Ian 'Lemmy' Kilmister, Motörhead frontman and hard rock pioneer, dies at 70
On Monday, Ian 'Lemmy' Kilmister, the founder of Motörhead and a rock-and-roll icon, died at the age of 70, just a few days after being diagnosed with cancer.
CBC Radio ·
This June 26, 2015 file photo shows Lemmy performing at the Glastonbury Music Festival at Worthy Farm, in Glastonbury, England. (Joel Ryan/Invision/The Associated Press)
Social Sharing
Let's say, for some reason, you put on noise-canceling headphones and watched the band Motörhead. You can't hear them — you can only see them. You'll notice something odd: that the lead singer, Lemmy, was hollering up into his microphone. That is, the mic was set up so that it pointed down at his face, forcing him to crane his neck and below toward the ceiling, or the sky.
Motorhead bassist Lemmy Kilmister performs with his signature microphone set-up. (Joel Ryan/Invision/AP)
Lemmy once said that he sang like that for "personal comfort." He was a brutally honest guy, so let's take him at his word. But there are two other possible reasons for his awkward-looking microphone set-up. One: it looked awesome. And two: if you want to roar as loudly as possible, you throw your head back and then you roar.
Take your headphones off, and you'll notice that that's what Lemmy did. For nearly 40 years, as the leader of Motörhead — a band whose slogan was "everything louder than everything else" — Lemmy roared. It might sound pretentious to call his roar a "barbaric yawp," but you can't argue it wasn't barbaric. It was supposed to be.
Singer Lemmy Kilmister, right, performs with Dave Grohl on drums during the second annual Revolver Golden Gods Awards in Los Angeles, Thursday, April 8, 2010. (Chris Pizzello/AP)
Lemmy's last name was Kilmister, but everyone called him "Lemmy." It was more rock-and-roll, and plus, they don't give hurricanes last names either.
But hurricanes blow themselves out, and now, as unbelievable as it seems to fans who thought he was an eternal force of nature, so has Lemmy himself. On Monday, just two days after being diagnosed with cancer, Lemmy died, at the age of 70. He played his last show with Motörhead just two weeks ago.
Lemmy had a sense of humour. After all, there's an umlaut over the second "o" in "Motörhead." Lemmy once said he wanted the name "to look mean," but it's also funny. Just like one of the band's iconic songs, Killed By Death, which in light of Monday's news, is both funny and sad.
It's a song in which the toughest man in rock says, "I'm a backbone shiver / and I'm a bundle of joy."
