Tank; why don’t we get Eddie to do it?’ And so then it was just, well, I don’t care. You see what I mean? So, of course, the record company is thinking, well, it will get the job done. And the management are thinking it was straight money, you see, because I never got any money for it. So of course it’s like straight money. So see? There’s this other stuff going on. So the whole thing was fucked, from the off. And like I said, Lemmy was not really on board generally.”
So the producer’s fee went from £10,000 to £20,000 to zero.
“Yeah, of course, and everybody laughed. So, in a nutshell, yes. Which is a fucking bummer. For that to come into play, at this stage in our career, was a mistake. But anyway, so we went on. And of course, we were struggling, right in the album. To be honest, we were struggling for material. It wasn’t like, this was hard graft. And I didn’t realize that the vibes were so bad. Phil was taking smack at the time. He also had a girlfriend who was doing a bit of smack. We didn’t know that. But it explains a lot, what happened later. And so of course, I didn’t really see much of Phil. Lemmy? I didn’t see much of Lemmy either. We used to meet up down at the rehearsal room, but most of that was spent in the pub. It was hard work getting Lemmy out of the pubs, to do some work on the songs. And the riffs . . . I was pretty riffed out at that time. We needed a serious break. It had been a busy time. And we’d just come back from class and now we’re struggling for riffs, which made the whole thing worse. All I remember about the songs is we struggled desperately in the rehearsal room to come up with the tunes.”
Fated to pull double duty—it serves Eddie right for producing a classic kerranging feast of “baby Motörhead” music like Filth Hounds of Hades, in fact, in December of 1981 into January of the new year, immediately before work was to begin on Iron Fist.
“Oh, they were great,” recalls Eddie, regarding Tank. “That was a great album; I actually really enjoyed doing that. But they had their own problems as well. Bands back then, there was a lot of drinking and partying going on, so there were these mood swings and stuff going on. But they’d supported us on the tour in Europe when we got back from America with Ozzy. They were really good. And hence, I got to know them and did the album. The guitarist, Peter—I had a lot of problems with Peter. I remember rolling around the fuckin’ studio in a punch-up with him. We traded blows a couple of times. But I couldn’t be seen to be beating up the fuckin’ artist, could I?”
As for what Eddie brought to the Tank sessions, “Nothing really,” laughs Tank bassist and vocalist Algy Ward. “He just brought a lot of drink and a load of amphetamines, that’s all. And said it wasn’t loud enough. But no, Eddie he had to finish Filth Hounds quick to go and do Iron Fist. And then he pissed off to what would become Fastway. A couple of the songs on the Fastway album would’ve ended up on the Iron Fist album, or, well, whatever the next Motörhead album would’ve been. But he’d just had enough of that sort of nonsense.”
Similar dismissive missive from Tank drummer Mark Brabbs: “With all due respect, not much, really. Because on the first album we’d spent a year writing it as such, just in the studio writing songs. Then we spent a good nine months touring it before we actually got in to record. We went to DJM Studios to put down demos, with the DJM engineer. And then Eddie came along and produced the single, with a guy called Speedy Keen, which was quite good. But as it happened, nearly everything was done. Not being disrespectful to Eddie, because he’s done a good job, but there wasn’t really much left for him to do apart from get a sound up, possibly, which the engineer would’ve done anyway.”
“We were kind of on ice anyway,” furthers Eddie, who, if Lemmy was to be believed, was quitting the band every other day by this point. “And you get a lot of time off when you’re in a band, so I said, okay, I’ll have a look at it for them. And like I say, the management, they also managed Tank, and they wanted to use my name to sell the record. So it was a bit more like that than anything else. But I had done, previously, a single with them, for DJM Records. This would’ve been a year or so before. It was also when I did the Girlschool demos. See, I used to love being producer, because I used to love recording. I mean, when I was a kid, 10 years old, I had sold me train set and got a little tape recorder, so I’d always been into that. I just wish computers and that had been around earlier, so I could have had a 24-track in me living room, you know?”
The Iron Fist sessions had started at Jackson’s in Rickmansworth, but once the dust-up between Phil and Vic happened, the guys had to uproot and go elsewhere.
