Lemmy Kilmister’s final words to Ozzy Osbourne
Some say gothic music began with Bauhaus’s 1979 debut single, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, but when one considers Black Sabbath, who, fronted by a round spectacled Ozzy Osbourne, resembled an Addams Family do The Beatles stage production, we can confidently cast our net some ten years prior.
As well as pioneering heavy metal alongside Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, Black Sabbath trailblazed the gothic aesthetic with a sound to match. With chained crucifixes and black eyeliner in place, Osbourne and his band of Brummies caused a seismic shift in rock music with four seminal albums in the space of just two years between 1970 and ‘72.
Perhaps the most prominent and direct offspring of these gothic metal luminaries was the London-born metal act, Motörhead. Fronted by the charismatic hedon Lemmy Kilmister, Motörhead shared Black Sabbath’s love for The Beatles while taking rock music in a veritably darker and heavier direction. Lemmy and his boys in black picked up where the early Black Sabbath oeuvre left off, marrying metal with a high-paced punk sensibility that predated Metallica’s thrash-metal sound.
Naturally, it wouldn’t be long before Osbourne and Lemmy’s paths crossed, and as admiring counterparts, they found a strong friendship. Throughout the closing decades of the 20th century, the pair collaborated on a handful of occasions, most notably in the early 1990s.
In 1991, the Sabbath singer invited Lemmy to co-write ‘I Don’t Want to Change the World’, ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’, ‘Desire’ and ‘Hellraiser’ from his successful solo album, No More Tears. A year later, Osbourne appeared on Motörhead’s March ör Die, to duet with Lemmy on ‘I Ain’t No Nice Guy’.
Last year, in a conversation on a BBC radio station, Osbourne reflected on the late Lemmy as his “rock god” and recalled writing with him.
“My rock god is Lemmy Kilmister,” he said. “Lemmy was a guy – he shot from the hip every time. ‘That sucks,’ or, ‘I like that.’ I’m good at starting lyrics, but I can’t finish them. And he’d go – he’d write a bunch of lyrics for my songs – ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home.’ So, I’d give him a tape, and I had this book on World War II. I haven’t read it, and I told him, ‘Tell me what you think. And I have a bunch of these lyrics – whenever you can…’ I’m thinking it’s gonna be a week.
“And he says, ‘Come back in about four hours,’” Osbourne continued. “So I got back, and he goes, ‘What do you think about these?’ And I go, ‘Oh, great.’ He then goes, ‘What about these?’ I go, ‘Oh, you got two…?’ He goes, ‘No, I got another one – three.’ I go, ‘You had written three sets of lyrics?!’ He said, ‘Yeah, and that book was crap!’ I said, ‘What book?’ He says, ‘The book you gave me.’
“He was a speed reader! He could read really fast. He was amazing! You look at people like Lemmy and you think, ‘Oh, he’s a yob.’ But he was very well-educated.”
Sadly, Lemmy died in 2015 at the age of 70 after a battle with prostate cancer. In a recent interview with Metal Hammer, Osbourne remembered the final words his friend had said to him.
“I think about Lemmy all the fucking time,” Osbourne said. “He was a great guy. He’d go, ‘That record you just made was fucking shit,’ or ‘I really like that one.’ His favourite [line] was, ‘Your best record was No More Tears’. ‘Yeah, because you wrote on it, you cunt!’”
“I went down to South America and he was there on tour,” he continued. “But he was so fucked he couldn’t speak to anyone. He was sitting at the front, skinny as a rake. He was riddled with cancer at the end. But mind you, he turned round to me and said ‘I’m probably going to die, I suppose. Never thought I’d make 70, so I did good’. His exact words were, ‘I could have lived a lot longer and taken care of myself, but I lived my life the way I want to live and I ain’t got no regrets’. Fair enough!”