Farewell to a renaissance man in knuckle dusters

I heard about his death in the way I usually hear about such things,
meaning that it jumped on me out of nowhere as I was doing something
else.

This time round I switched on the television early one morning during the
holiday season when most people have better things to do, like
staying in bed. Ian Fraser Kilminster, better known to the world he
spent his career trying to deafen as Lemmy the legendary front man of
rock band Motorhead was dead.

As 'where were you when' stories go this hardly makes for riveting
reading, apart from the fact that as I was reminded during the
television obituaries that followed for most of the next forty eight
hours we shared a home town.

Both he and I were born in Stoke-on-Trent in the West Midlands, the
British equivalent of what Americans call 'fly over country', the
stolid middle of the nation largely ignored by fashionable people
with the opinions and prejudices to match.

I'm still there, Lemmy, of course left to start his music career with the
brilliantly bizarre sounding 'Singing Vicars', before joining
Hawkwind, recording the vocal on their hit 'Silver Machine', then
getting kicked out for the inevitable drugs bust and going on to from
Motorhead.

The rest, as the cliché goes, is history, in his case a history of
living the rock lifestyle in the fast lane and somehow still making
it to seventy; something that must have surprised him as much as
anyone.

For some time there has been a campaign for his home town to honour Lemmy
with a statue led by local sculptor Andy Edwards with the aid of
German artist Oliver Hahn. There is already a bust of him in the
city's museum and this week a leading local politician was pictured
with it in the press, a sure sign of an opportunity for some good PR
having been spotted.

As someone who spent a significant part of my teens in the grubby back
rooms of pubs shaking my, always shamefully short, hair to local rock
bands who all wanted to be Motorhead when they grew older
disgracefully I can think of worse things for the council to spend
its money on.

As a country Britain is littered with statues commemorating generals and
politicians who within a couple of generations of their being erected
have been either forgotten or become an embarrassment.

Lemmy is unlikely to be forgotten in a hurry and as for the blots in his
copy book, he displayed them with pride, unlike legions of public
figures, many of them immortalised in guano spattered marble, he
never pretended to be anything other than a frail, flawed human
being.

What you saw was what you got, a larger than life figure leading from the
front on a banzai charge through life. A true wild-man of rock
bringing colour to an often beige world, he made his mistakes along
the way as well as a hell of a lot of great music.

There was a softer side to him, the hell raising rock star fond of Special
Brew mixed with Southern Comfort was also a fan of PG Wodehouse who
held well thought out political views. A renaissance man wearing
knuckle dusters as he looks up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

These days a performer like Lemmy wouldn't make it in the music industry,
not because he didn't have the talent, he manifestly did. The problem
would be that he was too raw, too likely to have the disadvantage of
a mind of his own. These days musicians, whatever their notional
genre, have to be a blank space onto which the marketing department
of their record company can paint an image that neither threatens
nor excites the audience.

Music, like so many other things, has become painfully bland over the past
two decades. Aural wallpaper for a world that doesn't like to think.
We need a statue of Lemmy to remind us how dull we've let ourselves
become.