'You've got the gig': Motorhead 1976-1982

‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke looks back on his time in the band

By Peter Lindblad

[Ed. note - Please forgive the lack of umlaut]

The classic Motorhead lineup

Accustomed to sleeping in and not receiving unexpected visitors in the morning, as is the way with most rock and roll artists who do not subscribe to the “early to bed, early to rise” ethos, “Fast” Eddie Clarke had no intention of getting dressed to see who was calling on him at such an ungodly hour.

One Saturday well before noon in the winter of 1976, the guitarist, irritable and cranky, got up to see who had disturbed his rest. Had he known who was waiting for him on the other side, his mood would have brightened considerably.

“There’s a knock at my door, and I say, ‘What the f**k is this?’” recalls Clarke. “And so I go to the front door, and Lemmy [Kilmister] is standing there, and he’s got a bullet belt in one hand and a leather jacket in the other. And he hands them to me and he says, ‘You’ve got the gig.’”

Clarke was as surprised as anybody to hear those words come out of Lemmy’s mutton-chop framed mouth. Just like that, he’d been hired to play alongside Larry Wallis as a second guitar slinger for Motorhead, then a dirty, brash wild bunch of rock and roll outlaws dead set on building the fastest, loudest chopper of grimy, rumbling, vice-ridden proto-thrash metal nastiness that anyone had ever seen, and nobody would dare categorize it as street-legal. Before Clarke could recover from the shock, however, Lemmy was gone.

“And then he turns around and walks off (laughs),” said Clarke. “So I’m standing there in me underpants holding a bullet belt with this leather jacket, and I just say, ‘Oh, f**king great!’ I mean, I really was over the moon."

A week earlier, Clarke’s mood wasn’t so elevated. His audition for these holy sonic terrors had ended rather unceremoniously with him slipping out the door before things got worse.

“I did the audition with them,” remembers Clarke. “And Larry came down, because Larry, who was in the Pink Fairies, was the guitarist then. And he wasn’t getting on with anybody. He didn’t even talk to me. He just came in, plugged in and played the same song for half an hour. And I said, ‘Oh, bloody hell. I haven’t got this gig, have I?’ And he and Lemmy went outside and they were having words, and it’s all getting a bit tense. So I packed up me guitar and I went home, and I left Phil [“Philthy Animal” Taylor, the band’s drummer] and them there to play on. I paid the bill on the way out, though (laughs) for the rehearsal. And then I didn’t hear anything.”

That is until Lemmy showed up on his doorstep. Soon after, Wallis would leave, having rejoined a reunited Pink Fairies lineup that intended to get back to touring. All that remained then was Lemmy, “Fast” Eddie and “Philthy Animal” – the classic Motorhead lineup that would shake the earth from 1977 through 1982 with rumbling, fire-breathing touchstone LPs Motorhead (1977), Overkill (1979), Bomber (1979), Ace of Spades (1980), No Sleep ‘til Hammersmith (1981, a live album that reached #1 on the U.K. album charts) and Iron Fist (1982), the threesome’s swan song.

“Those were great days, man. They were great. I mean, there were some tough times, obviously. Motorhead was a special time for me. I mean, we were like brothers. We went through so much shit together,” said Clarke.

As siblings often do, the three had their differences, and in 1982, as Motorhead was touring America, simmering tensions bubbled over and Clarke was dismissed. Shell-shocked by the turn of events, Clarke took the first plane back to England. Back on his native soil, the exiled Clarke, still reeling from his abrupt firing, attempted to regroup, even as a growing substance abuse problem was threatening to consume him. Unbeknownst to Clarke, his next project was waiting for him at – of all places – Motorhead’s office, and it would yield an under-the-radar classic heavy metal album, Fastway’s self-titled debut.

Still, although Clarke would later experience a rollercoaster ride of emotions with Fastway, it was nothing compared to what awaited him as a member of one of the most notorious acts in metal history, Motorhead.

Life Before Motorhead

A child of the 1950s, Clarke was born in Twickenham, London to a family that immersed itself in music and did what it could to see that Clarke took an interest in it.

“My parents played a lot of music,” said Clarke. “I was lucky because they played all the old 45s they used to get, but my sister also, she was playing things like ‘Cathy’s Clown’ and Paul Anka’s ‘Diana.’ And my parents were playing a lot of the MGM stuff. So they were quite musical. There was always music going on, even though I wasn’t particularly involved in it. My dad did take me out when I was about eight or 10, he took me down to the little record shop down here, and he said, ‘Right, pick yourself out a tune.’ So the guy in the record shop played some singles, and the one I picked was Jerry Keller, ‘Here Comes Summer.’ I remember that, going back to the ‘50s.”

Near where Clarke grew up, the musical scene of the West London area exploded with vibrant creativity and an adventurous, hedonistic spirit in the 1960s.

“As I got older, living where I was in west London, well, of course, we had the Rolling Stones kicking off here up the road,” recalled Clarke. “We had Eel Pie Island just down the road here, where John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers were playing and Pink Floyd played there. Then the Cream started up over here and Fleetwood Mac – all going on in this area. So I got to walk out the door and there was a gig to go to. And I think that helped a lot. You know, I was on the front door of it all, and of course, when I realized how much people liked that, I thought, ‘Well, I’d fancy doing that.’ And I got really heavily into Eric Clapton when he was with the Yardbirds, and we used to go to the Rolling Stones, but we’re going back a few years now (laughs). That’s going back to ’63 or ’64. And the Yardbirds, of course … Eric Clapton is playing his Telecaster up there, and all this great stuff like ‘Smokestack Lightning’ and all these great blues, and I loved them to bits. And so of course, I wanted to play like that, so I started learning those tunes.”

Through the prism of the British blues boom of the ‘60s, Clarke got an education in American blues. “I was actually learning American blues tunes, but I was learning them third-hand, because they liked to copy the guys in America and I was copying them. So I was kind of like the third generation, and I had my own take on it, which I think gave me my  … I like to think I had a little bit of my own style, and I developed out of that.”

A quick study, Clarke cycled through various local bands – the Bitter End being one of them – by the age of 15. The neighbors were not so accepting of Clarke’s musical escapades.

“I was very fortunate, and then of course, there was a little band at school … we had a little band together,” said Clarke. “We used to play in me dad’s garage, and all the neighbors used to throw stones on the roof to get us to shut up (laughs). But I loved the guitar. I used to get up in the morning before I went to school, and the first thing I’d do is get clean out of bed, put my feet on the floor, and grab the guitar and have a quick five minutes on the guitar.”

Clarke’s development allowed him a chance to turn professional with Curtis Knight’s band, Zeus. As lead guitarist, Clarke helped Zeus record the album The Second Coming at Olympic Studios. He even wrote the music that backed Knight’s lyrics on a song called “The Confession” and continued on with Zeus through the making of Sea of Time. But then, Clarke got together Allan Callan, a guitarist friend of his, and keyboardist Nicky Hogarth and drummer Chris Perry for a jam session at Command Studios in Piccadilly that resulted in a record contract with Anchor Records. Calling themselves Blue Goose, Clarke, Hogarth and Perry abandoned Zeus, and Knight, to concentrate on their new project. It wouldn’t last.

Arguments erupted and Clarke left Blue Goose, going on to form another band called Continuous Performance that went nowhere and another act with Hogarth, bassist Tony Cussons and drummer Terry Slater that also flamed out. Frustrated by what seemed like a stalled career, Clarke went to work re-fitting a houseboat as he attempted to get his solo career off the ground.

“I was working and I was doing my solo album,” said Clarke. “I was working building a houseboat on the river Thames. And the money I was earning I was putting into my solo album, to record my solo album.”

Through various jobs, he had gained other skills, some of which would make him a more attractive candidate for hire than simply his guitar-playing ability.

