THEY TURNED PEOPLE ON TO HEAVY MUSIC
“I first heard Motörhead on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game when I was only eight years old. I didn’t really know much about rock ‘n’ roll at the time so when I heard Ace Of Spades, it was almost shocking! Really fast-paced and everything was distorted and super loud and the vocals were totally thrashed and gnarly-sounding. It didn’t just get me stoked, it introduced me to heavy metal and I never turned back. They inspired everybody. Listen to the way that music changed from Motörhead on – you can hear their influence everywhere. If there was no Motörhead, I can’t imagine what music would be like now, and thankfully I don’t have to.”
THEIR SONGS ARE PURE ADRENALINE
“The essential Motörhead song is incredibly fast – they lock into this one groove and it just follows this driving, hard-hitting, pissed-off drum beat the entire time. Then there’s some ripping guitar solo in the middle that blows the song to bits. It makes you want to headbang while smoking cigarettes and driving a car really fast, doing dangerous stuff. I have a pretty fast car and on the day Lemmy passed, I was just cranking Motörhead’s latest record, Bad Magic, opening my car up and bombing down these back roads in Ohio, flying like a maniac without even realising it. That’s what happens when I listen to Motörhead. I get amped up and I just fucking lose it.”
SNAGGLETOOTH IS ICONIC
“Snaggletooth, their sick, War-Pig logo with the massive horns, totally embodies Motörhead. It’s hard for a band to come up with a really good logo — it’s more than just drawing something crazy or scary – you have to make something that everybody remembers and that immediately makes people think of your band. Theirs is epically badass. Much respect on that front.”
LEMMY WAS ONE OF A KIND
“What set Lemmy apart was his sense of honesty. If you look at interviews with Lemmy or see documentaries featuring him, you see that he lived his life exactly the way he wanted to live it and he really never cared what anybody else thought. Personally that has always been incredibly inspirational. Look, I’m not exactly the guy drinking a handle of Jack Daniel’s and smoking two packs a day, but that mentality of doing exactly what you love and living the life that you actually want to live has always inspired me as a musician.”
THEY GAVE ZERO FUCKS
“Motörhead fully-encompassed the essence of British heavy metal and it was the /real deal/. It was never a front. So many bands taste a little bit of success and then they seem to feel this pressure to start acting like these badass dudes, drinking and banging chicks and whatever. But with Motörhead, that’s just the way they were. They were gnarly dudes who just wanted to live the lives they wanted to live and they ended up making incredible music because of it. They are the polar opposite of fakers. Motörhead straight-up loved playing rock ‘n’ roll shows and they were incredible at doing it. They did everything in an outrageously badass way, and that’s awesome.”
THEY TOURED LIKE WARRIORS
“Lemmy literally toured until he died! That was his life – living on tour busses and stages. When Beartooth play live, it’s about the energy. It’s about going up there and getting insanely loud and fuelling everybody to keep getting crazier. That’s the whole point of our live show and that was Motörhead. We did nothing to reinvent the wheel, we were just inspired by legit rockers like Motörhead and those guys were the best. ”
A new Beartooth album will land later this year
