10 Stars Of Rock & Metal With Famous Second Bands

‘Lemmy’ Kilmister will forever be immortalised as the louder than life frontman of Motorhead, whose furious blend of punk and metal at the end of the seventies saw the band rise to prominence at the beginning of the next decade, and during the emergence of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal scene. With Ace of Spades (1980), Lemmy also wrote one of the all-time classic rock songs, which made him a fortune and inspired a generation of artists.

But it was as a younger man in the early seventies that Lemmy first found fame as the bass player in Hawkwind, the psychedelic British space-rock band who were festival favourites throughout the decade. Hawkwind had a legendary hit of their own with Silver Machine, in which Lemmy sang lead vocals, and the band epitomised the hippy generation of the time, with their members often taking LSD whilst performing on stage. However, Lemmy himself was not exactly cut from the same cloth, and preferred a concoction of hard liqueur and amphetamines to fuel his performances.

This often put him in conflict with the rest of the band, with the last straw coming when Lemmy was arrested for possession of drugs during a tour of the USA in 1975. This gave Hawkwind the perfect excuse to fire him, although Lemmy would ultimately have the last laugh as he took the opportunity to create one of the all-time legendary bands, who he would continue to play with through to his death aged 70 in 2015.