“The reason why I started working was I had to get an amplifier became my little one use to blow up all the time,” said Clarke. “And I used to stick a screwdriver in the back and go bang! And then it would start working again. So I went to get this job fixing televisions. And the guy said, ‘Why do you want this job?’ I said, ‘We’ll, I’ve got this amplifier that keeps blowing up and I need a new one,’ and being in Motorhead, we didn’t have any money for repairs. Well, I’ll tell you, it did come in handy. It did come in handy. It helped me to no end. So, it was a great career move at the time. I didn’t realize what a great career move it was, but later on in life, it turned out to be a winner, you know.”

So was the gig working on that houseboat, through which he made a contact that would lead him to Motorhead. It was Phil Taylor.

Getting Stiffed

Lemmy, having played in Hawkwind, was certainly well-known around the haunts Clarke used to frequent. He remembers seeing Lemmy once at a party before the days of Motorhead, though Clarke didn’t get an introduction.

“So, he came in. Nobody spoke to him,” said Clarke. “But he plugged in and started playing … and I thought that he was playing rhythm guitar. I thought, ‘Oh, he keeps it together well,’ because he keeps the songs up, where other bassists are just jamming. And then I started to [see him] a little bit about, because where we started hanging out, Lemmy was always around. He’s one of these guys who’s always around. He was always around the scene, you know.”

But, it was Taylor who first made contact with Clarke.

“What happened was, I met Phil first,” recounted Clarke. “And I met Phil and Phil had gotten into Motorhead. And then Phil contacted me, and he said, ‘Look, we’re looking for a second guitarist. Would you fancy it?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ because I wasn’t doing anything. I was working and I was doing my solo album. So, I said, ‘Yeah, fine.’ And I didn’t hear any more from Phil.”

Communication having broken down between him and Taylor, Clarke kept plugging away at finishing up the houseboat, while also taking in some of the local nightlife.

Lemmy Kilmister, Phil Taylor and 'Fast' Eddie Clarke

“Quite by chance, I picked up this bird at [this place] called the Greyhound in Fulham,” said Clarke. “It was a real big gig back in the ‘70s. I picked up this bird there, and she stayed over with me that night. And I brought her to work the next day, and she happened to work at the rehearsal room in the King’s Road in Chelsea. So I took her to work that morning. It was 11 o’clock. She had to open the doors. And who walks in? Lemmy (laughs). I said, ‘Hey, Lemmy. I’m supposed to be auditioning for your band.’ He said, ‘Oh, are you?’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah Lemmy.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah.’ So I said, ‘Well, can I put it together?’ And it all seemed to come together. He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ So, he gave me his number, and I had to organize the rehearsals. I had to pay for them, because they didn’t have any money. And I had a car, so I went and picked them up, put all their gear in the car and then dropped it off and went back to get the rest of the gear. So that was the first time I ever really had a chat with Lemmy. He seemed fine. He was one of these guys who, because he liked a bit of speed, wouldn’t sleep much. He was always on the go. Not to put too fine a point on it, and of course, I became a speed freak as well after that. He was already a speed freak. So we were speed freaks together.”

Before the sharing of drugs commenced, however, there was the little matter of Clarke’s audition. Having passed the test, Clarke soon took over as sole guitarist for Motorhead, with Wallis quitting. What Clarke wasn’t prepared for was the struggle that lay ahead.

“It was like that, it was like that, because nobody liked us,” said Clarke. “Of course, we were all wearing bullet belts and a lot of Hell’s Angels used to come to our shows. People were generally a bit scared of us. They never knew what was going to happen, you know. Although we were fine, everything was fine, but people conceived us as being … and they didn’t like our music either, because they didn’t conceive it as music. It wasn’t considered music. It hadn’t happened yet. We were sort of breaking new ground with this (makes loud guitar-like noise) and so people were actually working against us all the time. And it was difficult the first year, but the thing was solid, man. The plans were there. We’d turn up in Shitsville, Birmingham or wherever, and there’d be 30 kids there, but they were diehard fans. And Lemmy said to me, ‘Don’t worry, man. Those kids are going to go away and the next time, they’re going to bring their mates with them. The next time there’ll be 60.’”

Kilmister’s confidence was a calming influence on Clarke, whose patience was tested by the band’s poverty and a troublesome incident with Stiff Records after recording the single “Leaving Here” in December, 1976 for the label.

“Lemmy kept us all going on that, and it was true,” said Clarke. “We had quite a following in a year. But then we had this deal with Stiff Records, and we did a recording for Stiff. We didn’t have any money, so we borrowed the money and we got into all sorts of trouble, and then Stiff Records didn’t put the f**king record out. They said we’re not putting the record out because we want to put it on this Stiff compilation, which f**king finished us. We were f**king done. We were relying on that to give us a bit of a profile and get us some shows, ‘cause we didn’t have a pot to piss in. We were living off porridge and pancakes. It was one of them. And so, Stiff Records really f**ked us over. I f**king hate that label – we all, the three of us do. It was supposed to be an independent label, and sh*tsville. They really did bad by us.”

‘ … On Our Way’

“We are Motorhead … and we play rock and roll!” growls Lemmy, the way he usually does when introducing a Motorhead show. In 1976, Motorhead wasn’t playing rock and roll for very many people, and the sparsely attended gigs were demoralizing to Clarke and Taylor. In fact, it got so bad that breaking up the band seemed the only logical option.

“We were on the verge of breaking up, and we had more gig to do,” said Clarke. “It was the Marquee, and Phil said, if nobody turns up, we might as well break up after this gig. And I said, ‘Shove off.’ And he said, ‘Well, what’s the point of going on?’ I said, ‘What are you going to do anyway?’ (laughs) It wasn’t as if we had anything else to do, you know what I mean. Phil was adamant, though.”

If this was to be the end for Motorhead, they wanted to go out in a blaze of glory and record this final sendoff for posterity. “So what we tried to do was, we tried to get a mobile (recording studio) down to the Marquee,” said Clarke. “Well, it turned out, the Marquee had a recording studio linked up to the gig and they said they would do it, but it would cost … I don’t know, a thousand pounds or something, which was like the f**king king’s ransom. So Lemmy knew this guy, Ted Carroll, from Chiswick Records. He said, ‘Look, how about recording the band at the Marquee, ‘cause we’re thinking of breaking up. It’d be nice to have something to remember us by.’ And he said, ‘I can’t do that. It’s too expensive,’ because nobody had any money in the ‘70s. Those were poor times. He said, ‘But, I’ll pay for you to do a single.’”

That offer turned out to be a stay of execution of sorts.

“So after the f**king Marquee gig, we got Speedy Keen from Thunderclap Newman. He was going to produce it. He drove us down to this studio in Kent (Escape Studios), with a budget to do it … we had two days in there,” said Clarke. “And I said to the guy – ‘cause I’d done some stuff with Curtis Knight, and we’d done an album in 24 hours – ‘Look, we can do an album in this time.’ I said … ‘cause I noticed when we’d done stuff back at the pub, we’d only have to play it once. And they all go, ‘Okay, okay.’ So we laid all the backing tracks down, and then we did all the guitars and the vocals … you know, we had 24 hours and we had the whole thing down.”

When Carroll visited Motorhead to get a listen to what was supposed to be a single, Clarke and company presented all that they had done – 11 raw, unfinished tracks of cyclonic rock and roll fury, to be augmented later by two more cuts. “So when the record guy came over to hear it, we said well, we’ve got a bit more than a single,” said Clarke. “We’ve got an album. And of course, he said, ‘Wow!’ And when we played it to him, he loved it. He loved it. That was the first album, the black one [1977’s Motorhead]. And he loved it, this guy loved it. He was over the moon. And then of course, he put in a bit more money. We remixed a couple of tracks in Olympic Studios, and then we were on our way. We were on our way. There were some things that were to happen later on that would almost sidetrack us, but that’s what saved us from breaking up.”

