Free White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography by Lemmy Kilmister

food with acid before the gig. But as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself.
    Anyway, it was Dikmik who got me in Hawkwind. He was running around, looking for speed and of course he found me eventually. I was living with this girl in a squat on Gloucester Road in London, and she ran into him. ‘Oh, I’ve got a friend at home who takes pills,’ she said. So he came round and we discovered that we had a mutual interest in discovering how long the human body can be made to jump about without stopping. We went on something of a binge that lasted about three weeks, during which we had about two hours’ sleep. He had decided he was going to India to find the Sufic secret or some fucking mystical shit like that. But he only got as far as Gloucester Road, which is in the wrong direction anyway, and then he gave up. He’d found me anyhow, and that was fine with him because he was the only speed freak in Hawkwind – the rest of them were acidheads – and he wanted some company.
    I’d seen Hawkwind before – not at the beginning, when they were known as Group X, though. The entire audience looked like they were having an epileptic fit, all six hundred of ’em doing the same move. I remember thinking, ‘Well, I have to join them – I can’t watch them!’ I wanted to get a spot playing guitar. Their lead guitarist, Huw Lloyd Langton, had just left the band – disappeared, really. They had been doing a gig at the Isle of Wight festival. They weren’t really playing at the festival, though; they played outside of the festival – how’s that for being alternative? Anyway, a bunch of them were sitting around a campfire and Huw had done something like eight tabs of acid. ‘I’m going for a walk, lads,’ he told the others, went over a hill and nobody sawhim again for something like five years! That’s the way things were in Hawkwind – loose, very loose. Huw did re-emerge a few years later, in a band called Widowmaker (not Dee Schneider’s 1990s project, which we’ll come to later).
    So I was hoping for the guitar slot, but I wound up on bass instead. In fact, the day I joined Hawkwind was when I first started playing bass. It was in August, 1971. The band had an open-air gig at Powis Square in Notting Hill Gate, and the bassist, who was Dave Anderson at the time, didn’t show up. But like an idiot, he left his bass in the van, which paves the way for a successor, doesn’t it? You’re almost inviting somebody to come along and take the job off you, which I did. Apparently, Dave didn’t like doing free festivals, like the one Hawkwind was doing that night. He wanted to be paid all the time, and the band was into doing all these benefit shows. I remember us playing in defence of the Stoke Newington Eight, whoever they were. They’d been put in jail for some fucking thing and we thought it wasn’t fair because we were freaks and everything wasn’t fair because of the pigs – you know, all that crap that you talked to each other in those days. So we were doing all these gigs for these people, but the whole time we were getting conned. The organizers of those gigs had pockets everywhere. Quite a racket, that used to be. Still is, really. But once again, I digress.
    Anyhow, here was Hawkwind at Powis Square with no bass player, and somebody was running around asking, ‘Who plays bass?’ Dikmik, seeing his opportunity to have a full-time partner in speed, pointed at me and said, ‘He does.’ ‘Bastard!’ I hissed athim, because I’d never played bass in my life! So Nik Turner, who played saxophone and sang, came over to me and said in very important tones, ‘Make some noises in E. This is called “You Shouldn’t Do That”,’ and walked off again. I mean, that’s a lot of fucking information, isn’t it? And then they opened up with another song anyway. It must have gone all right, ’cause I was with them for four years. They never officially told me I was in the band that whole time. Del Dettmar, the