In White Line Fever, Lemmy, the thinking person's Ozzy Osbourne, provides a completely unreconstructed, warts and all account of his excessive life--well, the bits he can, or cares to, recall of it anyway. "That was a great time, the summer of 71", he wistfully muses at one point, "I can't remember it, but I'll never forget it!" Leader of Motorhead for close to 30 years, Lemmy has had more drugs, drinks and girls than hot dinners. His mechanism really has gone--in 1980 his blood was officially diagnosed as toxic to other human beings.

Lemmy, born in 1945 and christened Ian Fraser Kilmister, was a vicar's son. His dad, however, didn't stay around long and he was raised, predominantly, by his librarian mother in Wales. A teenager at the birth of rock 'n' roll, Lemmy first took an interest in music after discovering, as he forthrightly puts it, "what an incredible pussy magnet guitars were". After spells in local beat combos he headed off to Manchester and then London. Here he became a roadie for Jimi Hendrix, played in Opal Butterfly, before pretty much ambling into space rockers Hawkwind's line-up during 1971. This was, of course, an era when the group "would get high in the park and talk to the trees--sometimes the trees would win the argument". Sometimes it sounded as if the trees wrote the songs, too. Four years later speedfreak Lemmy was sacked for "doing the wrong drugs".

Vowing to form the "dirtiest rock 'n' roll band in the world", he put together Motorhead, arguably the heaviest (and according to the Guinness Book of Records for about five years, the loudest) heavy metal band ever to grace a stage. Thrilling buzzsaw songs such as Ace of Spades, Bomber, Killed by Death and Hellraiser (as deep as their names suggest) gained them a legion of headbanging fans. And while Lemmy may spend a little too long berating his former record label Sony and griping about recent albums being overlooked, this sex, drugs and metal memoir certainly goes all the way up to 11. --Travis Elborough

2008-10-28 'Overnight Sensation'

As most other reviews have stated, this is an informative run thru' the life of Lemmy; from early days right up to the present and all the mayhem in between.
I was really interested in the amount he had in common [and hung around] with punk bands from the early days, esp The Damned and the Ramones [touring with the former, producing the latter], as well as the obvious metal/rock bands.
He's right though, how many people stopped buying Motorhead records after 'ace of spades'? I know I'm guilty and intend to remedy that by buying a couple of the later ones [probably 1916 and Motorizer unless anyone's got any better suggestions].
An excellent read though and written in a style you'd expect.