MOTÖRHEAD Guitarist Talks About His Children Following In His Musical Footsteps

Simon Milburn of The Metal Forge recently conducted an interview with MOTÖRHEAD guitarist Phil Campbell. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

On the idea of his children following in his musical footsteps:

Phil: "I advise them as much as I can. They're doing really good. They're all great musicians and stuff. Two of them have a band and everything. We just built a ProTools studio in my house… a digital one for my eldest son. He passed his music technology with first class honours last year at uni. They've got a track coming out on the Electronic Arts Rugby thing that is coming out in March. Their stuff is just the fuckin' best band I've heard for the last ten years. My eldest son sings. Todd Rundgren (Campbell) is his name by the way. Todd, he sings, writes most of the stuff and plays guitar. Then, my middle boy, Dane, he drums and my youngest boy, Tyler, he's not in a band but he played in a three-piece with his mate, Mike, on bass for two years. So the drummer, Dane, decided a few years ago that he wanted to take up bass seriously. So I get him this really nice bass that he buys himself and everything. He goes to expensive bass lessons. The first some he comes back learning… what is it? 'Portrait of Tracy' by Jaco Pastorius … like the hardest thing… I'm going 'What? What? You're kidding me!' Then, my 14-year-old Tyler, at the time, he goes to guitar lessons once a week and I pick him up and I say, 'So what did you learn today, Tyler?' expecting an IRON MAIDEN song. He went 'Oh some STEELY DAN song, Dad. 'Deacon Blues'.' I went 'You're fucking kidding me?' It's great man."

On the secret to MOTÖRHEAD's success and endurance:

Phil: "What our secret is is that we write our music for the three of us. We don't write it for any fans, for any record company. We write what we wanna play and if people don't like it, then OK, tough shit. We're disappointed, but we'll just do another one. It's like years ago, I realized. I'd do a guitar solo and say 'Well, what do you think of that boys?' and somebody would say 'Oh that's fuckin' amazing!' and somebody would say 'Well that's crap, Phil!' and somebody would say 'Oh it's not bad,' and I'm thinking, 'Well, what the hell is it?' You can take constructive criticism from people but it's not as pure then if you have other ideas come in. That's probably one of the reasons why we've stuck together that long. It's honest music. If we want to do a track with four or five violins or something like that, it doesn't matter. If we wanted to do a track with ten recorders or an instrumental with a triangle, it'd still be MOTÖRHEAD because that's what we want to do. It's give and take on the road. We're all really good friends with each other. We spend more time with each other than we do with our families and stuff. We have a sense of humour. You have to have a sense of humour. Sometimes, I burn my sense of humour out. It's hard work tryin' to make these fuckers laugh."

On the many changes in the music industry since Phil first started a career in music:

Phil: "It's more corporate-orientated (now). They just see us as a product. Y'know, they put these boy bands together and stuff like that, but good music will always stick through. They've never given heavy rock, especially in England… there used to have a Friday rock show with Tommy Vance for two hours on a Friday and that was all. Tommy sadly passed away. But the music scene worldwide is pretty shitty. There's some fuckin' crap you hear on TV… garbage. Look at 'Top of the Pops'! Twenty-five years ago, everyone in England was like 'Oh it's Thursday night, 'Top of the Pops'. Who'll be on it now?' We'd have SLADE or T.REX or someone else exciting! It's a bunch of twats now. Some guy miming, breakdancing or something like that, meaningless lyrics with some song that somebody's done on a Trinity Triton keyboard and some fuckin' fat dancers there. Because of the video age, I think a lot of it has to do with it. A song can be a pretty mediocre crap song right, but if it's got a good video, they might go buy it because of the video. If we just heard it as a record, the song and all that, it'd be like 'That's a fuckin' load of shit!' I also think that in music stores, they shouldn't categorize artists. They should put the name of the artist and that's it. Like heavy metal, and stuff like that, someone might say 'Oh yeah I've heard a heavy metal band before — URIAH HEEP. I didn't like that so I won't listen to heavy metal again.' Just put the name on it and take a chance. You're not getting steered towards the labelling."

Read the entire interview at TheMetalForge.com.