Lemmy was the scruffy, toxic demi-god beloved of rock zine-runners like me. We never imagined losing him

You couldn’t make up Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister. Frontman and bassist for Motorhead, he once claimed that “if [we] moved in next door to you, your lawn would die.” His body was reputedly so toxic after years of drug-taking, a transfusion of anyone else’s blood would have killed him. To his detractors, he was an “ugly” embodiment of the worst of rock’n’roll excess. To fans of rock and metal, he stood for many of its best qualities.

In Hawkwind, he was a speed freak in a band of acid heads, a bassist who’d never touched the instrument before he was drafted in last minute to cover a festival. His unique style, perfected in Motorhead, owed as much to that experience being a rhythm guitarist playing bass. Yet the results were incredible. A friend once told me of first hearing ‘Ace of Spades’ at the age of 11, of him and a friend sitting around the record player, playing it over and over again, as if they were trying to work out what was happening to them.

For us rock zine-runners in the early 00’s, he was one of two immortal pillars of Metal – Ozzy Osbourne on one side, Lemmy on the other. Where Ozzy had the theatrics and spectacle, Lemmy had the raw, unadulterated passion of rock’n’roll. While neither made one the better, Motorhead’s was a punk aesthetic we appreciated to the bottom of our cashless, student scum pockets. Ozzy belonged to those who could afford to see him. Lemmy was ours.

He was a legend in his own lifetime, an everyman god of the gutter whose music shook you to your core, but who you could still chat to in the pub afterwards -- and would still be there long after you’d left. Friends who knew him talk of a gentleman with a taste for misbehavior, a well-read, hard-drinking historian with a taste for Nazi memorabilia. While his collection gave many pause, he’d never espoused the ideology, speaking instead of how “throughout history, it’s always been the bad guys who dressed the best: Napoleon, the Confederates, the Nazis.”

As readers of 2002 autobiography White Line Fever will know, Lemmy would be the last to claim perfection. Yet, for me, Lemmy stood for doing it all in spite of that. Of taking life on your own terms, no one else’s. With his death on 28th December, he missed all the end of year farewell issues. He couldn’t have timed it better.

That this happened so soon after the death of bandmate Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor, is salt in a wound already cut straight to the bone. To us, Lemmy was a scruffy demi-god.

Undeniably human as he was, the idea that one day we’d be without him -- that he’d be gone before Ozzy, for heaven’s sakes -- had never even crossed our minds. Cancer? There’s just no way. As on the 1984 single from No Remorse, Lemmy was Killed by Death -- the only thing that could keep him down.