Lemmy and Motörhead’s last show: “Don’t forget about us”
The last time Lemmy Kilmister went on stage there were no epitaphs, no explicit omens, just the usual distorted roar of an amplifier on its limits and a rough voice that continued to challenge time, the body, the very gravity of the end. On December 11, 2015, at the Max-Schmeling-Halle in BerlinMotörhead went on stage for one of the many dates of the “40th Anniversary Tour“, a concert like many and yet different from all the others, destined to become the last live chapter of a forty-year-long story, written with strokes of volume, speed and obstinacy. Seventeen days later, on December 28, 2015, Lemmy Kilmister would die in Los Angeles, just two days after an aggressive cancer diagnosis, leaving behind not just a band, but the very idea of rock’n’roll. Today, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the passing of the iconic Motörhead frontman, Rockol dedicate one special to Lemmy Kilmister with a “mixtapes”(available at this link). We therefore also return to that last night and what it would have represented, bringing on stage not the end of a band, but thedefinitive snapshot of a way of being on stage and in music.
That evening in Berlin was not thought of as a farewell, and perhaps for this reason it weighs more today, because Motörhead played like they always hadwithout concessions to rhetoric. Only Lemmy’s passing would then project retroactively that concert in a historical dimensionforcing fans and audiences to return to those final minutes through home videos, imperfect recordings, snippets shared online like testimony to the fact thatwhatever his conditions, Lemmy continued to play rock’n’roll until the last moment possible.
Motörhead were in the midst of “40th Anniversary Tour“, a celebration on the stages that began the previous August in Southern California and continued between postponements, cancellations and stubborn restarts, as if stopping had never been a real option. The European tranche had started in November and the Berlin date, postponed by two weeks compared to the original calendar, should have simply represented the last concert before a Christmas break, with the tour is scheduled to resume in Januarywith also two dates in Italy set for February 2016. That evening, no one was talking about goodbye. “Thank you, Berlin. See you next time, allright. And don’t forget us! We are Motörhead! And we play Rock’n’Roll”, “Thank you, Berlin. See you next timeAll right? And don’t forget about us! We are Motörhead! And let’s play rock’n’roll”, would have been Lemmy’s greeting to the audience, as witnessed at minute 58 of this video, with the complete audio recording of the concert.
Motörhead took to the stage in their classic and now granite formation, which was visible Lemmy Kilmister on bass and vocals, a magnetic and central presence even when his physique began to betray him, supported by Phil Campbell on guitar, long-time traveling companion, precise and solid, and with Mickey Dee on drums, a tireless machine who would later tell how every concert had become a test of resistance.
There laddercompact and without superfluous deviations, crossed sixteen songs which condensed forty years of career without the need for explanations. Classics like “Bomber,” “Stay Clean” and “Metropolis” reaffirmed the band’s primal identity, while “When the Sky Comes Looking for You,” from “Bad Magic,” was a reminder that the historic group was not a nostalgic institution, but a machine still in motion.
After the inevitable “Ace of Spades”, in “Whorehouse blues” Lemmy also took up the harmonica, while Dee switched to the guitar, granting a rare change of perspective in a show that remained, from start to finish, faithfully Motörhead.
The encore found its natural closure with “Overkill”, the 1979 song which seemed to contain, in its obsessive repetition, the entire manifesto of the band, driven by the need to always move forward.
Nevertheless, that Berlin date came after difficult monthsmarked by increasingly evident health problems. Lemmy had faced surgeries and hospitalizations, but on stage he continued to appear ironic, even joking about his own supposed indestructibility, while his figure remained immediately recognizable and intact in the myth that he himself had built. Even before an icon, Kilmister was a character, who became an icon of rock and roll, not through disguise but through the conscious choice of auniform made of black jacket, hat pulled down on the forehead, worn boots, military details and western referenceswith the microphone positioned high, from which the voice seemed to come from a place saturated with smoke and whiskey, filtered by amplifiers, lived-in, rough, irreducible sounds. Only two days before his death he was given the diagnosis of an extremely aggressive form of cancer, but he did not have time to make it public as he wanted, nor to turn it into a story.
After his passing, Mikkey Dee immediately ruled out any possibility of a Motörhead future without Kilmister: “Motörhead is obviously over. Lemmy was Motörhead,” Dee told the “Expressen”, underlining how that story could not continue with a replacement: “We won’t be touring or anything anymore. And there won’t be any more records. But the brand survives, and Lemmy continues to live in everyone’s hearts.” And at the same time he talked about how evident, already during the European tour, the immense effort that Lemmy made every night. The drummer added: “He was terribly emaciated, he spent all his energy on stage and afterwards he was very, very tired. It’s incredible that he was even able to play, that he was able to complete the European tour. It happened just 20 days ago. Incredible. It’s a great feeling knowing that we were able to complete the tour with him. It’s comforting that we didn’t cancel because of Lemmy. I am immensely grateful for the years we shared and that we had so much fun together.”
A few days before Berlin, on 20 and 21 November 2015, two sold out concerts at the Zenith in Munich had captured on tape another testimony of that final resistance. From those evenings he would be born “Clean Your Clock“, a posthumous live album that today sounds like an unfiltered photograph of Motörhead in their fortieth year of activity. But it is in Berlin, on December 11, that the story finds its final point with the last, obstinate affirmation of an idea of rock’n’roll carried forward to the extreme possible limit.
This is the setlist of Motörhead’s last concert on 11 December 2015 in Berlin:
Bombers
Stay Clean
Metropolis
When the Sky Comes Looking for You
Over the Top
Guitar Solo
The Chase Is Better Than the Catch
Lost Woman Blues
Rock It
Orgasmatron
Doctor Rock
Just ‘Cos You Got the Power
No Class
Ace of Spades
BIS
Whorehouse Blues
Overkill
