All this time on the road has not been without its cost, though. Decades of knocking back Jack, taking drugs and smoking like a chimney made Lemmy seem, like Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, another man with a famous appetite for life’s fastest lane, indestructible. But the last couple of years have seen Motörhead having to call in sick, cancel tours and, during last year’s Wacken Open Air festival in Germany, abandon their set midway through so Lemmy could be taken to hospital.
“I’ve had some health scares,” he admits, “and I’ve had to really cut back on smoking and drinking and whatever. But it is what it is. I’ve had a good life, a good run. I do what I do still. I’m sure I’ll die on the road, one way or another.”
Are you afraid of that?
“No.”
What do you think happens when you die?
“I don’t know.” Then he smiles. “I’ll tell you when I find out.”
That’s not something we want to think about too much right now, but this attitude sums up Lemmy. This devotion not just to a band, but to the life the band has given him, is what’s helped make Lemmy the icon he is. But use that word – or ‘legend’, or ‘hero’, or any of the other tags you can hang on him – to his face, and he’ll just casually shrug it off.
“Whatever I seem to be, that’s what I am – that’s the whole story right there,” is how he mulls over the notion that he’s anything other than Lemmy The Bloke.
So, when people call you a legend, how does that make you feel?
“As long as they don’t believe it, that’s alright.”
Can you understand why people say it?
“Well, who wouldn’t want a hero somewhere in their lives? And it might as well be me, ’cause I don’t take the piss out of them for it, and I don’t laugh at them because of it.”
That’s one thing I think people do see in you.
“Yeah, but I’m not a legend. I never thought of myself as being special in particular. Maybe I make brilliant music, but that’s about it.”
Do you always just think of yourself as Lemmy From Motörhead?
“Sort of,” he muses. “You probably see it differently because you’re young. We’ve always been around for you, haven’t we? But we haven’t always been around for me. I spent the first 30 years of my life without Motörhead, so there’s all that to think about. I’m just me; it’s not my job to do other people’s thinking about me for them.”
If you were to be the philosopher for a moment, what would you say that all this has taught you about the meaning of life?
“I never cared,” he shrugs. “See, that’s the great thing about me, I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck if I’m famous or not. I’m always going to be like, ‘It doesn’t really matter.’”
Again, that’s very Lemmy. Don’t give a shit. It doesn’t matter. Fuck it. Which is about as close to fatherly advice as you’ll get out of the man. Nobody tells Lemmy what to do, and he’s not going to do that to anyone else, either.
“I don’t give advice,” he says when asked. “I don’t say, ‘Do this, and do that, and don’t do this and don’t do all that.’ I’m all finished with that stuff, y’know. Whatever problems I had, [younger people] won’t run into, ’cause it was a different planet then. And I don’t think you should give advice anyway, I think it’s a really bad idea. People should make their own decisions and mistakes. That’s how I did it.”
Neither does Lemmy ‘do’ regrets. He once said, “I’ve given my life to rock’n’roll, and rock’n’roll has given me my life,” as fine a trade-off as one could imagine. He’s only ever had one real job, which his father got him, working as an engineer in the Hotpoint washing machine factory. But that didn’t last long. “I grew my hair ’til they fired me,” he chuckles. “And I’ve been on the road ever since.” Instead, Lemmy has been a pirate of the road. A genuine rock lifer who does what he does because it’s his whole life. And even in his imagination, it couldn’t have been any other way.
“There’s always shit you can bitch about in life,” he concludes. “Some people will always say, ‘I could have been an architect,’ or something. Well, fuck off.” And as he stubs out his fag and bids Kerrang! goodbye, hat perched firmly, proudly on his head, you’re glad. Lemmy is a reluctant hero. But that’s what makes him who he is. He and his band haven’t changed in four decades, they still work like dogs, and will do until, perhaps, the bitter end comes. And that’s just how Lemmy always wants it to be.
We’d say ‘Never change’, but it would be fruitless. Lemmy never will. And thank fuck for that.