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Ace of Skins
Mikkey Dee is Motorhead?s drummer. Surely that?s the only introduction you need?
Mot?rhead are playing tonight. You can tell this, not just by the huge lettering on the front of Brixton Academy, but by the huddle of noir-garbed metalheads hanging outside the entrance and by the two jumbo tour buses secreted around the back of the venue.
Inside the bus are Lemmy Kilmister, Phil Campbell and Swedish drummer Mikkey Dee. They are Mot?rhead. They remain the hardest, loudest rock band in the business. If it were possible to make universal signal of rock brotherhood in print (half fist, first finger and pinkie vibrating in the air) I would do it right now.
Inside the building, 61-year-old Lemmy, who looks every inch the wiry metal-for-lifer he clearly is, stomps away down a corridor to his dressing room with guitarist Campbell, primed for an imminent soundcheck. Drummer Mikkey Dee, 43, however, is relaxed and friendly. Sitting in his dressing room, he opens a box of tobacco and puts a little ball of it under his lip, giving him a strange lopsided look ? on one side at least.
?You see these older bands doing one or two shows with a week off in some hotel suite,? he says. ?We still live the dirty smelly rock life. We are all crammed in buses and we do so many shows in a week. Teen bands can?t even keep up. We have a lot of support acts that just fall apart.?
Current support Clutch, who have been on this whistlestop UK tour for a month are deemed to be coping well. Mostly. ?They look pretty pale now,? says Dee with a grin. ?They?ve done a lot of touring but this is a shock for them. It really is a very high-tempo lifestyle.?
He?s not messing: as well as this tour, Mot?rhead found time to release a full-throttle album titled Kiss Of Death (?it?s going down well, but a new album needs to grow on you a little bit and get in your pants?) and played to 100,000 people with Foo Fighters in Hyde Park in the middle of the summer heatwave. ?Dave Grohl is such a nice guy,? says Dee. ?He?s touring for the same reasons we are: it?s supposed to be fun, not fucking each other over.?
Dee joined the band in the early ?90s, replacing Phil ?Philthy Animal? Taylor, drummer considered part of the band?s classic line-up along with Fast Eddie Clarke. Lemmy was keen for Dee to join; he?d been tying to prise the half-Swedish, half-Greek drummer away from bands Dokken and World War Three since 1985.
Band relations aren?t always easy: ?Lemmy and I fight pretty much every other week. We fight, but we fight clean ? no below the belt shit.? What, physical fights? ?No, arguments. But it?s pretty scary. People run away from us. Then we make up. It?s clean, it?s fair, it?s very healthy.?
His early years on the road are, naturally, ?a bit of a blur?. These days, while he agrees that Motorhead still like to party hard, he claims to save any hedonism for off-stage. ?I physically can?t play like that. I have a couple of beers. For me, playing is like running a marathon every night. It?s insane.?
It?s been 31 years since Lemmy was kicked out of Hawkwind for, as the myth goes, doing the wrong drugs. It?s been three decades of jet-propeller amps, ear-blasting shows and hardcore metal life. Who do they believe can rival them for sheer power and sound? ?No-one!? says Dee, scooping up his box of snuff. ?You have bands that try but they just don?t make it. Tons of bands you can put in our pocket, but Mot?rhead is unique.?
Motorhead?s Kiss Of Death is out now
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