A quick scan takes in an ursine head on broad shoulders, long, skinny legs and a pair of clumpy, intricately stitched cowboy boots. Black and silver are the only colours that matter, and, his Ace Of Spades tattoo and smoking Marlboro Red aside, you can see why Alice Cooper refers to Lemmy as “Captain Hook”.

Tonight, just as he has done for the best part of the past 50 years, the man born Ian Fraser Kilmister in Stoke-on-Trent will be grafting at rock’n’roll’s coalface, gruffly piloting Motörhead though another night of thunderous excess. But if the decibels and Lemmy’s taste for amphetamine sulphate have sometimes stolen the headlines, it’s worth remembering that his musical education has been thorough and wide-reaching, beginning with his love of Little Richard, encompassing a life-changing  moment watching The Beatles at the Cavern club at the age of 16, not to mention his stint working for Jimi Hendrix. He can, of course, also play the crap out of a distorted Rickenbacker bass, but it’s his highly-attuned bullshit detector, his uncompromising approach to life and his ability to blur the lines between rock’n’roll, psychedelia, punk and metal, one senses, that has led to him being revered by fellow musicians as diverse as Slash, Jarvis Cocker and The Clash’s Mick Jones.

Lemmy’s dressing-room betrays one or two other preoccupations: a fruit-machine custom-built in Germany tours with him, and a well-thumbed copy of History Today magazine nestles alongside 
a jar of Marmite and some reading glasses. “’Scuse fingers,” he says, plinking ice cubes into two tall glasses and furnishing MOJO with 
a quadruple Jack Daniel’s and Coke. Always mirror your interviewees, they say, but that may not be wise when your subject has the constitution of an ox. That said, his has been a life less ordinary, and he commences to furnish us with a guided tour of it…

HAVING PAID his dues with R&B act The Motown Sect, Lemmy joins The Rockin’ Vickers, another Blackpool-based outfit. Their early live set includes songs by The Beach Boys and Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, and they will go on to work with producer Shel Talmy (The Kinks, The Who). Indeed, it’s Talmy who overseas The Vickers’ final 45, a take on the Ray Davies-penned Dandy which rises to Number 93 in the US charts. The group also become curiously popular in Finland and are one of the first bands in England to utilise double bass-drums.

“We wore dog collars, which was kind of ironic. My old man was a vicar and he fucked off when I was three months old. My mother never went to church and she never took me, so I didn’t give a fuck. With the Vickers we made £200 a week each free and clear. We were nothing south of Birmingham, but north of there we sold out the Locarnos with the revolving stages. It was great: screaming chicks tearing your clothes off and going at your hair with scissors – pretty crazy when you consider that you couldn’t buy alcohol on the premises. Then one day the taxman came by. He had a Homburg hat and a clipboard, and we were lying around with chicks draped over us. He says, ‘You haven’t filed a tax return in three years – I’m taking possession of your speedboat and those three Jags outside.’ Harry [Feeney, aka ‘The Reverend Black’; singer] goes, ‘Sorry, no can do – I just signed everything over to this chick here.’ In the end we got the guy drunk and he lost his job. Working with Shel Talmy was great, but he couldn’t see very well. You’d hear this crash from the other room, then: ‘Ow! Fuck me!’”

LEMMY MOVES to London, where he is befriended by Ronnie Wood (then in The Birds), later moving to the floor of Jimi Hendrix’s roadie, Neville Chesters. A job humping gear for Hendrix, Pink Floyd and others brings in £10 a week, and night after night, Lemmy sees Jimi at the height of his powers. He repairs Jimi’s stomp-boxes with tape and string – and learns that you can play a coherent show on two tabs of acid.

“Acid didn’t take any prisoners: you put your mind at its disposal. The best trips were when 
I realised there was more to it than religion and 
a lot less to it than God. Hendrix had met [underground LSD guru] Owsley Stanley in California and brought some tabs with the little owls on them back to the UK, so my introduction to acid came from Jimi’s roadie, Neville. I took 
a whole pill, not realising it was four trips, but fair play to Neville: he came with me at the same dosage. It was 18 hours of Technicolor explosions: Bang! Bang! Bang! Then halfway down we went to the Speakeasy and saw Keith Emerson chucking fucking knives at his Hammond with The Nice. Jimi was just the best: absolute control of his guitar, a total gentlemen, and a real boost to be around. I only knew him in ’67, but when he went back to the States The Black Panthers fucked him around, saying, ‘What are you doing playing with those honkies?’ I can’t listen to the Band Of Gypsys album he recorded with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles at the Fillmore East. People swear by it, but that’s not Hendrix for me.”

