Motorhead racked up 22 studio albums in their four-decade run as rock’n’roll’s truest champions, eschewing flavour-of-the-month scenes running from NWOBHM to punk rock and plain old heavy metal to live by the maxim: ‘We are Motorhead, we play rock’n’roll’.
However, like many of their 70s peers it was the band’s live output that more readily represented who they truly were. Steadfast road warriors through and through, Motorhead played songs that reached their apotheosis when jammed into a room of sweaty punters prepared to sacrifice their hearing in exchange for an opportunity to glimpse the true face of rock’n’roll, in all its verrucose glory.
Motorhead toured right up until the very end – Lemmy often quipped he hoped to “die on stage like [comedian] Tommy Cooper” – and their live releases often offer a truer insight into who the band were at a given point in their career.
Changes in personnel, style and approach are all captured in the 14 releases (to date) that make up the band’s live album catalogue, not to mention some of the more unscrupulous background circumstances that surrounded certain releases, put out by the band’s ex-manager to capitalise on the success of No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith).
In spite of this, each live release offers a truer-to-life representation of the band than their studio output ever could. There is, after all, a reason live versions of No Class and Bomber find their way on to ‘greatest hits’ releases, and why No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith took pride of place as the only Motorhead record to top the UK charts.
Reliable as clockwork – Christmas still doesn’t feel right without their annual November jaunt – and subtle as a nuclear bomb, Motorhead live were a rampaging beast, uninterested in adhering to anything so mundane as decibel limits, and unimpressed by the frippery their contemporaries adorned themselves with on the road to becoming ‘rock stars’.
Twelve-minute solos and warbling vocal demonstrations could never compete with the sheer bluster that Iron Fist, Over The Top or Orgasmatron could bring to bear. Motorhead cemented themselves as rock icons by letting the music do the talking. As the band themselves put it almost every single show after 1979: “The only way to feel the noise is when it’s good and loud.”
