Lemmy Kilmister

Lemmy Kilmister

Motörhead’s most iconic song, “Ace of Spades,” opens with Lemmy Kilmister playing a tap-dancing lead bass line before falling into a melody that sounds like his Rickenbacker is headed straight to hell as he sings about feeling “born to lose.” Both in his poetry and his bass playing, Kilmister’s aesthetic was all about reckless abandon. Prior to Motörhead, he was a rhythm guitar player who switched to bass to play with space rockers Hawkwind. “[Bass] is just like playing the guitar without the top two strings,” Kilmister once said. “I just made chords out of what strings I had left. It’s unorthodox, but it works for us.” After his predilection for uppers got him ousted from that band, he developed his own gritty style. “Lemmy was an influence on me in the way he uses distortion — that was different, new, and exciting,” Metallica’s late bassist Cliff Burton once said. Kilmister’s approach perfectly matched his sandpapery voice and underdog wit, and it made him unique — a distinction he was proud of. “I think I play like nobody else does,” he once said. “I always wanted to be John Entwistle, but since that place was taken, I became a lesser version.”

Rolling Stone