Motörhead

Founded in London in 1975 by bassist, singer and heavy metal figurehead Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister (ex-Hawkwind, he would remain the only permanent member), Motörhead pursued a solid career against all the odds, built on incessant deafening concert tours and smash albums - including the undying classic No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith from 1979 - without ever letting up. Motörhead is one of the most influential and respected bands in the history of hard rock/heavy metal, having largely opened up the spectrum of heavy metal in the 1980s, prefiguring thrash metal, speed metal and punk, and never really "betraying the cause" by watering down their music. Since the band's 1977 debut album of the same name, Motörhead has produced a succession of guitarists and genre classics: Overkill (1979), Bomber (1979), Iron Fist (1982)... right through to Aftershock (2013) and Bad Magic (2015), the last albums from the band that lost its charismatic frontman on the evening of December 28, 2015, a victim of fulminant cancer. The last survivor of the original line-up, "Fast" Eddie Clarke, who had founded the band Fastway, died on January 10, 2018 at the age of 67. In 2025, ten years after Kilmister's death, The Manticore Tapes, tapes of studio sessions dating back to August 1976, were released alongside numerous compilations and concert archives.

Please enable Javascript to view this page competely.