Lemmy Kilmister spent his whole life denying that Motorhead were a metal band, and he was right, and it does not matter in the slightest. Every thrash record ever made is standing on something that band did between 1979 and 1981, and most of the people who made those records have said so in print.
What follows is the specific inventory: four things Motorhead supplied, why each one was necessary, and the one thing they did that had nothing to do with music at all.
The tempo, and the drum that made it possible
Overkill opens with Phil Taylor playing continuous double bass drum underneath a whole song, then stopping dead, then starting again, twice, so the track appears to finish and refuses to. Nothing in rock had done that.
The double kick itself was not new. Jazz drummers had two pedals decades earlier, and Ian Paice had used the trick as an effect. What was new was treating it as the floor of a song rather than as a moment inside one, and the consequence is structural rather than decorative. Once the kick drum runs continuously, the guitar has to fill the space above it, and the only way to fill that space at that tempo is with continuous downstrokes. The entire thrash right hand is implied in the first thirty seconds of that record.
The bass that took up the guitar's room
Lemmy played a Rickenbacker through Marshall guitar amplifiers with the treble up, chording rather than walking, and used a pick. That is not how anybody played bass. It put the instrument in the same frequency range as the guitar, where it fought for space and lost some of it and won some of it, and the result was a three piece band that sounded like six people.
For a generation of teenagers who could not afford a fourth member, that was not an aesthetic preference, it was a solution. Half the thrash bands that formed between 1981 and 1984 were trios or effectively trios, and the reason they could get away with it is on those records.
The nerve, and the volume
Motorhead were loud in a way that was genuinely a design decision rather than a boast. The band travelled with a wall of cabinets, they played at a level that damaged rooms, and the whole presentation said that this was not entertainment so much as an event you survived.
That posture is inherited whole by thrash. Nothing about a Slayer show in 1986 makes sense without a Motorhead show in 1980 having happened first, and the difference between a band who want to be liked and a band who want to be endured was established by Lemmy long before anybody downpicked anything.
The thing that was not musical
Motorhead were the one band in Britain that both the metal audience and the punk audience would go and see, and they did not have to negotiate a truce to make that happen, because there was nothing in the music to argue about.
That mattered more than any riff. The whole crossover trade, which supplied thrash with its drum pattern and its sense of proportion, is downstream of the discovery that the two audiences could stand in the same room. In Britain in 1980 that discovery was made at Motorhead shows, and it took the American critics another eight years to notice it had happened.
| Element | Where it shows up | Record |
|---|---|---|
| Continuous double kick as a floor | Every thrash drummer after 1983 | Overkill, 1979 |
| Punk tempo with metal equipment | The founding tempo of the genre | Overkill, Bomber |
| Bass as a second guitar | Trio and near trio line ups | All of them |
| Volume as a statement | Live presentation from 1983 on | Ace of Spades, 1980 |
| One audience, not two | The crossover trade | Not a record: a room |
What Motorhead did not supply
Being precise about the debt means being precise about its limits, and there are two.
The first is the right hand. Motorhead's guitar playing is not palm muted downpicked rhythm work; it is fast, loose, blues derived rock playing with the gain up. The specific technique that defines thrash came from somewhere else, mostly from British bands who were listening to Judas Priest.
The second is arrangement. A Motorhead song is a rock song, with verses and choruses and a structure you can predict on first listen. Thrash songs are riff sequences that go somewhere and do not come back, and that idea came out of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal rather than out of London.
Which is why Lemmy's denial was accurate and also beside the point. He did not make thrash. He made it possible, supplied about half its equipment, and then spent thirty five years being thanked from stages by people whose records he had not much liked.
The debt, in the bands' own words
The citations are unusually consistent. Lars Ulrich has described the band as foundational and Metallica have covered them. Slayer covered "Iron Fist". Sepultura, Kreator, Sodom and Overkill have all named them in print, and Sodom in particular took the entire template of a fast, loud, filthy trio directly from them.
There is a reason the tributes are so uniform. Most influences in this genre are contested, because bands disagree about whether they had heard a record before or after they wrote something. Nobody disputes Motorhead, because everybody had heard Motorhead. In a scene assembled from imported cassettes and half remembered radio plays, they were the one fixed point.
The full account of the period they belong to is in the chapter this belongs to, and the riff writing half of the inheritance is dealt with in Diamond Head, "Am I Evil?" and the Riff Metallica Built a Career On.
What Lemmy thought of it
He was consistently, cheerfully dismissive, and the dismissal is worth quoting in spirit if not in words. Motorhead, he maintained for thirty five years, were a rock and roll band. Not metal, not punk, not the founders of anything. Just very loud, very fast rock and roll played by people who were unlikely to live long, and the fact that a generation of teenagers had misunderstood that was their business rather than his.
He was also, by every account, generous to the bands who cited him. He toured with them, appeared on their records, turned up at their shows, and never once suggested that any of them owed him a share of anything. When he died in December 2015 the tributes came from every corner of heavy music at once, which is unusual for a genre that agrees on almost nothing.
The dismissal and the generosity are the same trait. He genuinely did not think he had done anything special, and that self assessment is why the band never softened, never chased a trend and never made a record that sounds like it was aimed at anybody.
The one that everybody covers
The scale of the debt is easiest to measure in cover versions, and it is a long list. Metallica have played their songs and recorded a birthday tribute. Sepultura, Anthrax, Testament, Overkill and dozens of others have taken one on at some point. Sodom took the whole model of a fast filthy trio and built a forty year career on it.
What is striking is which songs get taken. Not the hits, mostly. Bands reach for the fast ones, the ones where Phil Taylor is running the double kick and the bass is fighting the guitar for room, which suggests that what musicians actually inherited was the engine rather than the songwriting.
That is the accurate summary of the whole relationship. Thrash did not take Motorhead's songs. It took their machinery, ran it faster, and pointed it at different subject matter.
Sources and notes
Release dates refer to original pressings. Overkill was released in March 1979 and Ace of Spades in November 1980. Attributions of influence follow the musicians' published statements.