Any thoughts of throwing in the towel were now erased completely from their minds. “It was a great thing, because we had nothing better to do … nothing” said Clarke. “And we really worked hard at it. People had pissed on us so much that we were like, ‘Well, f**k ‘em. We’ll show ‘em. We’re not going to die. We’re going to stay here and dig in.’ You’ve got to get that kind of mentality going, that sort of siege mentality.”

Clarke wasn’t the sort to throw up his hands and walk away. His background as a laborer would suggest he’d stay until the job was done. And as it turned out, Clarke was the perfect fit for Motorhead for that reason and many others. One was his look; the other was his take-charge attitude.

“Well, I had long hair and tight trousers and boots,” said Clarke, talking about the clothes he wore before joining Motorhead. “I used to wear boots and all that. But the leather jacket always eluded me. I never had enough money to buy one. And the bullet belt was a new thing for me. I didn’t know anything about the bullet belt. But I wasn’t a pansy. I was a pretty tough guy anyway, so the clothes were helpful. I think Phil had already assessed that, that I would fit in, because I was running things with this boat we were building. I was running the show. So, of course, I had to tell people what to do and people got a bit short with me. I had to deal with them, you know. And I think Phil thought that was something that would be good … I wasn’t a pansy, you know.”

The word “pansy” is not one that comes to mind when describing anybody in Motorhead. Still, there were cracks in their sneering veneer that implied a weakening of the bonds between them. After the untamed and savage Motorhead LP shot up to #43 on the U.K. charts, the band toured with Hawkwind, before embarking on the “Beyond the Threshold of Pain” tour with the Count Bishops. At home, management issues would rear up, with Tony Secunda taking over the reins. Meanwhile, as turmoil swirled within Motorhead, Clarke and Taylor branched off and formed The Muggers with Keen and Billy Rath.

Nobody was playing taps for Motorhead, though. In the summer of 1978, the band changed management again, opting to return to Douglas Smith. It was Smith who brokered a singles deal with Bronze Records that would lead to Motorhead recording “Louie, Louie.” The track charted at #68 in the U.K., giving them more momentum. In fact, it lead to their initial performance on the “Top of the Pops” TV show in England, the first of many.

“Well, we did that seven times,” said Clarke, who was not exactly comfortable doing the program. “We became the BBC’s pet band. Yeah, we were always on ‘Top of the Pops.’ Never sold any records, though, because of it, but we were always on ‘Top of the Pops.’ I think it’s because they liked to show that they could have a moody, ‘out there’ band, you know, to get a bit of credibility. What do you do? So, yeah, we did it. I mean, ‘Top of the Pops’ is the worst show. I mean, however much I drank, I could never do it without feeling like a complete prick. You stand there, and there’s an audience, and you’re miming it, and you’re thinking, ‘God, I’m f**king miming this.’ – yeah, really difficult stuff. I hated all that, you know. Lem and Phil didn’t mind so much, ‘cause Lemmy’s a real showman. I don’t care about all that, but I used to love Lemmy for that.”

Emboldened by the success of “Louie, Louie,” Bronze gave Motorhead a little more rope, extending their deal so that the band could record an album at Bronze’s studios. As Motorhead is wont to do, they left their mark there and they fought like brothers while doing so.

“Well, Overkill was our first time in a proper studio with an album deal,” said Clarke. “And we had a studio, Bronze Studios in London, and we were like, ‘Oh.’ And of course, we were just trying to get our band sounding great. We had a few bashes there. One of the bashes we had was we were so f**king drunk that Phil got sick on the ceiling – in the corridor. It was quite funny. You had these little couple of steps you had to go down, and when you went in the door, you went up again. Well, he managed to throw up and it hit the ceiling (laughs). We did have some fun. We had a few fights, me and Phil. We had our differences. We had our moments. But it was just that thing when we played Overkill, man, you know on the big speakers, with the double bass drums … I mean nobody had really done that then, not in that way. That’s why we did three endings. We did it with three endings, you know. I said, ‘Hey, let’s f**king do three endings here,’ you know. ‘We can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Why not? We’re Motorhead. We can do anything.’ And we did, and it was brilliant.”

With help from producer Jimmy Miller – whose resume had included the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street and Goats Head Soup LPs – Motorhead birthed the explosive, unrelenting Overkill, the first Motorhead LP to rocket into the U.K. Top 40 album chart and what many consider the band’s finest hour. In anticipation of the record’s release, the group … well, they mimed the flying-at-unsafe-speeds single “Overkill” on “Top of the Pops.” Those were heady days, indeed, for Motorhead.

“See that was finished in the beginning of ’79,” recalls Clarke, “because we started it in the end of ’78, end of Christmas. And then we did the show at Hammersmith November the fifth. That was also a great time, that Hammersmith Odeon [performance]. That’s like Mecca, do you know what I mean? And it was fantastic making it there. And then we did Overkill. And then straight after that … that was ’79, the beginning of ’79, we toured with Overkill, with the Girlschool thing and all that, and did some gigs in France and all that. But the record company wanted another album by the end of the summer.”

The beast had to be fed, after all. More food would be thrown down its gullet in the form of Bomber, Overkill’s hastily thrown together follow-up. Luckily, Motorhead was a well-oiled machine at this point, and with the threesome on fire in the studio, Bomber, when released, dropped a devastating payload of thermonuclear proto-speed metal on a world that had already been blown away by Overkill. Few bands have ever had a hot streak like the one Motorhead was on.

“For once, we sat down and we went into the rehearsal studio, and came out about a week later and said we’ve got all the tunes,” said Clarke. “It was brilliant man. Things like ‘Stone Dead Forever’ … I mean fantastic. So that has another thing going for it. It was just there. It was right in front of us and we just grabbed it – just fantastic.

Last bombing run

Ask Clarke to choose which album he favors, and he’ll answer with a shrug of the shoulders.

“Bomber and Overkill are my favorites,” said Clarke. “I don’t know. Between the two, I’m not sure which one. I mean, there are some fabulous tracks on Bomber. Don’t get me wrong, Ace of Spades is … well, Ace of Spades is Ace of Spades. But, you know, I’m looking for something else, because that was kind of a hit record. I mean, Overkill had that … it was one of those that was just blown out. And so was Bomber. I have difficulty choosing between the two of them. They were my two favorite albums.”

And that period of the band’s history – including, of course, the Ace of Spades album – is considered by many as Motorhead’s golden age. In live settings, Motorhead took no prisoners, thrilling audiences with visceral, explosive performances and a bit of theatricality.

“The fans definitely did take to it, ‘cause the bomber … we put the bomber up in the truck, the lighting truck, the bomber came down,” said Clarke. “So, of course, the kids really appreciated that. It really was picking up speed now. It was actually on a chain hoist that would come up and down and it looked fantastic. It was an old World War II bomber, you know, come right down and touch the top of our heads and then it would go back up, and it just looked fantastic. And the kids just couldn’t believe it. I mean, the kids loved it.”

Not everyone was convinced of Motorhead’s brilliance, however. “Obviously, the critics were still telling us we were the worst band in the world, that we were f**king noisy,” said Clarke. “And if you’re a muso lover – you know what I mean – you won’t like Motorhead because we’re just so noisy and awful. But the fans loved it. But of course what happened was – it was really quite funny actually – when we did No Sleep ‘til Hammersmith, that same band that was titled ‘the worst band in the world’ … the same journalists, for the same paper said it was the best f**king live album ever. Now how is that possible when six months ago you were telling us that we were the worst band in the world? But it’s funny how people’s attitudes change, isn’t it?”

So it was within Motorhead as well. Where ideas flowed during the accelerated recording sessions of Overkill and Bomber, Clarke remembers Ace of Spades being a bit of a chore to complete.

