(Credits: Goran Beg)
Wed 24 September 2025 18:00, UK
Like clockwork, every two years these days, a major celebrity will fall foul of revealing their daily routine.
The online vultures then pick at the sorry carcass of the silliness spewed, and their career from thereon will always be marred by the fact that they are either bare-faced liars or they really are the sort of maniac who plays golf at five in the morning rather than seeing their kids before school.
Had Lemmy existed in the age of social media backlash, it’s hard to say what the hungry vultures would’ve made of his utter mess of a morning. His decadent routine is certainly not a bare-faced lie because it came from Topper Headon of The Clash rather than the horse’s drunken mouth, but it also makes him a far different maniac to the maladjusted souls who claim to be working out before dawn before volunteering, praying, building a house, and making a god-awful motion picture before nightfall.
In short, Lemmy was a rock ‘n’ roll musician from head to toe. It seems he was genetically programmed to operate in the manner of an unglamorous rocker, warts-n-all. As a result, his house functioned as a sort of hostel for unhomed punks. As he once explained himself, “Sid Vicious lived in my flat for a couple of months and I tried to teach him bass, but he was hopeless”.
A little further down the line, his abode would be darkened by the rather more proficient punk, Topper Headon, and his recollection of Lemmy’s asylum-like London flat paints a picture with all the vividity of Hieronymus Bosch.
“We lived together for a while. He had a house in Coleville Terrace just off Portobello Road,” the drummer recalled to Classic Rock, “Lemmy was…well, he sleeps with his eyes open. It was a horrible place, just like a squat. I just indulged with Lemmy, taking speed and stuff.”
If his eyes-wide-open nights sound strange, his mornings were even stranger. Headon describes the Motörhead man’s routine as thus: “Lemmy was a creature of habit; he would always do the same thing when he got up in the morning: have a huge line of speed, and then a big fry-up for breakfast. He was one of those people who took drugs to keep himself normal.”
A fry-up is enough to strain the heart of most mere mortals without some antacids at hand, but this madman was seasoning that calorific feast with a fucking side of heavy metal amphetamine. While the ‘Ace of Bass’ singer might no longer be with us, it’s remarkable that this creature of habit habituated himself all the way up to 70.
Headon, however, was also drawn in by his strange brand of squalid decadence, as he explained, “One day I asked him for a line and he stuck his knife out with a pile of sulphate on the end of it. I bent over to take a snort and almost sliced my nose in half. There was blood everywhere.” I doubt Lemmy even mopped it up.
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