Hitting My Head Against The Wall: Lemmy & Motörhead; The Early Years review

Priceless document of Lemmy and co’s golden years

Cover art for Hitting My Head Against The Wall: Lemmy & Motörhead; The Early Years

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

In Hitting My Head Against The Wall, Paul Welsh resurrects his unpublished book drawn from documenting Motörhead’s earliest gigs and interviewing the band when they were desperate men kicking against closed doors. It’sarefreshing change from the endless tributes by those who discovered Motörhead later so missed the classic line-up of Lemmy, ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor and ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke rising from poverty to stardom through the Overkill and Bomber tours.

Although the book looks like a hardcover fanzine and won’t win any literary awards, nowhere else will you find Motörhead so up close and personal at this crucial time, illustrated by often supremely daft photos, including Philthy in his beloved bald wig. There are also press cuttings and an interview with Dave Brock. It’s a suitably rough-and-ready affair that vitally redresses the balance with Lemmy’s LA rock god years by showing what he crawled up from.

Kris Needs

Kris Needs is a British journalist and author, known for writings on music from the 1970s onwards. Previously secretary of the Mott The Hoople fan club, he became editor of ZigZag in 1977 and has written biographies of stars including Primal Scream, Joe Strummer and Keith Richards. He's also written for MOJO, Record Collector, Classic Rock, Prog, Electronic Sound, Vive Le Rock and Shindig!