“We were flowing,” said Clarke. “I mean we went from Overkill straight into Bomber, and we had the bomber itself, and it was just flying along. And then Ace of Spades just followed onto that. Ace of Spades was the first … well, it was the first time we had to think a little more. What we did were rehearsals. We did a sort of demo recording, an 8-track demo recording of the rehearsals. And then we worked on those, so more work had to go into the writing of that, whereas with the other ones, we just went in and banged it out. So that was the first sign that ideas were starting to get difficult, because you get a band like Motorhead, you don’t have many options. So it’s quite difficult coming up with new material all the time because you tend to be standing on your own toes. But we got through Ace of Spades, we got through it, and it was great. The “Ace of Spades” track just killed everybody, everything’s going great … it was just another step up the ladder. We did four Hammersmith Odeons, and it was f**king brilliant.”

Motorhead - Ace of Spades cover

Even the photography sessions – which can sometimes be tedious – for the cover of Ace of Spades were a blast. “Well, I loved it. We all loved it, because before that, we’d done the thing with Girlschool, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (EP), where we dressed up like Al Capone. You know, we had machine guns, and it was brilliant,” said Clarke. “And we loved that, because we were sort of in the groove then. Photo shoots are normally a horrible thing to do, like videos. When you’re playing another part, it’s actually great, so we were really ready for it. We got all our stuff, we were all grooming beards for a few days to get a bit of stubble, you’ve got the cape out like Clint Eastwood, you’ve got the tablecloth out, you know what I mean? And we really prepared for it, and it was quite lucky because we did it in a place in north London. And it’s a sand quarry. Fortunately, the sun was shining. It all came out rather well. A lot of people say, ‘Where did you do that?’ And they think it’s like New Mexico or something. No, we did it in the north of London. And they go, ‘You’re f**king joking.’ It was one of those. It really was.”

The good times would, however, come to an end. Iron Fist was a bit of step backward for the band, and Clarke was eventually left to fend for himself on the fateful North American tour that ended so abruptly for the guitarist. Clarke went back to England and eventually formed Fastway, which released its first album in decades earlier this year. 

Looking back on it all, he still feels great affection for Lemmy and fondly recalls the heady excitement of Motorhead’s success.

“Lemmy was my friend for a lot of the time, especially in the beginning,” said Clarke. “In the beginning, I remember he said to me once … we did the first couple of shows we ever did in ’76, and we had some bad reviews, and I was teed off a bit. And he said to me, ‘Look, man. You’re going to get a lot of this. You really just have to ignore them and carry on. I’ve had loads of them in my lifetime,’ he said. ‘You just have to ignore them and carry on, ‘cause people are going to write that shit.’ And that was the nice thing about working with Lem, because I was a bit of a greenhorn, so having Lemmy give me a few pointers here and there was quite helpful. It got you through the hard times when people are putting you down and you go and do a bad gig and you feel like hanging yourself, you know. Lemmy was always there.”

It’s hard to imagine a world without him … and Motorhead, of course.

'Fast' Eddie Clarke talks Fastway's new album

Legendary guitarist revives classic metal band 

By Peter Lindblad

The Fastway lineup of 2012

Way back in 1990, Fastway released the abysmal Bad Bad Girls, the overly slick follow-up to the similarly over-produced On Target. For more than 20 years, “Fast” Eddie Clarke – clean and sober for years now after protracted and scary battles with drug and alcohol addictions – has longed to redeem the bluesy metal band he founded with UFO bassist Pete Way in 1982 after getting booted out of Motorhead. And he’s finally done it.

Eat Dog Eat, released in April, is a rousing reminder of just how tight and tough Fastway was when they recorded their screaming fireball of a self-titled debut, the rugged, energetic 1983 classic Fastway. Built with powerful, rock-solid guitar riffs and fluid, economical soloing from Clarke, plus singer Toby Jepson’s expansive howl and Matt E.’s blue-collar drumming, Eat Dog Eat is the album Fastway should have made in the ‘80s. Deeply spiritual in spots, with a surprisingly beautiful acoustic-guitar piece – don’t worry, it eventually turns electric and heavy – that comes out of nowhere, Dog Eat Dog is the early contender for comeback album of the year. Clarke discussed the record and his colorful past in a recent interview.

Listening to the new album, Fastway sounds as good as ever these days.

“Fast” Eddie Clarke: Yeah, I’m really chuffed with it. I must admit I think it’s turned out much better than I at first anticipated. We were trying to get that old-fashioned … not old-fashioned, but that old style feel to it, and it seems to have worked out. We seem to have managed it. And it was by accident, really, because we didn’t actually plan it, but that’s what we wanted. And it just seemed to happen, you know. I was using exactly the same set-up I had 25 years ago, you know, 30 years ago. I was using the same amp, the same guitar, and I’m the same sort of person, just a bit older. So I think that’s the mainstay of it that has kept it kind of honest, and then, of course, Toby comes over the top. He’s done a real good job of it I think.

He’s a really good singer, really diverse and really fits the material well.

Clarke: Yeah, well, we lumped it all together. It was kind of like one of those things where we started writing the record, right, and I mean we sat here in this little studio down in the garden here, and we sat down there … I think we had about three sessions down there. We were just so honest. It was one of those things where you just pick up the guitar and you say, “Oh, how about this one?” And he says, “Yeah, that’s great man.” And it was just one after another. And they just kept coming out. I haven’t had that since the first Fastway album or the Overkill and Bomber albums with Motorhead. You know, that thing where you’ve got so much inside you that it just falls out, you know.

I guess that’s what every musician hopes to feel.

Clarke: Oh, you dream of it. You do, because you think of things like … well, Ace of Spades is okay, but once we got to Iron Fist, we were struggling, you know, with Motorhead. And then, unfortunately, with Fastway, I mean, once we got to the second record, we were struggling. You know, I mean we got away with the second record, although I thought the production lacked on All Fired Up. Some of the songs could have been, should have been better; they should have been stronger, to match up with the first record. And of course, by the time we got to the third one, we were basket cases. The producer had taken over and the record company put strings on it. Oh, it was just dreadful that third Fastway album. I mean, I’m still paying for it (laughs).

You’ve got to go with your gut.

Clarke: Right, but we did have a bit of luck there. We followed it up with Trick or Treat, so that was kind of good, because we went back to our roots more or less. And so, I sort of thought we were coming back together on that one, but the third album was very strange – very strange record all around because we had Terry Manning from the Eliminator album, a top engineer. And he had all these ideas. He wanted to be like Mutt Lange as a record producer. So he put Fairlight drums on it, computer drums, and it all got a bit over the top. And of course, by then, it was out of my hands. Because the second record didn’t do too well, they kind of wrestled the reins from me. Another time, I was kind of bungled all then with the record company and the management having their say. All they care about is money. Well, you know what they’re like? They’re used to business. They want success at any cost, where my motto has always been: if you get success, great, but you must stick to your guns. So, it did f**k me up a bit, and that’s when I really started drinking heavily. I was drinking heavily before, but then I really started drinking heavily (laughs).

Tell me about “Leave the Light On.”

Clarke: We had one in the bag, which was “Leave the Light On,” which was brilliant. We didn’t have any vocals for it, we didn’t have any lead parts, but we just had the backing track, which was the riff and everything. And we played it, and we said, “That’s not bad, is it?” So we stuck a vocal on it. I did some guitar parts and we livened it up, and it turned out to be one of the best tracks on the album. Yeah, but the one we chose, we said, “Which one should we leave off? Let’s leave that one off.” Funny thing is, the first Fastway album, if we’d had 11 songs, the one we would have left off would have been … “Say What You Will.” Yeah, can you believe that?

“Leave the Light On” really sounds like classic Fastway.

