It’s 1982, and Motörhead tickets only cost a fiver. You elbow your way to the front and yell impatiently at the curtains drawn across the stage, which you imagine hides a black-clad road crew beavering away with torches and gaffer tape on the drum riser and towering black backline.
But when the house lights go out and the curtains part, there's no sign of the band. Instead, a short film plays on the scrim behind Phil 'Philthy Animal' Taylor's drum kit. In the footage – soundtracked by Gustav Holst’s epic Mars, Bringer Of War – Motörhead emerge from mist dressed in medieval clobber with studded leather armour, brandishing fearsome gauntlets and arcane weaponry.
"I think most of the costumes were originally made for a film called Merlin, which John Boorman made way back when, director Nick Mead told Negative Insight. "It was lit by aircraft landing lights hidden behind a hill and we dropped a few smoke bombs to create eerie smoke, which the band walked through. Nothing that technical, and thankfully it wasn’t a windy night, the smoke basically did what it was told!"
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Lemmy, Philthy Animal and ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke start playing, but they're still nowhere to be seen. There's only a giant mechanical fist, a 3-D realisation of the one on the album’s cover, flexing its spotlight-tipped fingers.
This was surprising, likewise the sound of the then-unreleased Iron Fist’s title track, but above us, there was more. As the searchlights built into said enormous iron fist’s fingers raked our bemused eyeballs, the penny dropped… the band were above us, being lowered from the roof over the stage!
Touring the UK to promote Iron Fist during March and April 1982, Motörhead were determined to make an impact. No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith (cunningly recorded in Newcastle) had made them – if possible – an even bigger noise than they had been before, so they decided to up the ante even further when they took to promoting the largely disappointing follow-up album.
Everyone had loved the Heinkel 111 bomber-style lighting rig that had been flying and nose-diving on tours since 1979 so, after a bit of Motörheadscratching, it must have seemed a natural step to take the concept of the tried-and-tested hydraulic-winch-plus-bag-of-chains concept to some ridiculous new level.
Being Motörhead, this couldn’t be anything highfalutin, like individual members dangling foolishly in a Peter Pan style. Instead, it meant the whole band descending ominously onto a platform creaking under the weight of drums and their full backline. God only knows why the roof didn’t follow it and bury the front stalls in a twisted pile of rubble, riffs and Rickenbacker.
The descent, which took just about a minute of the opening number, was never without peril. The mechanism was notoriously unreliable. During several shows, the fist failed to open correctly, and Lemmy noted that sometimes the chains on one side of the stage would lock, tilting everything to one side – then they’d unlock and a sudden drop would get everything on the level again. He also joked that it cost more than the band's bus but worked significantly less often.
Guitarist ‘Fast’ Eddie was cooly dismissive: “It was a little over the top, wasn’t it? A bit naff.”
Lemmy thought the same about him when he walked out on Motörhead a few months later to form Fastway, while the rig followed Eddie out of the Exit door and was never used again, reportedly bound for the scrapyard.
"None of it ever fucking worked except the bomber," Lemmy told Uncut in 2017. "We had this huge Orgasmatrain thing, and after we built it, we realised we couldn’t get it into most of the venues – isn’t that wonderful? The iron fist was even worse – it ended up making a very rude gesture to the crowd. We had to rely on our Motörheadness to get us through."
That wasn't quite the end of the story. In 2022, the original intro footage was restored and released to mark the 40th anniversary of Iron Fist. Mars, Bringer Of War was gone, and in its place was a new soundtrack, an unreleased instrumental demo of Motörhead's Ripsaw Teardown. The fist, however, has never resurfaced.
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