The health struggles of Motörhead legend Lemmy Kilmister through the final years of his eventful life - and the typically bullish way in which he dealt with them - have been warmly discussed by some of his closest peers and collaborators in a series of new interviews commemorating the tenth anniversary of his passing.
Speaking to Metal Hammer for their special celebratory new issue, Lemmy's former bandmates, colleagues and associates open up on his life, legacy and the man he was behind the scenes - and it seems that when his fast and furious lifestyle started to catch up with him, he refused to let it keep him down.
It was a diabetes diagnosis in the early 2000s that began a string of health issues for Lemmy, who would ultimately pass away in December 2015 aged 70.
“What started all of this problem was the diabetes," confirms Todd Singerman, who managed Motörhead from 1992 onwards. "That’s when we had to try to get hm off booze. That was never going to happen. His compromise was vodka and orange juice. Orange juice is all sugar, but in his mind it was cleaner. Doctors used to tell me, ‘He needs more water, more hydration.’ So the fucker, in front of my face, put two more ice cubes in his drink.”
Cameron Webb, who produced Motörhead's albums from 2004-2015, remembers one particularly dicey situation around the recording of one of Motörhead's final records. “When we started [2013’s] Aftershock, Lemmy told us he was going to need to get a pacemaker put in after he finished recording," he explains.
"He’d seen a doctor, but he wanted to do a record first. We did songs’ worth of pre-production, but I felt like five of those were not good at all. We decided to take a break – he’d get his pacemaker put in, and come back to do the remaining five songs with more ideas. So Lemmy goes away and sees his doctor, and the doctor is like, ‘Holy shit! If you’d waited another week, you’d have died. We need to put this in today.’ It was supposed to be a one-day process originally, but he ended up in hospital for like two weeks. He’d almost died.”
“I said, Lemmy, you gotta start eating more vegetables," adds Singerman. "So he had sour cream and onion potato chips. in his mind, those were the vegetables.”
Even some of Lemmy's former bandmates attempted to calm him down in his later years - but the rock 'n' roll legend wasn't having any of it. “We did have that difficult conversation about slowing down," recalls Hawkwind singer/guitarist Dave Brock. "I sent him a text saying: ‘A live legend, a dead hero’. Flying around the world and the stress of playing concerts isn’t good for your body, but I don’t think he paid it too much attention."
Lemmy's death came just four months after Motörhead's final studio album, Bad Magic - and just over two weeks after their final ever concert, at the Max-Schmeling-Halle in Berlin, Germany.
You can read more about Lemmy's life and career, as told by those that knew him best, in the new issue of Metal Hammer, out now. Order yours online.
