MOTÖRHEAD's LEMMY Talks Gear In New Interview

Peter Hodgson of the I Heart Guitar blog recently conducted an interview with MOTÖRHEAD mainman Lemmy Kilmister. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

I Heart Guitar: Your signature Marshall amp is very cool.

Lemmy: The old Marshall stack. It's most gratifying, y'know? It proves I was doing something right, I think. They just took one of my old amps, which has been on the road with me for years, and fucked around with it. They didn't remember making it! They said, "We have no prints for this. We don't know what this is! Have you modified it?" and I said, "No, I've just fitted a new output transformer a couple of times, that was it." They were like, "Oh wow." The Lemmy stack is a bit more toppy than the ones I've got. They made it a bit too much like a Super Lead amp because that was the only one they had a plan for! Hahaha.

I Heart Guitar: I guess you would have seen some very early Marshalls when you were a roadie for Hendrix?

Lemmy: Yeah, I did that for about six, seven months. He used to use a stack of Marshalls and a stack of… what was it… there was a shop in London used to make their own stacks, and he used to have one of those and a Marshall stack… Music City, yeah. They were both really good. He used to link them together, the output of one into the input of the other, so you've got what's known as a slave amp. It was amazing working with him. Imagine, y'know? Fucking Jimi Hendrix, y'know? Jimi Hendrix!

I Heart Guitar: You're pretty well known for using Rickenbacker basses. Have you changed what you use much over the years or is it still the same basic bass?

Lemmy: Well, they made the Lemmy model of that, right, the carved one, and I've been using that for years. I've got a couple of other Rickenbackers as well. I mean, I just like the shape, y'know? And the old ones, you used to have to replace the pickups, because the old pickups were shit, but now they're making the new pickups really good.

I Heart Guitar: What are they like to play? Do you like your basses to play easy or to fight you back?

Lemmy: It's never easy! I sanded the neck down on them to make it a little easier to run up and down the neck, but other than that it's just from the shop.

I Heart Guitar: Your bass style is really distinctive. Where does it come from?

Lemmy: It comes from being a guitar player before I was a bass player, really. I like to do a lot of chords and a lot of fill-ins instead of just "bom-de-bom-de-bom," because that's fucking boring to me. I always wanted to be able to show off like the guitar players do. I think I managed that alright!

Read the entire interview from the I Heart Guitar blog.