No. The trio that sold more records to the audience of the new wave of British heavy metal than almost any band inside it, and that sent a live album straight to number one in Britain in June 1981, at the very crest of that wave, was Motörhead, and it still has no place on the membership roll. Is Motörhead NWOBHM? It is the band the wave ran beside, borrowed from and copied. It never joined.
Speedway bikes are built for one job. They run on a single gear with no brakes at all, they burn methanol, and they cover four laps of a shale oval in about a minute, sliding sideways into every bend while the rider's steel shoe ploughs a furrow through the track, and no scrutineer alive would pass one for a road racing grid, however many road racers learned their throttle control by watching it. One gear, no brakes, nothing to slow down for. That was the band. The wave was the grid.
Formed in London in the summer of 1975, within weeks of Hawkwind firing its bassist in the middle of a North American tour, and first pressed onto vinyl in 1977 by Chiswick, a small independent better known for punk singles, the trio of Lemmy Kilmister, "Fast" Eddie Clarke and Phil Taylor was blowing the cones out of club PA systems across Britain two years before Sounds printed the phrase that named the wave.
How the wave was named, pressed and sold, from a pub disco in Kingsbury to the top of the album chart, runs through chapter two. Motörhead turns up there as a creditor rather than a member. The evidence for that comes in five kinds, and not one of them is a birth date.
What the covers say
A band's cover versions are its family album. Motörhead's go back to the fifties, to jump blues, rock and roll and the garage bands, and almost nothing in them came from the heavy rock of the seventies that the young British bands had grown up on.
The first single the band made for Bronze, the label Gerry Bron ran and that signed the trio in 1978, was "Louie Louie", written by Richard Berry in 1957 and hammered into a garage standard by the Kingsmen in 1963, and when Motörhead played it on Top of the Pops on 14 September 1978 the old three chord riff came out of the television with the chrome stripped off and the silencer sawn away. It reached number 68 on the UK singles chart. Nobody in the wave was covering the Kingsmen.
The debut album had already carried "Train Kept A-Rollin'", a jump blues from 1951 that the Yardbirds had turned into a guitar record in 1965, and in February 1981, when Motörhead and Girlschool cut an EP together, the song they chose to sing as a duet was "Please Don't Touch", a British rock and roll single by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates from 1959. Iron Maiden went to Montrose when it wanted a cover. Motörhead went to records pressed while most of the wave was still in the pram, and the songbook sets the band in a lineage that runs from fifties rock and roll through the pub circuit to punk, a line that crosses the wave rather than running inside it.
Who stood on the bill
Tour posters are harder evidence than headlines, and Motörhead's always put it above the wave rather than inside it.
The Barnsley five who opened for Motörhead when the Bomber tour went round Britain at the end of 1979, with one album to their name and the second not yet in the shops, were Saxon, and they came off those dates with a following that helped carry Wheels of Steel to number five the next spring. The wave queued for Motörhead's support slot. Motörhead never queued for anything of the wave's.
The wave queued for Motörhead's support slot. Motörhead never queued for anything of the wave's.
Two summers later the ranking was printed in the running order. The band at the top of the Heavy Metal Holocaust, an all-day bill staged at Vale Park, the Port Vale football ground in Stoke-on-Trent, on 1 August 1981, with Ozzy Osbourne second and one band of the wave, Vardis, near the bottom of the afternoon, was Motörhead. An elder under it, a newcomer far under that. The trio stood above both generations and belonged to neither.
The till, 1979 to 1982
The strongest case for membership is the sales ledger, and it deserves a fair hearing. Overkill reached number 24 in March 1979, Bomber reached number 12 that October, and Ace of Spades went to number four in November 1980. Iron Fist, the last studio salvo of that line-up, reached number six in April 1982. The classic line-up of Lemmy, Clarke and Taylor held together from 1976 until Clarke walked out in May 1982, a lifespan that lies almost exactly over the wave's own.
Taped on the band's British tour in the spring of 1981 and released by Bronze that June, No Sleep 'til Hammersmith went into the album chart at number one, and it plays like a rugby maul driven at the try line, three men bound so tightly around the beat that no tackler can get an arm between them, the whole mass shoved forward yard by yard while the crowd roars behind it. Nothing on it slows down. Nothing on it needs to.
Timing is not membership, though. The wave's audience made those records sell, and a headliner that plays to a movement's crowd is still the headliner. When Judas Priest wanted that crowd it trimmed its songs to fit, and did so on British Steel in April 1980. Motörhead had nothing to trim. Most of its songs had been built short, fast and loud since 1977, and the band changed not a note to earn the wave's money.
The trios built to its specification
The clearest sign that Motörhead stood outside the wave is how many bands inside it were built to its specification: three players, a bass driven as hard as the guitar, and a drummer with no interest in slowing down. No harmonised twin leads, no tenor climbing to the rafters, no seven minute epic about a mariner: the marks of the wave's best bands never once appear on a Motörhead record.
The London trio fronted by a bassist who had played on the Damned's Machine Gun Etiquette in 1979 went out as Tank, and its 1982 debut was produced by Clarke while he was still in Motörhead. The Newcastle three who took the same format onto Neat Records and kicked the grilles in on every speaker cabinet they could borrow, with a sound even cruder than their model's, called themselves Venom. Tyneside also sent Raven, three more, who ran the engine at a higher pitch.
A copy points back at its original, and every one of these points to London in 1977 rather than to the Soundhouse in 1979. Inside the wave there was a whole Motörhead faction. A faction named after an outsider is proof of the outsider.
Motörhead NWOBHM: the band's own word
The last witness is the band, and on this point it never wavered. For forty years Lemmy turned down the heavy metal label in any form, old wave or new, and introduced his trio from the stage as a rock and roll band until the final tour in December 2015, weeks before his death. Asked across three decades where the band belonged, he gave the same answer whoever was holding the microphone, and it never once had the words new wave in it. Bands are not always the best judges of their own shelf. This one happened to be right.
The five kinds of evidence fall the same way. The songbook is older than the wave, the bills set Motörhead above the wave's bands and above its elders alike, the sales came from the wave's crowd without the band bending an inch toward it, the wave's trios were built from its drawing, and the band said no. The record shows a forebear of half the wave, and of thrash after it, standing outside the roll, and what followed inside.
Is Motörhead NWOBHM? No. It is rock and roll played at a speed the wave spent four years learning to match, and it was there first.
