White Line Fever: Lemmy - The Autobiography

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