Tuesday 18th November 2008 @ Colston Hall
With Support From: Saxon

There are certain indisputable ‘Rock & Roll Facts’; one is - you don’t fuck with Motorhead! Tonight is no bullshit time-capsule back to 1979; just serious, balls-out, heavy rock covered in leather and axle grease. Lemmy arches back in front of the mic in familiar fashion, chest puffed out like a fighting cock, staring down the audience, daring them not to dislodge the fillings in their teeth head-banging to ‘head classics like Killed By Death and Overkill. Back in the day, Motorhead were the only heavy metal group endorsed by punk, and for good reason!

Lemmy is like Josh Homme’s older, angrier Anglo-Saxon cousin, just holding a heavy bass guitar in place of an axe and the group are louder than bombs. For one night only, facial hair, sleeveless t-shirts, devil horns and exclamation marks are back!!! It’s sweaty, it’s defiant, it’s dangerous; it’s not a night for Smiths fans with fingers in their ears. Everywhere you look are old guys with beards, pony-tails and beer-guts in tight tour t-shirts from 1985 but crucially, most seem to have brought their kids (some alarmingly young, some even wearing protective headphones) and are passing the torch. Someday Lemmy will be in his eighties, back in Bristol playing these same tunes to these children’s children.

After an hour of this full frontal assault - including one huge drum solo that must have ruptured more than one spleen in the front row - the group leave the stage. It’s not long before they’re back out though, first taking it down with the acoustic Whorehouse Blues, then plugging back in and launching into Ace Of Spades which feels less like a song than actual bodily harm! The show then ends to chants of; “Lemmy! Lemmy!”

So, it can only be appropriate to end with the words of the great man himself; “We are Motorhead, and we play fucking Rock and Roll!!”

In contrast, support band Saxon are a camp nostalgia act; and from the band that inspired Spinal Tap, it’s no surprise. A group can only survive the amount of line-up changes that Saxon have gone through without dispersing into parody if they have an immovable centre of gravity, a reason for existence; think Lemmy, the Gallaghers or Mark E. Smith. Each’s group have had more members than Spinal Tap had drummers, yet each group’s very existence is fully justified simply by the vitality of its core member/members. Lemmy is vital. Liam and Noel Gallagher are vital. Mark E. Smith is vital. Bill Byford and Paul Quinn are not! This doesn’t mean that fans of the group - Tommy Saxondale and the like - aren’t punching the air, stamping their feet and head-banging their way through a set which is just as loud and accomplished as any rock groups you’ll see, it’s just that it all seems rather redundant. Blunt. And when heavy metal no longer cuts, what’s the point?

www.imotorhead.com

James Davey