AFTER A brief, if fruitful spell with tabla-toting psychonauts Sam Gopal (he wrote much of 1969’s rated album Escalator), Lemmy “bluffs” his way into Ladbroke Grove-based space rockers Hawkwind. Quickly proving his worth, he goes on to sing lead on the band’s biggest hit, Silver Machine. As well as leader Dave Brock, his bandmates include six-foot-tall dancer Stacia Blake, and resident poet/lyricist Robert Calvert. Lemmy tours the US with Hawkwind for the first time in November 1973, and that same year their double live album, Space Ritual, reaches Number 9 on the UK charts. 

“I listened to Space Ritual on the bus the other night and it was fucking great. That’s how Hawkwind actually sounded. The studio albums don’t really get it across, although Hall Of The Mountain Grill comes close. Before I joined the band in August 1971 I was a dope dealer, but then I got busted and they confiscated my gear and I had to give it up. Being in Hawkwind was one of the best times in my life.  I was still really young, then. I had this amazing rapport with Dave Brock on-stage, and I’ve never had it with anybody else since. We could be facing in opposite directions and we’d still change note at the same time. We just knew. It was unfortunate that there was so much drug snobbery in Hawkwind; a lot of people going, ‘Oh, we only do organic drugs.’ Actually, there’s no such thing. By the time you get whatever it is it’s already been through about six people, two of whom have definitely cut it with something other than Shredded Wheat, you know? But I would never have left Hawkwind if they hadn’t fired me.”

LEMMY SHORES up Motörhead with a temporary recruit, but ex-Thin Lizzy guitarist 
Brian ‘Robbo’ Robertson’s wearing of shorts and ballet shoes live doesn’t quite fit the image and there will be many line-up changes ahead. Lemmy doesn’t know it yet, but the period’s more enjoyable pre-Robbo collaborations, with Wendy ‘O’ Williams and with Girlschool on the 1981 hit EP St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, will also come to seem poignant.

“When Eddie left there was no big crisis, we just had to be pragmatic. We were stuck in New York running up hotel bills with a tour to do, so we got in Robbo. We made a good record together [1983’s Another Perfect Day], but he would work on one solo for 10 fucking hours, wipe it, and then start again. Plus, he always wanted to let people know he was a star guest, which wasn’t quite what we were after. Truthfully, it’s the women that I’ve lost I think about, not ex-members of Motörhead. Wendy ‘O’ Williams [who committed suicide in 1998, aged 48] was a great woman. Fucking mental. And Kelly Johnson from Girlschool – she died young as well [to cancer in 2007, aged 49], which was a terrible, terrible shame. I had a small affair with Kelly. She was a good-looking girl and a great guitarist. People used to say, ‘She’s all right for a girl’, and I’d be like, She’s better than you, motherfucker! On a good night Kelly played like a young Jeff Beck. Rock Goddess were fantastic, too. I’m pro-girls in general because I was brought up by my mum and my grandmother. Do I like American women? I like all women; I don’t care where they come from. Most of the time I don’t care where they’re going, either.”

LEMMY PARTS company with manager Douglas Smith, then swaps the St Mortiz Club, Wardour St, for the Rainbow on Sunset Strip, Los Angeles, where he is crowned by LA’s metal faithful. He lives in a cramped two-bedroom apartment that he rams to the rafters with war memorabilia and Motörhead-related “crap”.

“I hate it when people are snobby about LA. It’s bollocks. Think about it: the weather’s a lot better and the chicks wear less clothing because of this. When I moved over it was like Hendrix in reverse; I got a lot more respect in America than I did at home. My apartment’s definitely too full, but most of the time I prefer being on the road, because that’s where you prove yourself. I’d probably be happier in a bigger apartment, but I can’t bear the thought of moving all that shit, and my rent’s only about $1,000 a month. What I miss most about England is the cheese. In America they can’t make cheese to save their life. So I miss Cheddar and I miss 10, maybe nine people over here. They’re girls, mostly. This place is certainly not the England I was born into, or even the 
one I used to work in. New Labour or the Tories? Christ, what kind of a choice is that?”