White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page B

was alsoplaying with this guy Tempy. He was an extraordinary person who taught me a lot about sarcasm, and was a most difficult person to get along with. He played bass – I mean, he really played bass, and for about one and a half hours we hooked up with the local moody guitarist, Tudor, but what with Tempy’s scornful sarcasm, my amiable insults and Tudor’s eggshell ego, it was no surprise that, although we played together beautifully, that one rehearsal was it. Shows how good it could have been if I remember it forty years later. That sort of petered out, so back to the DeeJays!
    We got a singer, Brian Groves, who was a dark, heartthrob sort of guy, a bit like Johnny Gentle, if anyone remembers him. And finally we found a large bass player called John, who was a remarkable rarity in that he had a Fender bass and an amplifier – so he was sort of the Bill Wyman of north Wales, I suppose. My God, we thought, we’re made now! But amazingly, we weren’t! We played a lot of factory dances and weddings and stuff, and then I got the itch – I knew that wasn’t it. Then we kept losing members until it was finally just me and Dave, two guitarists and nobody else, so we played instrumentals for a while. That was the DeeJays. I joined another local band called the Sapphires but they had this terrible hyperventilating guitar player who I couldn’t put up with. Between that and the Hotpoint factory, you can see why I left Wales.
    When I arrived in Manchester, I had an Eko in my hand. What a horrible guitar that was! It looked like Liberace’s fucking stage jacket made into a guitar – all silver glitter and black. And it hadten push buttons on it and only two of them worked. The others were just for show – I took the panel off and they weren’t connected to anything. But I swapped it soon enough for a Harmony Meteor (which I should have kept), then traded that in for a Gibson 330, which was a cheap version of the 335. And I changed bands about as often as I changed guitars. First, the Rainmakers: I don’t recall how I got with them but by the time I’d joined them, they were already past their prime, and I wasn’t in them for very long. After that, I was with another band for about three weeks. I don’t even remember what they were called – that shows how impressive they were. Then I joined the Motown Sect, where I would stay for about three years.
    I met the guitarist, Stewart Steele, and his bass player Les just from hanging around in Manchester. They had a drummer called Kevin Smith (who lived next door to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley), and I joined up as a guitarist and did most of the singing too. I didn’t like singing much – I still don’t, but I’ve gotten used to it by now, obviously. After about two years Les left and we got this bass player whom I knew, name of Glyn, but we called him Glun – who knows why? Glun was a very strange individual. He only ever had one girlfriend, and they got into weird sex immediately when they met. She was this chick who used to walk around the sand dunes in Wales and she always wore this white bikini made out of chamois leather – very thin, clingy material. And she would never talk to anybody. Nobody knew who she was, but everybody wanted to know her! Then she showed up one day with Glun, who was going bald already at the age of twenty.He was a good-looking guy, though. He looked a little like Dennis Quaid, the actor who played Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire , except he had a mass of blond, frizzy hair.
    Anyway, the Motown Sect were a kickass R&B band. Stewart was a very good guitarist, well ahead of his time. He had a Gibson Stereo 345, which to everyone else was very big news. And he had a treble-boosted Vox amp, too, which was also a big deal. The Sect played exactly the kind of music that I wanted to play, so I fitted right in. We only called ourselves the Motown Sect because Motown was very big then and it got us gigs. But we didn’t play any Motown