Band bios can be a hell of a boring genre. To read in book form, which one could just as easily check on Wikipedia in a nutshell. And actually it’s never about the events of the band’s history, but about what the band does with their listener. Where she picks him up, saves him or gives him a hearing loss.
This is what actor Charly Hübner wrote down for the KiWi music library – a wonderful because it is free format. About Motörhead. But he does not dedicate a biography to the English legends; rather, he inscribes it in his biography in a highly amusing way. Another might have made Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister’s passion for World War II memorabilia the starting point for his considerations. Not so Hübner, for whom his own Motörhead story begins in the Mecklenburg pampas, and really in a GDR ballroom that turns into a youth disco once a week. Here he meets the two metalheads Lennz and Donner (ahh, you think of Werther! Klopstock! The country life!), Who pass him a magical thing: a cassette sampler with the title Metal IV. Judas Priest and AC / DC are eager to get the boy’s attention, but the B-side starts with Motörhead and their song The Hammer. And now the story takes its course. “For me, Motörhead is both a lifeline and a rocket in my ass, and a spacer between the world and me.”
The world is basically the perfect hit world of the parents, the James Last sound wafting from the cassette deck of the family car, lovingly dubbed “Taiga bug” by the father. The fact that a story about Motörhead, literally a band on speed, begins in this car of all places is bizarre.
Even more peculiar that it is precisely the devil who throws Hübner back into the rock ‘n’ roll primal scene in the car: the parents hear James Last, you sing along – can you see a tear in your father’s buttonhole? – and the son pukes on the father’s neck, which is probably not the reaction to the music itself, but the product of the unpleasant interaction between the smell of gasoline and the bumpy road. But the child lies in the well, the sputum in the car, and so the story ends in a significant parent-child rift, at the end of which the boy renounces the hit forever. If that’s not a story!
75 Ostmarks for an album
And who is this devil who – like the Christmas spirit – brings Huebner back to buried places of memory? He calls himself Memphis and has only ridicule and malice for Lucifer and Mephisto. Maybe this Memphis is just a revenant of Mr. Kilmister himself? It would be to be expected of him. In the end, Huebner even got a pub date with Lemmy, who he’d almost interviewed in the real world, but not quite. Lemmy felt uncomfortable and preferred to read war and peace.
Motörhead is considered the loudest band in the world, their legendary slogan Everything Louder Than Everyone Else is the superlative par excellence – well, only surpassed by Knorkators The next album ever. Speaking of the album. The first self-purchased album is the sacred moment in a person’s rock ‘n’ roll career, with Charly Hübner it is Motörheads Orgasmatron, which he buys for 75 Ostmarks. 75 marks, that’s more than a month’s rent, and the poor boy has just made the money digging mud trenches and, at least for the reader, a very amusing fight with a panicked muskrat. But of course he needs this album, and money is just money, and as Karl Marx said: everyone according to their needs. And Hübner’s needs have been cleared up since the evenings in the youth disco (once old rockers and metalheads got into a tangible bar brawl via Judas Priest). Well then: ear plugs in and Orgasmatron on your ear!
Charly Hübner on Motörhead or Why I should be grateful to James Last Charly Hübner Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2021, 161 p., 12 €
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