The nice thing about that was, when Toby did the vocal, I said, “Oh, this is really starting to sound great.” And then I put the guitars on it, it was like, “Oh, wow!” It was one of those. It was like (snaps fingers three times) … a revelation, because we went up to the studio for just a couple of days to do the mixing and put the guitars and vocals on. It was one of those where you’re doing it, and you’re thinking, “I think we’ve got a real big one here.” (laughs) It’s was just, “Whoa, we really have something here.” And it’s all overshadowed, because of course, the other ten tracks by then had become old hat, because we’d listened to them for 12 months … well, it was about eight months actually. But it took so long to get a record deal. It’s tough out there, isn’t it?

Talk about a couple other tracks on the new record: “Deliver Me” and I think “Dead and Gone” is a different one for you.
Well, “Deliver Me” was kind of the first one out of the bag. We’d come up with that riff and we were sitting there, and I said to the other two, “I’ve got this riff, and I kind of see it a bit like this,” and I started playing it, and so … because we were in the studio, we put the drums down … using that program you get, we put a little drum thing together and stuck it down. And [Toby] was so taken with it, he said, “Man, I’ve got to sing on this.” So, he started singing almost immediately. Before we knew it, in a couple of hours, we had a really good sounding, sort of Zeppelin-esque riff going on. Brilliant, you know? And I think that was one of the sort of catalysts for the rest of the stuff, because you get one groove on you and it inspires you to do more, you know, and dig a bit deeper. But then, after we’d got all that, Toby had this idea. He said, “I’ve got this sort of acoustic thing I’ve been mulling around. He said, ‘I’ve called it ‘Dead and Gone’ for now.” And I said, “Well go on. Let’s have a listen.” Well, he played it, and actually, I said, “I love it.” It’s nice and simple. It’s acoustic. I’ve never had acoustic. I said, “As long as we put something on the other end of it …” (laughs) We can’t have an acoustic track on the album because I don’t like acoustic … well, I’ve never had an acoustic track on a “Fast” Eddie album. Can you imagine Motorhead … although, I think Motorhead did do an acoustic blues on one of their more recent albums. We always said acoustic songs and love songs are a definite no-no. And so we developed the idea of two verses and got the choruses sorted out. Then, I said look, why don’t we save it up there, and then we’ll go into this. And I just went straight into this riff, and whack! That’ll do. And we just built it from there, and it was a bit like “Say You Will” [from the first Fastway album] really because we needed something for the heavy bit. And for me, as you say, it’s an unusual track because it’s a bit of a departure, but it’s a big departure from what I’ve ever done before that. So, it checks the box for me. The list is getting about this big (laughs). I should stop before I start. (laughs)

Looking back on the album, what is it you like most about it?

I like the ease with which it came together and the enjoyment. We really didn’t have any real stress involved. It was a real enjoyable experience, and of course, I haven’t been in the studio for 20 years.

CD Review: Fastway - Eat Dog Eat

CD Review: Fastway - Eat Dog Eat

MVD Audio

All Access Review: B+

Fastway - Eat Dog Eat 2012

Comprised of rock and roll gypsies eager to reinvent themselves, the Fastway that churned out the blazing fireball of blues-stoked heavy metal that was their self-titled 1983 debut was very different from the confused jumble of imitators and Johnny-come-latelys that hung around at the end to watch it all come crumbling down. What had been a bona fide supergroup that combined the DNA of Motorhead, UFO and Humble Pie was, by the late ‘80s, a shell of its former self. And so was “Fast” Eddie Clarke, once a fret-scorching dynamo with Motorhead.

Gone was Jerry Shirley, former drum basher for Humble Pie and Fastway’s indefatigable combustion engine. Gone back home to Ireland was singer Dave King and that screaming alley-cat wail of his. And Pete Way … well, ol’ Pete, a man without a country following his departure from UFO, never even made it on that first record, having been shanghaied for Ozzy Osbourne’s band before Fastway ever stepped foot in the studio – this despite starting Fastway with Clarke in 1982.

That left Clarke as the sole surviving original member, and he was having a bad time of it in rehab by the end of the ’80s. In a palace coup of sorts, Clarke was usurped as Fastway’s leader, and without him in the driver’s seat, the fractured unit produced the disappointingly synthetic On Target and Bad Bad Girls. Released in 1988 and 1990, respectively, they were as schlocky and bloodless as the worst ‘80s metal had to offer. Not that Clarke had much to do with any of it. He was focused on overcoming his addictions, leaving “Fast” Eddie little opportunity to join Fastway in the studio on either one of those records, and his absence was felt. All those synthesizers and computer drums – that was clearly not the “Fast” Eddie way

Influenced heavily by the British blues boom of the 1960s, Clarke’s blazing leads and tough, working-class riffs – on display during Motorhead’s most exciting era and found in the kinetic energy of Fastway’s early days – are born of a taste for simple, uncomplicated music that aims straight for the gut and seeps into the soul. Perhaps that’s why he walked away from Fastway in the early ‘90s, covering the old girl with a tarp and letting rust have at its compromised legacy. He could no longer stand by and watch Fastway devolve into a glossy, fabricated mess.

No one could have predicted Fastway’s glorious 2012 return – not Nostradamus and certainly not the Mayans. For two decades, Fastway remained dormant, but Clarke, possibly troubled by how he’d left things, has restored the abandoned vehicle, and the good news is it is absolutely road worthy. Titled Eat Dog Eat, the latest effort from Fastway is, in many ways, a throwback to a bygone age, one that prized the holy trinity of guitars, drums and bass and couldn’t get enough of good, honest songwriting – elements always in abundance in Clarke’s work, here strengthened by some of the most rigorous grooves and ballsy riffage of his career, not to mention his searing solos. From the stomping funk of “Freedom Song” to the nasty, swinging riffs of the hot-wired “Leave the Light On” – the track most reminiscent of Fastway’s earliest efforts – Eat Dog Eat is made of strong stuff, as evidenced by the relentless march of muscular, driving guitars that plow their way through the simmering tension of “Deliver Me.” In similar fashion, though the mood is much darker and the expansive choruses grow and fan out like plumes of black smoke signaling a fire in the distance, “Fade Out” grinds out a rugged, rough-and-tumble existence. Underneath Jepson’s impassioned, powerhouse vocals and flashing, occasionally sparkling guitars, a raging undercurrent of bass lines rumble as if an earthquake is imminent – the same signs of which are evident in the slow-burning “Who Do You Believe?” and those wah-wah effects of Clarke’s that light up the trac

And while “Dead and Gone” is surely no seismic event, it is a surprising anomaly for Fastway and “Fast” Eddie, whose aversion to anything acoustic is well-documented. While the thoughtful lyrics meditate on mortality, the loss of faith and the recovery of belief, “Dead and Gone” opens with a stark, melancholy cycle of acoustic-guitar picking from Jepson before he deftly brushes and strums the golden hair of those strings ever so gently. But, in the end, Clarke just can’t help himself, and when the words turn hopeful and downright uplifting and Jepson’s voice grows increasingly defiant, Clarke provides support in the way of rocky, sharply struck electric chords.

Never one to reinvent the wheel, Clarke is happiest when song structures have good bones – basic elements like undeniable hooks and gripping melodies, such as those found in the hard-charging “Sick as a Dog,” a galloping horse of a track that refuses to spit the bit. By the time “On and On” shuffles ponderously onto Eat Dog Eat’s well-worn stage, however, it’s hard not to be slightly numbed by the sameness of much of the record, or more specifically, the trudging tempos that become a little too routine and predictable while taking their own sweet time to bloom into bigger, more dramatic endings. Thankfully, the closer “Only If You Want It” offers more in the way of soulful, acrobatic dynamics and righteous energy.

