In November 1978, when Motörhead headlined their first show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, a venue that would become central to their story, they were still seen as a curiosity. Their self-titled debut album, recorded in just three days in April 1977, had been released the previous summer. This initial effort was a patchwork of styles, blending influences from Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies, and it featured a reworked version of an earlier track released as On Parole.
The album’s standout was the title track, a slang term for ‘speed freak,’ which was a remake of an old Hawkwind B-side. The single garnered some attention, with NME warning listeners to check for structural damage after playing it and Sounds calling Lemmy the “Lee Marvin of megadeath rock.”
Motörhead’s breakthrough came unexpectedly when a lackluster rendition of “Louie Louie,” mistaken for new wave, landed the band on Top of the Pops in October 1978. This performance hinted that Motörhead might have something special. This marked the beginning of a remarkable four-year period where nearly everything Lemmy and Motörhead touched turned to gold—or at least silver.
Guitarist ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke explained, “Lemmy was still finding his feet as a lyricist. My job was to give him something to sing over.” He added, “The trick was: you’re bombing along having a great time, then you put a couple of little changes in and the next thing you’ve got a song.”
Drummer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor was recognized as an equal co-writer because, as Eddie noted, “We knew if we made it big, we didn’t want Lemmy and me rolling up in Rolls-Royces while Phil rode a bicycle.”
It was Phil, a former speed dealer and skinhead from Leeds, who introduced the pivotal musical element that transformed Motörhead from a punk-metal act into something transcendent. While rehearsing in Notting Hill Gate, Phil had just acquired a new drum kit that, unusually for the time, featured double kick drums.
Eddie recalled, “Phil said, ‘Why can’t we do a song like this?’ He was going crazy with those two bass drums, not quite sure what to do with them! Lemmy responded, ‘All right then,’ started playing in E as he usually did, and I jumped in. Ten minutes later, we had ‘Overkill.’ We were all grinning, thinking, ‘Yeah, that was pretty good. Let’s do it again!’”
The exuberance of the track was echoed in Lemmy’s lyrics: “On your feet you feel the beat, it goes straight to your spine / Shake your head, you must be dead if it don’t make you fly!”
The band was so thrilled with “Overkill” that they made it the title track of their second album. Former Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller recorded the project “hot” at Roundhouse Studios in north London, and both the Overkill single and album were released just weeks apart in late February and early March 1979.
Fueled by a 20-date UK tour, Overkill became Motörhead’s first album to break into the Top 30 in the UK, reaching No. 24, while the single marked their first Top 40 hit. This success was accompanied by another appearance on Top of the Pops, the cover of Sounds, and a half-hour live broadcast on Radio 1 in May.
The day after the Radio 1 broadcast, the band played their first show abroad, performing in front of a curious and mostly stunned audience at the Palace d’hiver in Lyon, France.
“Once we cracked the little formula of how to really work together on ‘Overkill,’” Eddie said, “that’s when we really started to take off.”
As Phil once stated, “You hear a lot of good things and a lot of bad things about Lemmy, and most of them are true. He is a c**t, he is a bastard, and he does knock off other people’s chicks. But he’s also incredibly funny. Every time you go out with him, it’s a memorable experience.”
Eddie added, “Phil and I were especially close because Lemmy was a bit of a loner. I never really thought about whether I liked Lemmy or not; when we played together, we felt indestructible.”
Ultimately, it was Phil’s “mental” drumming that left a lasting impact. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich recalled how Phil’s work changed his life at age 15.
“I got introduced to Motörhead’s music in 1979 when ‘Overkill’ came out,” he remembered. “I was in a record store when the double kick drum intro started, and I had never heard anything like that before.”
Lars said, “Phil Taylor was the first drummer I ever heard play that double kick drum thing. The first time I heard ‘Overkill,’ it blew my mind. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Of course, I wanted to play like that too.”
The double kick drum would become a defining feature that contributed to the relentless intensity of the thrash and speed-metal bands that followed. Meanwhile, Taylor remained blissfully unaware of the revolution he had sparked, recalling that when Metallica supported Motörhead on an early tour, he could barely comprehend their speed: “They played so damn fast.”
Initially, Lemmy shouted at Taylor, “Fucking hell! Can’t you play a straight four?!”
However, Lemmy’s bass playing was fundamentally different. He stripped away the brontosaurus bass sound typical of 70s rock—“there was no bottom end at all,” he proudly claimed—and replaced it with a more aggressive style. As Lemmy cheerfully remarked one night while brandishing a large silver dagger coated in white powder, “Don’t fix what ain’t broken.”
Thus, the similar bass lines in their legendary anthem “Ace of Spades” and the iconic “Overkill” can be traced back to this innovative approach. Ultimately, it was the double kick drums on “Overkill” that set the standard for what was to come.
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