(When asked why he put the umlauts over Motörhead’s name, Lemmy said, “I thought it looked mean.”) In the box, there’s March 1979’s Overkill, the band’s most perfect single LP, in all its sleazy, knuckleheaded glory, and its slower, scuzzier sister, that October’s Bomber, which showed that three musicians could play as heavy as any larger-sized band. The highlights of Motörhead’s Year of Radical Thinking now comprise a new box set, 1979, which is a smart title since Lemmy would’ve wanted it plain and raw. In another time and another land, Lemmy would have been an outlaw country hero, a folk legend, but in London at the dawn of Thatcherism, he was a drug-fueled heavy-metal prophet. The lyrics ranged from lubricious (“Damage Case”) to ludicrous (“Over the Top”), and yet Lemmy was also the king of metal maxims: “The only way to feel the noise is when it’s good and loud” (“Overkill”), “The only proof of what you are is in the way you see the truth” (“Stay Clean”), “Dead men tell no tales” (“Dead Men Tell No Tales”). It was the best of metal, punk, and Capital-R Rock & Roll sledgehammered into half-hour wallops. The two records they put out that year, Overkill and Bomber, smacked of gritty, unpredictable, throbbing riffs and frontman Lemmy Kilmister sounded as if he had been huffing macadam and was coughing it up kernel by kernel.
In 1979, Motörhead became the one band headbangers and punks could agree upon.
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