I love living in the future: Lemmy's lost almost solo album

You might have noticed me mention Motorhead once or twice on this blog... so you might think that I was a bit of a fan. From 1979 when I first heard Overkill until 1984 when they released No Remorse (a compilation with four substandard new tracks on it) I listened to precious little else. I bought everything, I had obsucre 7" singles on Swedish bootleg labels, I had multiple copies of the No Class single so I could have each of the three different sleeves, I even bought No Remorse in it's (mock-) leather sleeve. I also owned this book which was a short but thorough compendium of pretty much all you wanted to know (including the existence of obscure Swedish bootleg 7" singles).

The book had a short section on Lemmy's pre-Motorhead career - of course Hawkwind were mentioned and it was fairly easy for a fan to fill in his collection with Hawkwind's Lemmy-era releases. Also mentioned was the psych rock band Sam Gopal but that was less easy to track down, and to be honest I wasn't sure whether it would be worth the effort so didn't really bother. Over the years I pretty much forgot about it even to the point that when a friend sent me the Damage Case compilation I didn't even notice that there was a Sam Gopal track on it.

Then on last Sunday's Freak Zone, Stuart Maconie dug out the Sam Gopal album that Lemmy played on (Escalator) and played a track. It was fairly typical psych-rock all fuzzy guitars and with Sam Gopal himself playing the tabla, but on top of all that was Lemmy. I had assumed that his contribution to Escalator would be as a young buck learning his chops. But no, Lemmy sings the whole album, plays that fuzzy guitar over the whole album (and apparently wrote most of it too). This is like a lost Lemmy solo album!

It's not a classic, not by a long chalk, but it's not that bad either, it's rough and loses it's footing periodically but I'm sure I'll go back from time to time.

So digital radio reawakened my interest but the Internet gave me the opportunity to hear this album and even better than that... the Internet gave me the chance to see Sam Gopal perform (although not too psych-rock and fuzzy guitars on this one sadly - try this for one of the better tracks on the album)...

I love living in the future!

Oh... and here's me with an obscure Swedish bootleg Motorhead 7"!