Every single metal band to ever exist owes Ozzy Osbourne a drink whenever they are in his presence. Though he may not have intended to be the father of heavy metal, his work with Black Sabbath is still among the heaviest music to come out of the 1970s, and everyone who has ever played that style of music afterwards has pulled something from them without even knowing it. For Osbourne, the true testament to what a heavy metal band should be came from Motörhead.
Intriguingly, neither of these two bands ever claimed to play heavy metal in the first place. When discussing the lineage of Sabbath, they always called themselves a typical blues act, albeit with a little bit of a dark edge thanks to Tony Iommi’s riffs. It wasn’t until groups like Judas Priest came out just a few years later that people started to identify the style as an actual genre of music.
Motörhead was much the same way. Given how heavy his band’s songs tended to sound, Lemmy Kilmister wasn’t really that different from the classic rockers of the 1960s growing up, idolising artists like Little Richard and Eddie Cochran and wanting an excuse to scream his heart out onstage.
Once he left the psychedelic outfit Hawkwind, Lemmy had a slightly different sound in mind. Instead of playing the traditional rock and roll angle, he got a power trio together and turned his amp to 11, resulting in some of the most feral rock and roll ever created, this side of acts like The Stooges.
Whereas albums like Overkill and Bomber helped introduce the world to double bass drums and thundering guitar riffs, Lemmy was not always comfortable being a metal godfather. Whether he was tongue-in-cheek is up for debate, but whenever Lemmy played, his tagline of ‘We are Motörhead, and we play rock and roll’ was a more accurate picture of how he saw the band.
Kilmister did find time to soak up his status as a metal icon, even working with Osbourne on the hit single ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’. When talking about the track ‘I Don’t Want to Change the World’, Osbourne said that Lemmy was the living embodiment of what a heavy metal icon should be.
Discussing Kilmister writing the song, Osbourne said he considered Motorhead a touchstone of hard rock, telling Louder, “Every time I sing this song now, I think of Lemmy. That was a Lemmy lyric. There’s one line, ‘Tell me I’m a sinner, I’ve got news for you. I spoke to God this morning, and he don’t like you.’ That’s Lemmy, tongue-in-cheek. If anybody was to say to me, ‘Who would you say was the [ultimate] metal band?’ It would be Motörhead”.
Motörhead was never married to that particular style of metal, either, eventually taking on everything from progressive metal to blues metal to the odd straight-ahead rock and roll number. Lemmy certainly didn’t walk around like he was a metal icon, but whereas Keith Richards is still a fixture of rock and roll for most people, Lemmy did the same thing for the heavier side of the genre.
