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

synthesizer player, sold me a Hopf bass, which he got at an auction at Heathrow airport for about £27. I still haven’t paid him back for it.
    As I said earlier, Hawkwind was a very loose outfit. Every few months, there was a change in the line-up; people would come and go. You were never quite sure who was in the band at any one time – at least, you were never sure who would show up. At one point, there were nine of us in the band and then just a few weeks later there were only five of us, and then there were six, and then seven and then five again. Every picture you see, it was different people in the fucking band. It was very strange. Dave Brock, who sang and played guitar, founded the band in July of 1969 and he’s been its only constant member over the years. It’s his band, really, the same as Motörhead is mine. Hawkwind would not exist without him. And even he would disappear occasionally. He would go through these, like, nature boy phases – that’s what we used to call them – striding out into the fields with a staff, naked but for a loincloth, and you couldn’t get to him. I mean, there was no point in saying, ‘Dave, we’ve got a gig tonight,’ ’cause he was gone, he was busy being nature boy, right?
    In addition to being the main part of Hawkwind’s power core, Dave also wrote most of the songs. But he would never write with anybody else in the band. At least with Motörhead, I give the others credit, but Dave was all self-sufficient. I learned a lot from him, really, about vision and tenacity – things I already knew about, but watching him bolstered my confidence. He just made me sure of it. He had his quirks, too, like his spanking fantasies. He used to pass schoolgirls on the road and lean out of his car, yelling, ‘Spank! Spank! Spank! Hello, girls, spanky-spanky!’ When he was tripping, he was always convinced that he’d bitten off his tongue. He never had, of course, but he used to keep a red bandana in his back pocket and he would wipe his mouth with it. Then when he saw the bandana was all red – aaargh! – and off he’d go! One time, in Grantchester, we pulled that trick on him and it took me forty-five minutes to talk him down (I was tripping at the time myself, so I probably wasn’t doing a very good job!). Dave was always trying to beat the taxman out of money. One time he was explaining to us, ‘I went and bought this new place. I’ve written it off against the old place and got this farm and they can’t touch me.’ And it transpired that as he was telling us that in London, the marshals were going through his house in Devon and taking all the furniture. Fucking miraculous, that.
    Nik Turner was the other half of the power core in those days since he was the frontman, basically. He was in Hawkwind from the beginning, too, and he was one of those moral, self-righteous assholes, as only Virgos can be. Nik was the oldest one in Hawkwind – older even than Dave and I think that’s where someof his behaviour came from. Like, on the one hand he could be very old-fashioned but he was also keen on showing off how outrageous he could be. I guess it was some sort of post-hippie, mid-life crisis. And he would do annoying things, like play his saxophone – through a wah-wah pedal – right on top of the fucking vocals. Whenever we got a new sound guy, Dave or I would tell him, ‘Singing – sax out.’
    I recall one time when Dave didn’t show up for a gig in north London, and we rang up his house in Devon. His wife, who hardly ever spoke, told us, ‘Oh, I don’t know where he is. He took some mescaline and went for a walk. That was this morning and I haven’t seen him since.’ So Nik got this guy, Twink (who later founded the Pink Fairies), to play lead. The only guitar we had had two strings on it and he couldn’t play either of them because he was a drummer. That was one of Nik’s great decisions. He was also one of those who later got me fired from the band, so there