On the whole, Eat Dog Eat redeems Fastway. The imagery of a mangy cur on the cover is not only appropriate, but it is emblematic of Fastway itself. Fastway is the malnourished underdog prowling the city streets in search of food, and though it’s been beaten occasionally,the animal is too tough to die and too optimistic to give up the fight. That hunger and desperation, not to mention the desire to restore Fastway’s good name, pushes Dog Eat Dog toward greatness.

-            Peter Lindblad

The Comeback Kid: ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke seeks redemption

Legendary guitarist revisits the glory days of Fastway

By Peter Lindblad

The Comeback Kid: Eddie Clark

Just as “Fast” Eddie Clarke was getting back on his feet in 1982 and putting the ugliness of his shocking departure from Motorhead behind him, fate pulled the rug out from under the guitar great.  For months, Clarke and Pete Way, who had then recently walked away from UFO, had been plotting their next move and in doing so, they recruited a talented crew of rock and roll mercenaries for a potential supergroup that aimed to shake up the balance of power in heavy metal.

Former Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley was already in the fold when they discovered a singer from Ireland with the screeching, switchblade-wielding voice of an angry god in Dave King, who would later go on to front the Emerald Isle-meets-America punks Flogging Molly. The rehearsals had been scintillating. Every piece of the puzzle was in place. Then, just as quickly as it had all come together, something happened that drove the project dubbed Fastway off the rails.

“I’ll tell you what, man. It was fantastic,” recalls Clarke, talking about those early Fastway sessions. “Of course, we put so much into it, and it was fantastic, and then Pete fucking disappeared! We go to fucking rehearsals, and I’d say, ‘Where’s Pete?’ ‘Well, we don’t know.’ So, I went around the office and I said, ‘Where’s Pete?’ And they said, ‘We heard he’s going with Ozzy Osbourne.’ I said, ‘What?’ Apparently, Sharon [Osbourne] had offered him a job with Ozzy, ‘cause they were doing three [shows at Wembley Stadium] here in London. And they didn’t have a bass player, or their bass player couldn’t make it or something. So they asked Pete to do it, and Pete agreed. I didn’t see him again for seven years.”

As is often the case in such matters, the original Fastway was undone by record company entanglements, as Clarke would find out. Years later, the two would reconcile and rehash what had happened. “I was coming out of my flat in London and who was walking along the street with his girlfriend? Pete,” recounts Clarke. “I said, ‘Pete. It’s you.’ And we had a cup of tea and a chat and all that. And I mean he’s such a lovely bloke.”

As Clarke tells it, he invited Way’s label, Chrysalis, to the studio to review the demos they’d made. Only Chrysalis never showed. “I mean, it had been three days, and I said, ‘Well, what’s the problem here?’ recounted Clarke. “I said, ‘Well, okay. Come to a showcase at the rehearsal room.’ They didn’t show up. But CBS did show up, and my business guy – because we’d gotten a manager by then, an accountant who was helping me out – he said, they’ve got Billy Squier’s management and Gary Moore, and he said, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ I said, ‘Well, look. Let’s play it this way: The first one with a check on the table, we’ll take it.’”

Ready to make a deal, Clarke remembers, “I didn’t even care what the amount was. I said, ‘The first one who puts their money where their mouth is, they can have the band.’ I thought that was fair, you know. Well, CBS bikes over a check and within two hours, there’s a check on the table. It’s just a down payment, but of course, Chrysalis got to raving and said we’re not going to let Pete go.”

Try as he might to smooth things over, Clarke couldn’t get Chrysalis to cut Way loose. “I said, ‘How come you’re not going to let this go? I’ve given you every opportunity to sign the band,’” said Clarke. “They said, ‘No, no, no. We’re not going to let Pete go.’ I went up to their offices and said you’ve got to sort this out. But it really upset Pete.” And Clarke believes that is ultimately why he took the Ozzy offer, “ … and that was that – which was a tragedy.”

Although Fastway went on to record one of the most underrated debut albums in metal history, 1983’s hard-charging, bluesy haymaker Fastway, and produced six more LPs of varying quality, including 1984’s All Fired Up, 1986’s Waiting For The Roar and The World Waits For You, 1987’s Trick Or Treat soundtrack, 1988’s On Target and 1990’s Bad Bad Girls, the band’s star-crossed first chapter came to an ignominious conclusion as the ‘90s ushered in the era of grunge. As for Clarke, he often wonders what might have been had Way stayed on.

“I never really got over Pete leaving, ‘cause you know, it was our thing,” said Clarke. “And so Pete leaving was … I never really recovered to be honest. I never recovered.”

Redemption Songs

In April, Clarke and a revamped Fastway, including vocalist/bassist Toby Jepson, released Eat Dog Eat, a tasty, satisfying dish of meat-and-potatoes, no frills hard rock that’s a welcome return to form for a band that’s been away far too long. Harkening back to the street-tough blues rock, razor-sharp guitars and thumping rhythms of Fastway’s eponymous debut album, Eat Dog Eat emphasizes a back-to-basics approach that targets and hits the erogenous zones of anyone who fancies old-school, early ‘70s metal dressed up in frayed denim and leather. 

For Clarke, recording Eat Dog Eat was a chance to right two wrongs – namely 1988’s On Target and 1990’s Bad, Bad Girls, the two records that sullied Fastway’s reputation and discouraged Clarke so thoroughly that he avoided stepping foot in a formal recording studio for two decades.

About recording Eat Dog Eat, Clarke said, “We went to a studio I used in the late ‘80s. There were a couple of dodgy Fastway records at the end there, On Target and Bad, Bad Girls, which actually didn’t have much to do with me, but they were done at this studio in Lincolnshire – it’s an old chapel. So I revisited that, and I’d forgotten how great it was to set up in the chapel live. And we just started jamming, and I’d just forgotten what a blast it was to be in the studio, to be backed by big monitors and all that. For me, it was the memory of how great recording can be and listening back to it and saying, ‘This is great, man’ and playing a solo and thinking, ‘Wow, wow. I’ve done it. I love it. That’ll do it.’ I enjoyed every minute of it, and I can only say, it was the best money I’ve ever spent in my life.”

Feeling vindicated by the lean, mean sonic quality and hard-hitting nature of Eat Dog Eat, Clarke had long been troubled by how he’d left things with Fastway all those years ago. “Well, in the ‘90s, or really the end of the ‘80s, I was messed up, you know,” said Clarke. “The last two, the On Target and Bad, Bad Girls albums, I wasn’t on ‘em really. I did a little bit of help with them, but that was it, because I was in a bit of a state. And the guy [Lea Hart, who replaced original Fastway vocalist Dave King] that took over by then – ‘cause I’d lost track of it before and I lost track of it again – he kind of took over and sort of just angled it the way he wanted it to go, with keyboards and all that. Of course, for the second album, Bad Bad Girls, I was actually in the hospital most of the time, in rehab ‘cause I was really ill. I got really ill. I was close to death, and I was really tanking it with the old booze. So I was in rehab for five weeks, and they let me out for one weekend to go up and have a listen to what was going on. But you know, I got back to the old hospital and the album was kind of done without me. And so, when I hit the ‘90s, I stopped drinking and I had to stop drinking because I was in such a mess, and that takes a little bit of a while to get over.”

In recovery, after doing a solo album in 1993 – which featured Lemmy singing on one of the tracks – that fizzled thanks to the rise of Brit-pop in the U.K., Clarke retreated from the public eye, buying a little house in the west of England where he “… just hung out there, just played a bit and just did a little bit of recording at home … and generally just wasted my time.” A call from Lemmy drew him out.

“What happened was, Lemmy called me in about 1999 and we were talking,” said Clarke. “And he invited me down to the 25^th anniversary of Motorhead and he said, ‘Well look, why don’t you come down?’ And I said, ‘Okay, I will.’ He said, ‘Come to the sound check. We’ll work out what we’re going to do and all that.’ I was really chuffed that Lemmy phoned me, so I went down there and I did that, and it kind of started me back up a bit.”