“We went to Morgan Studios,” continues Eddie, “and I used Will Reid-Dick, my old friend engineer, who’s a good man. We went through every day religiously to try to put this record together. Did the backing tracks. They went down relatively not too bad. They weren’t perfect, but no one was interested. Phil wasn’t interested, fucked off and we never saw him again. Lemmy had done his bass at that time, and then it was down to trying to get to the vocals. ‘Well, look man, I want to go to the pub.’ ‘I’ve got your vocals to do.’ ‘I’ll have to do it some other time.’ It was all that. In fact, when I tried to get him to do a replacement bass—he did a bum-out on one of the tracks—I couldn’t get him to do it. We had to fly in and out—in the old days, you had to fly it in on the quarter-inch, so you had to record a note back onto a quarter-inch, and then fly it back onto the 24. Because I just couldn’t get him to play. He was just not interested. They both were not interested, and I never understood why. I never got it.”
Front cover of the Iron Fist tour program.
© Bill Baran Archive
“I don’t know if Iron Fist was rushed or not,” reflects Phil on the situation. “Certainly as each album came and went, it got quicker, as in the time it took to record an album. We were never ones to stay in the studio for a lot of time. For one, we couldn’t afford it, and for two, we weren’t that kind of band. Most of the stuff we played live in the studio, and then there would just be, obviously, guitar overdubs and bass overdubs and vocals. But all the albums were always live—I never did any overdubs—and the rhythm guitars are always live. I seem to remember there was a bit of animosity or shit going on, because it was produced by Eddie and Will Reid-Dick. But it was very low-key and it was mainly between Eddie and Lemmy.”
Iron Fist, recorded in fits and starts between January 26 and March 1 of 1981, would be issued on April 17, hot on the heels of the opening title track emerging as a single (backed with non-LPer “Remember Me, I’m Gone”) two weeks earlier. All of the nagging issues with the wider album can be heard within this dog’s breakfast of a title track itself. “Iron Fist” opens, ill-advisedly, with the exact same Lemmy bass strum as “Ace of Spades,” after which it proceeds to become a weaker version of that top-shelf Motörhead classic. Eddie and Will’s production is essentially correct, not gravely lacking in any department, but it’s not particularly powerful. And then when Phil sounds sloppy on top of it, and maybe too loud, compounding the wobbler of a performance, it’s not a grand opening statement, even if the song’s anthemic chorus helps render it the album’s most enduring track.
“Heart of Stone” is similarly fast, rickety and under-written. Compression would be a debate primarily of CD-era production, but whatever is going on here result
s in a similar level of ear fatigue to the most egregiously heavy records of the 2000s that are victims of too much compression. Thankfully, the guys then switch gears with “I’m the Doctor,” offering a simple, old-time rock ’n’ rollsy number punked-up beyond recognition, but easy on the ears nonetheless due to its rootsy charm and Lemmy’s comfort with the historical rock idiom.
But then the album begins to exude a degree of hue and dimension. “Go to Hell” and “Loser” both hang on melancholy heavy metal riffs and all of a sudden Iron Fist is beginning to look desperate in a heroic way, white-knuckled, producing hidden gems of quality art through the fog of exhaustion. Closing side one of the original vinyl, however, is another nondescript quick one, “Sex & Outrage,” reflecting a similar degradation in the quality of Judas Priest’s fast songs as they went from the high integrity of Sin After Sin and Stained Class to the sawed-off Kiss songs all over British Steel. Motörhead didn’t have quite as far to fall as Priest in terms of riffic complexity, but the valid complaint was that these fast songs offered nothing more in terms of creativity over the band’s previous proto-thrash numbers, and maybe even less when it came to the disintegrating chemistry between the pillars of the rhythm section, namely Kilmister and Taylor.
Over to side two and Iron Fist punches above weight with another quiet classic, “America,” which is a newer, groovier kind of metal for the guys, on top of which Lemmy barks compact and colorful words of both praise and damnation of what would soon be his adopted homeland.
Of course he also comments on American women. “I like them because they’re crazy,” quips Lem. “If you get a real good American girl, then she is fucking nuts. She is open to any idea and any avenue of thought. American girls—and American men—are eager to learn stuff and they are not afraid to say so. The other side of it is that Americans are always full of extremes. They have an attitude of, ‘I know it all so don’t try to tell me nothing.’ If you get a good American person on your side then that is a great friend to have.”
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