‘Hard, fast, nasty, disgusting’: why Motorhead’s No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith is the perfect rock album
I well remember the first time I heard Motorhead. Tuning into the weekly chart rundown, at 6.40 on the evening of July 17 1981, the DJ Tommy Vance announced on Radio 1 that the structurally unstable trio had gatecrashed the Top 40 at number six. By way of proof, he played them. Whoosh. Age 10, in fewer than four minutes my life changed forever.
The unlikely hit single was the live version of the song Motorhead, from the concert LP No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith. An unbridled and at least halfway-deranged paean to the wonders of amphetamine sulphate – “can’t get enough, and you know it’s righteous stuff” – I’d never heard a sound like it. Incandescent and explosive, its feral power was like being caught in the radius of a nuclear blast.
To mark its 40th anniversary, last week No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith was re-released in lavishly expansive form. Featuring 71 songs recorded at concerts in England in the spring of 1981, its bounty of source material is both fascinating and unnecessary. The finest live album ever released – certainly the best that I’ve ever heard – its original 11-tracks cannot be improved by archival expansion or pretty packaging. It’s perfect as it is.
People who love music will each have a story of the first time an album or an artist upended their life. Just this week, members of the press marked the 50th birthday of Blue, by Joni Mitchell, with rightful eulogies. Before you know it, it’ll be the golden jubilee of Exile On Main Street, from the Rolling Stones, and Dark Of The Side Of The Moon, by Pink Floyd. Each of these records are things of beauty. But only No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith features a song called The Hammer.
Reviewing the album for the New Musical Express, Paul Morley wrote that “No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith is disgusting, bleeding, gruesome magnificence and Motorhead are one of the Great Popular Groups. The LP represents the limitations, absurdity and rare glory of HM rock so comprehensively and madly it has to be considered a major work. It tells you everything you need to know about the stinking sin of rock'n'roll, the sweaty faces and the vacant myths.”
For what it’s worth, I think Morley is only half right. Motorhead’s first live LP is a major work, but it isn’t heavy metal. What it is is rock’n’roll in its purest form. The group’s only number one album, the lineage of No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith can be traced back to the movement’s original pioneers. The simple beauty of its secret ingredient is that it takes a template laid down by artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis and – God knows how – contrives a way to make it louder, faster and more explosive still.
"It's more or less the way you look and the sort of audiences you attract that gets you labeled as heavy metal," drummer “Philthy Animal” Taylor told the writer Adam Sweeting, in 1981. I reckon he’s onto something here; Motorhead looked like Black Sabbath as imagined by the Muppets. "But at every interview we always try to point out that we don't like to be called HM music. It’s more like hard, fast, nasty, disgusting rock’n’roll.”
For bandleader Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, rock’n’roll was a lifelong gift. As a child, in the 1950s he would listen to the pirate broadcaster Radio Luxembourg on a transistor radio; captivated by the wild sounds of a revolutionary movement, he would later describe the music of Little Richard (in particular) as “fierce joy”. That’s rather good, isn’t it? Decades later he was able to imbue his own band with the same magical quality. Fierce joy is the reason No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith is as resplendent today as it was on the morning of its release.
I don’t imagine there’s a month that’s gone by in 40 years that I haven’t listened to it at least once. Possibly as a means of shutting me up, in the summer of 1981 my mother bought me its hit single and then the album itself (for good measure, she even got me a Motorhead t-shirt). At this young age, I had already taken a tumble for a number of songs – Oliver’s Army by Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Master Blaster (Jammin’) by Stevie Wonder, Dog Eat Dog by Adam & The Ants – but this was the first time I realised that it was possible to fall in love with a band.
Even now I struggle to explain just how intoxicating it was. Testing the reliability of my childhood memory, last week I purchased the vinyl edition of No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith from a local record shop. Just as I remembered, its inner sleeve features a polaroid picture of a crowd who look like they belong in an insane asylum. “I think these are Aberdeen,” reads the caption. It seems fanciful to say that I stared at this image for hours. But it’s true. I had no idea that people like this existed.
“Recorded live in England surrounded by maniacs,” read the sleeve notes on the back cover. “Dedicated to all the people who have travelled with, drunk with, fought with and screwed with us on the roads of England and Europe for five years… Thanks to everyone who came to see us. Thanks to Smirnoff and Carlsberg without whom lots of this would have been coherent.” Tongue protruding only slightly, I’d read these words again and again. What do they even mean?
It’s remarkable just how little information I had to hand. No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith didn’t bother to apprise me of the names of the people in the band. I didn’t know if they’d been together for 15 months or 25 years. Recorded at the Queen’s Hall, in Leeds, and Newcastle City Hall, even the title is misleading. For years I assumed that the Hammersmith Odeon was the last date of the tour. Turns out that in 1981 they didn’t even play there.
Really, all I had to go on was my own intuition. These days I can clear a room in 10-minutes intellectualising Motorhead as one of the great ideas in all of rock’n’roll – in this, they’re much like the Ramones - but even I realise that at its point of contact the appeal is emotional. This is what you get from music that sounds like a supersonic jet. Just as well, too, because at age 10 emotions were all I had. Within the carnage, I caught my first whiff of chaotic lives and determined non-conformity. According to every available metric, Motorhead had no business being at number one.
“I’d never heard singing like that on an album before,” was Metallica frontman James Hetfield’s take on Lemmy’s ashtrays-and-shrapnel vocal style. “I didn’t even know that you could sing like that.”
Powered by the heavy fuel of sulphate, spirits and cigarettes, Motorhead were, as far I can tell, perfect lunatics. Fracturing his fingers in a fistfight, “Philthy Animal” Taylor once completed a tour with a drumstick gaffer-taped to his hand. After being dropped on his head during post-show horseplay, in Belfast, he undertook a subsequent campaign with a broken neck. (“He was lucky,” writes Lemmy in his autobiography White Line Fever, “he could have been paralysed forever.”) In honour of this mishap, Motorhead titled the short brace of shows the Short Sharp Pain In The Neck Tour.
But cossetted within the chaos was something special. Unusually for a record of its kind, the songs on No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith speak of the pursuit of happiness – unyielding and rugged for sure, but happiness all the same. “The pleasure is to play, makes no difference what you say,” they sing on Ace Of Spades. “Don’t be scared, live to win,” is the advice on Stay Clean. At times it can even seem like a credo. “I just live the life I lead, another beer is what I need, another gig my ears bleed,” they announce on (We Are) The Road Crew.
"Live and let live is the cornerstone of my life," Lemmy told the journalist Stephen Dalton, in 1981. "I'm essentially an anarchist – you can't trust people, you know? If you gave everybody the same amount of money tomorrow, in two weeks somebody somewhere would have most of it."
Ripped off and short-changed, during this time Motorhead made almost no money. Instead, they made a perfect album. There are times when I wonder if the reason I continue to listen to No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith is because I’ve yet to figure out how it’s possible for three musicians to make this much noise. But then I’m captured by its juggernaut force, by the unstoppable momentum of a band who appear to be playing on black ice, and suddenly I’m 10-years old once again. To this day, it remains the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard.
No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith (40th Anniversary Edition) is on release now