Ready to get back in the saddle, Clarke set about restoring his legacy. The way he went about it speaks to the man’s preference for that which is simple and uncomplicated. “So the next few years – I've got a little studio built down here – I started to try to get new equipment in,” said Clarke. “And then about 2005, I’m starting to write a bit of material, I’m working on new stuff. Then the record company asked me if I’d put an anthology together, so I put an anthology together in 2006. And then 2007 came along, and there was the offer of doing some Fastway shows. I mean, I kind of got Lemmy to thank for that because he got me back into believing in myself.”

Still, Clarke wondered if anybody still cared about him or Fastway. Was anybody clamoring for their return? As it turned out, the answer was a resounding “yes.” “If you’re gone too long away, you tend to think that everybody’s forgotten about you and nobody gives a sh*t,” said Clarke. “But when I got down with Motorhead in Brixton, the crowd went absolutely ape-sh*t. They really did, and I was really chuffed. And I thought, ‘Well, hang on, maybe I should be doing some more here’ … and that made me realize that there were people out there who didn’t want me to drop dead just yet.”

Turning the Ignition

Back in 1982, however, Clarke’s career, though, was on life support when he split from Motorhead. Upon returning to the U.K. after the divorce, the realization of just how dire his situation was hit Clarke full force.

“It was, “Oh, f**k. What am I going to do now?’” said Clarke. “I was heartbroken to be honest. We had a bit of a set-to, but I never ever imagined that I wouldn’t be in Motorhead. I thought we were there for life. And it’s funny how circumstances … they rally against you. Suddenly, you’ve got all these things going on that dictate the way things are going, and you just couldn’t even imagine that it would go that way. It wasn’t even on the menu, me leaving the band. But, one row and then another and they didn’t want me in the band anymore, and when I said, ‘Look, let’s carry on.’ They told me to f**k off. You know, ‘We don’t want you anymore,’ and I came back to England on the next plane over. And I remember tottering down the streets with half a bottle of vodka in me pocket, thinking, ‘What am I going to do now?’”

Complicating matters was the fact that Clarke and the rest of Motorhead lived in the same house in England. So, he had to move out. With no place to live and none of his equipment, which was still with the band in America, Clarke felt a bit lost. He also had no money to speak of. “I’ve got no money, because we never got any money in those days,” said Clarke. “We never really got paid, you know. A couple hundred well, you know, $250 a week, but … well, you don’t really need a lot when you’re on the road and everything’s paid for. You don’t kick up a stink. So I was poor, and they were very difficult times. And of course, we were huge here. We were Motorhead. So, it was a bit weird really. We had #1 albums and songs out … no money of course, because managers don’t like giving you money (laughs). They keep you under the yolk, you know.”

There was someone who understood all too well what was happening to Clarke. It was Way, who was undergoing a separation from his band, UFO. Somebody decided to play matchmaker. “I got a call from somebody at the Motorhead office in London, somebody who obviously felt a bit sorry for me or whatever,” said Clarke. “And it came out of the blue, and I said, ‘What’s this? I didn’t expect to hear from you.’ They said, ‘We just thought we’d let you know that Pete Way has left UFO and would you like to get together with him?’ And I thought, ‘Hey, I’ve got nothing going on here.’ I said, ‘Yeah, cool.’”

Previously, the only contact Clarke and Way had ever had was in the pubs. “I mean, I knew Pete a little bit, but only from being drunk together in the Marquee [the venerable London concert venue],” said Clarke. “We’d never had much to say, but … ‘Hey, do you wanna have a drink?’ ‘Fantastic.’ (laughs) So, I didn’t really know Pete. I knew he was a nice guy, but that was all. But we got together, and we hit it off right away because we both liked to drink. I had a drinking problem. He had a drinking problem. We had our drinking problems together, and it was a lot of fun. I think we were both relieved that we found someone who was in the same position.”

With Clarke on guitar and Way on bass, the budding partnership began laying the foundation for what would become Fastway by finding a rehearsal space … and a new friend. “That’s when we met Topper,” said Clarke, referring to Topper Headon, drummer for punk heroes The Clash.

By way of explanation, Clarke related how he and Way went to find the guy who ran the place where Motorhead once jammed. “Motorhead used to rehearse at this lovely place, a big old house in Notting Hill. We said, ‘Why don’t we go there and see if we can strike a deal with the guy?’ So we went around there to see the guy and said, ‘Can you sign us up for a few rehearsals? I can’t pay you immediately, but I can when things pick up.’ He said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’ And who was there? Topper Headon from The Clash, the drummer! And we all got chatting and we had a laugh, and he said, ‘My drums are here. Why don’t we have a rehearsal?’ So, the next day, we all picked up and borrowed a couple of amps that were out the back there, plugged in and off we went. But we had a couple of weeks, and playing with Topper, it was brilliant. It really was fun. We’d all laugh and get pissed and then go back and make some noise.”

Though word was getting around that a new supergroup was taking shape, Headon did not sign up for Fastway. He had other obligations. “So, then, of course, Topper did have a few problems with The Clash, and he had a few problems anyway, one thing and another,” said Clarke. “So, he said, ‘Look guys, I’d love to do it, but I can’t really. I’m just not well enough really.’”

No matter, Way and Clarke weren’t through taking applications. “By this time, we were doing a few interviews in newspapers and people had gotten wind of it, that this could be the first heavy metal supergroup, with members from UFO and Motorhead,” remembered Clarke. “And that’s when we sort of decided to advertise; in these interviews, we’d advertise we were looking for drummers. So we used to get all these tapes every day. We’d have about 50 tapes coming in every day … well, maybe not 50, maybe 20 or 30 in like a carrier bag, you know. Every day these tapes would fly in and Pete and I would listen to them, and all that.”

Serendipity would strike again with news of a certain drummer’s unexpected availability. “Then, a friend of Pete’s said, ‘You know, Jerry Shirley’s in town’ – Jerry, from Humble Pie,” said Clarke, who still sings Shirley’s praises, saying he’s right up there with Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and that “ … he used to hit [his drums] like canons.”

Continuing with the story, Clarke added, “And I said, ‘If we could get Jerry Shirley, wouldn’t that just be the biscuit.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll get you the number.’ So we got his number and we made a phone call, and he was about 25 miles out west this way. And we heard he was painting and decorating. So we made the meet with him, and we went down to see him after work. And he comes in the pub all covered in paint, you know. He said, ‘Hi guys. Why don’t I buy you a drink?’ And we said, ‘Sure.’ (laughs) We sat down and started drinking. We got chatting and he said, ‘Well, guys, my drums are in hock at the moment.’ I said, ‘No problem, we’ll get them out. Do you fancy the idea?’ He says, ‘I love it.’ So we sorted his drums out.”

Astounded at their luck, Way and Clarke went back to sorting through the tapes to find a singer. Way found two diamonds in the rough.

“Pete comes round my door one morning. He’s got a beer in his hand. It is 11 o’clock in the morning and a beer in his hand, you know,” said Clarke. “He said, ‘I’ve got two singers who are fantastic, two Robert Plants.’ And I said, ‘Oh.’ So we go down and we put the tapes on, and one of ‘em did ‘Communication Breakdown’ and it was out of this world. But he was in Australia, this guy. So that’s how big this got. People were sending us tapes from all over the world, wanting to be in the band. And then he played Dave [King]. And I said, ‘Oh, I like this guy,’ ‘cause he didn’t sound so Robert Plant-y. And you could just tell. I said, ‘Man, this is the guy.’ And Pete said, ‘Yeah, he’s good, isn’t he?’ I said, ‘Yeah, let’s call him.’”

