MOTÖRHEAD

That's the way I like it baby, I don't want to live forever

For most of his life people would have scoffed had you referred to Lemmy Kilmister as a “gentleman”, given the years of philandering, the daily diet of Jack and Cokes, and the women who showed up to his shows bringing teenage kids and saying, “I’d like you to meet your child,” but now at the age of 69 and, in recent years and possibly even before his a near-death experience, he has become precisely that — a Gentleman and an Elder Statesman of Rock N Roll.

Motörhead’s Friday night spot — the band’s first ever performance at Fuji Rock — was certainly one of the most anticipated sets at the 2015 Fuji Rock Festival, and this kind of billing may have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. But in recent years, and certainly since the 2010 documentary Lemmy, which makes a pretty decent case for Lemmy Kilmister as an archetypal God of Rock n Roll — at the very least, he certainly merits a chapel in the pantheon — Motörhead has finally received the reverence long due, after years of playing for a devoted and extremely hardcore fanbase.

I last saw Motörhead play in Charlotte, North Carolina about four years ago. The audience was a biker crowd of 2000 muscled, belly-heavy dudes in black leather, all with weirdly scultped facial hair, their arms crossed and their expressions unchanging. That was one heavy show. I’m pretty sure nobody got knifed, but one gigantic biker in a leather vest got on stage and grabbed the microphone and started singing, and everybody seemed to be fine with it. I had to make sure not to bump into anybody during Ace of Spades. Lemmy seemed to be fine with it.

At Fuji Rock on Friday evening, as the sky went dark behind the Green Stage, everybody was in a waaaaaay lighter mood. The band took the stage, their gothic type-face banner behind them, and Lemmy addressed the crowd, “Just in case you think we’re somebody else, we are Motörhead and we play rock ‘n roll.” With that they dove into “We Are Motörhead”, a song from their 15th (!!) album. The set list jumped all over the catalogue, with classics like “Damaged Case”, “Metropolis”, “Doctor Rock”, “Rock It” and “Just ‘Cos You Got the Power (That Don’t Mean You Got The Right)”. There were recent songs off the 2013 album Aftershock (“Lost Woman Blues”, the 2014 album Bad Magic. From the middle years, they played “Going to Brazil” (1991). Their closers are pretty much fixed at this point as “Ace of Spades” — which never gets any less electric, and the crowd gave a massive reaction — and after that, what Lemmy described as “the other song people know us for”: “Overkill”. (Sometimes it’s an encore, though since Fuji Rock runs on the exact schedule of a Japanese electric train, most of the time it’s impossible to go over time.)

As for other notes to the show, it’s perhaps significant that they didn’t play “Killed By Death”, a favorite with a sing-along chorus, but now possibly subject to a no-fly-rule in the wake of Lemmy’s near-death experience two years ago. Mid-set, Lemmy did explain, “We haven’t been to Japan for a long time. We’re going to do a couple songs we didn’t do last time.” That’s also a possible explanation.

Generally, Lemmy has a fantastically warm stage manner, pausing to introduce songs in a way that’s extremely respectful to the audience, and in a style that he picked up from the bygone era of Little Richard, Elvis and Buddy Holly, the idols of his youth. His voice may have an extra handful of sand thrown into the gravel these days, but songs don’t lose any heat when he sings them.

Rounding out the Motörhead trio were the two musicians that have been with Lemmy the last 20 to 30 years, Mikkey Dee on drums and Phil Campbell on guitar. They rock hard. And loud. And fast. They are Motörhead.