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

you go.
    But Nik was occasionally a source of high amusement. One time he walked up to the mic, holding his sax, which was plugged in, and he disappeared in this fusillade of blue sparks! We were all laughing, ‘Yeah, great, Nik!’ He finally shot back into the amps and they fell on him, which gave me immense personal satisfaction. Another time we had a gig on an open stage that had this moat running in front of it. So we were playing and it was pouring fucking rain – all these hippies were sitting under bits of plastic, just sopping wet and buying hamburgers for £15 – all that good festival shit. Part of the stage was under this bowl-shapedenclosure, but the front four feet were totally open and wet. Me and Dave were out there and Nik makes an entrance from the left, dressed as a frog – he had black cowboy boots, green tights, a green leotard and a full rubber frog head on. He was holding the saxophone and capering – he was a great caperer, Nikky. So he came capering along the stage and I said to Dave, ‘It’s about time somebody pushed that fucking frog into that pond –’ and as I said it, he skated straight into the fucking water! I had to stop playing, I was laughing so hard. And then Stacia – our dancer – came up and tried to help him out and she fell in with him! I was on my knees, fucking helpless with laughter.
    Another time we were in Philadelphia or somewhere like that and he was doing his trick with the joss sticks – he used to light these joss sticks and fill his mouth with lighter fluid. Then with all the lights out, he’d go POOM! and you’d get this big ball of fire. And this one night he overdid the lighter fluid. He went POOM! and set his hand on fire – there was this black silhouette hand in the dark surrounded by a halo of flames with a voice screaming, ‘OW! OW! OW!’ So we took him to hospital and he had blisters like sausages up his arm. But he still played that night, which showed fortitude, I will say that. He’d get drunk as a cunt on wine and once, in Switzerland, he walked out of the side of the stage and leaned on the PA and the whole thing collapsed on him. The only part of him sticking out of the rubble was his arm, holding the sax. Poor Nikky – he could be a bit accident prone.
    Our drummer at the time was Terry Ollis – we called him Boris or Borealis. He used to wear nothing on stage. He’d comeon wearing a pair of his old lady’s knickers – that’s all – but he’d take them off halfway through the first song anyway. He was a dynamite drummer, but his dick kept getting in the way – free fall, you know, and he’d wind up hitting it with his stick. Ow! – There’d be gaps in the fucking music. But he was still excellent, and an excellent character, too. He used to work at his dad’s scrapyard on the outskirts of Far Westland, and he was always coming to rehearsals and gigs in weird clothing he found there. One day he’d show up in a German army outfit, and another day he’d show up in an old woman’s shawl. Then he got into downers and that turned out to be his ruin. The last gig he ever did with us was at Glasgow University in January of ’72. He fell out of the van on the way there. We stopped at a light and he thought we were there, so he opened the door and collapsed out onto the street. He was all over the road, his bags scattered and shit. We didn’t know he’d gotten out, so we just drove on. Later, we found him and somehow we got him to the gig. I remember Nazareth was supporting us and when they finished, we put up our gear and he walked onstage and sat there with his drumsticks crossed on the snare all night. Never played a single hit. So it was obviously time for him to go. A shame, really. We replaced him with Simon King, whom I knew from Opal Butterfly. He was another one who wound up getting me fired from Hawkwind – and I was the one responsible for getting him in the band!
    We also had this guy called Bob Calvert, from South