And call him they did, even going so far as to propose sending him a plane ticket to fetch him from his home in Ireland. “So we called him and said, ‘Look, can you come over,’” said Clarke. “So we sorted it out and said, ‘Look, Davey, we’ll get a plane ticket to you and you can come over.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’ll pay for my own ticket,’ and all that. He was real independent. He was only about 20. And the rest is history. We picked him up from the airport, took him to the rehearsal room and said, ‘Well, here are a couple of the ideas we got.’ And he’s singing ‘em straight away. And it was like, ‘Oh, this is brilliant.’ I mean, Jerry, he was an old soldier, and he said, ‘Man, this is really going somewhere now.’ And it really was. It was like a light came … we saw the light.”

A New Way

Ah, but that light dimmed considerably with Way’s confounding exit. Still, Fastway soldiered on, tabbing Charlie McCracken, formerly of Taste, as Way’s permanent replacement on bass, although they used session player Mick Feat during the recording of Fastway.

On the strength of the snaky, biting single “Say What You Will,” Fastway won over critics and fans with its tough, no-nonsense attitude and ballsy rock ‘n roll songs that sounded like back-alley knife fights, such as the menacing “Heft!” and the thrilling, nitro-burning opener “Easy Livin’” that brackets Fastway with the seductive, Zeppelin-like closer “Far Far from Home,” a separate promotional single attached to the first vinyl issue of the LP. These days, Clarke is feeling a bit of déjà vu when it comes to “Say What You Will,” a song that coalesced in much the same way as Eat Dog Eat’s “Leave the Light On.”

A swaggering bit of raucous, riff-heavy hard rock that packs a punch and delves deeply into spiritual matters, “Leave the Light on” [for more on the songs from Eat Dog Eat, please read “’Fast’ Eddie Clarke talks Fastway’s new record, Eat Dog Eat”] was largely unfinished, but the record company wanted 11 tracks, not 10 for Eat Dog Eat. “Funny thing is, the first Fastway album, if we’d had 11 songs, the one we would have left off would have been … ‘Say What You Will.’ Yeah, can you believe that?” exclaimed Clarke.

Hard to believe, though true, the story of how “Say What You Will” almost didn’t make Fastway is not so unusual in rock history.  “Jerry and I, in those days, we didn’t like really like ‘Say What You Will,’” said Clarke. “We had nine tunes, and we had to write one more. And it was like, ‘Oh, bloody hell.’ We just didn’t have too many ideas in our heads, so we said, ‘Why don’t do this.’ Jerry had a bit of a riff and I got a hold of that, and I said, ‘We can’t use that. It’s moving around a bit.’ So we sort of transformed the riff, and then it was like, ‘Okay Dave, well look, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll start playing here and you start singing.’ (laughs) And then Jerry and the bass player, you keep playing, and then we did it like that. I think it was the simplicity of it that made it such a killer track. But of course, because it had been written like that, we didn’t think much of it, because you know what musicians are like. You’ve got to have it all complicated and it’s got to be fancy and all that. So we didn’t think much of it. But, of course, to our amazement, it became the biggest track on the radio that year. And like I said, we would have left it off. Of course, we don’t know anything. We’re musicians. We really are daft, you know.”

Off and running again, Fastway embarked on a tour that would see McCracken come aboard. Not long after coming off the road, Fastway went right back in the studio to record All Fired Up. And though it was deemed a success, both critically and commercially, Clarke knew something was missing. “It’s got some good spirit on it, but it wasn’t really like the first one,” said Clarke. “It didn’t have the spirit of the first one. To me, albums are all about spirit, and that’s why [Eat Dog Eat] is so nice. It’s got that spirit, you know – that sort of thing where you can’t put your finger on what it is.”

The lack of proper rest may have had something to do with it. Clarke’s troubled personal life also, perhaps, contributed to the flagging energy of All Fired Up. “I think the expectation was very high, because the first album had done so well, which always puts you on the back foot,” said Clarke. “We had started it in March or so. My mother had died that Christmas, which didn’t help and really put a downer on everything. And then of course we’d only gotten back from America on Dec. 15. We needed a bit of time. What record companies didn’t seem to understand back then was that you need a bit of space to come back from a six-month tour. You need some time off to re-energize yourself to start writing tunes again. Of course, we went straight into the rehearsal room. The same thing happened with Motorhead with the Iron Fist album. They threw us straight into it. They said, ‘We need an album next week,’ you know. So, you’re trying to write songs, but of course, you’re trying too hard.”

Making matters worse, Clarke feels producer Eddie Kramer, lauded for his work with Jimi Hendrix and other rock legends, didn’t give his all in the making of All Fired Up, after his excellent work on Fastway.

“Then, of course, Eddie Kramer, he didn’t come up with the goods the second time with the sounds on the album,” Clarke opined. “I thought the sound on the first one was brilliant. I thought the sound on All Fired Up was left wanting a bit. I thought Eddie Kramer sold us short on that one. We used the same band, the same studios … it should have sounded exactly the same as the first one. But it wasn’t, you know. It wasn’t. He was in a hurry to get back to America. He said, ‘Oh man, I can save you some money if we can cut this short by a whole week.’ We said, ‘Why would we want to do that?’”

Following Kramer’s advice, Fastway took the short cut. “And then of course, what happened was, we did the album,” continued Clarke. “He hurried back to America. Then the record company called me up. I was down fishing in Cornwall. I thought I’d get a bit of fishing in and hang out down there. I got this phone call in the middle of nowhere saying, ‘You’ve got to go back to the U.S. to remix half the album.’ And it kind of summed up my feeling about All Fired Up. Eddie Kramer sold us short on it. It’s just one of those things. And that’s why I never used Eddie again. I wouldn’t touch him, because I thought he really let us down. You know, when we remixed the album, I think we went to the Record Plant. And it was fun being in New York, but you know, it had gone down on tape wrong. Whatever we tried to do, I could hear that we weren’t actually doing anything to make it any better really.”

Whatever his feelings about the record were, the genie was already out of the bottle. All Fired Up was a fait accompli, and Clarke couldn’t scrap it and start over. “That wasn’t an option,” said Clarke. “The record company and management were leaning so heavily on us that that wasn’t an option. They never gave us that option. And of course, the record company, they don’t f**king know. ‘Oh, it sounds all right to us.’ Of course it didn’t sound right. If you thought it did, you wouldn’t have dragged me over here to remix half of it. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but …’ It was all that. And we got off to a bad start.”

In support of All Fired Up, Fastway were road warriors, but scattershot planning killed any possible momentum. After backing Iron Maiden and Saxon after the first album, Fastway toured with AC/DC for three months, “ … which was fantastic and they really know how to do it.” With All Fired Up, however, Fastway did a couple of weeks with the Scorpions, a couple of weeks with Rush and a few gigs with Billy Squier and then Ratt. “It was all broken up,” said Clarke. “So it was very hard to get any continuity going.”

According to Clarke, everybody in Fastway was unsatisfied with All Fired Up.

“I think we all thought we’d failed with the second record,” said Clarke. “And then the sh*t really hit the fan. Jerry went his way. I said I’d never work with Eddie again and that caused problems with Jerry. And one thing led to another, and Dave went back to Ireland then and started playing with his Irish band. And that’s when he said, ‘Look, why don’t you come over here and play with this band?’ And like an idiot, I said, ‘Okay.’ That was another mistake. That’s where the third record came from.”

That band included musicians from King's first group Stillwood. But with Waiting for the Roar, fans waited but the roar would never come. A chance for redemption, however, came to fruition in the form of a soundtrack for the horror movie “Trick or Treat.” It was to be King’s last dance with Fastway. “That was brilliant, because the third album had failed and Dave was already on his way out,” said Clarke. “Him and his Irish band, they wanted to go off and do something that was more Irish sounding group thing than heavy rock. He had started to complain, ‘I’m sick of every rock band. I’m sick of every rock thing.’ So we had our differences. But when I was off with ‘Trick or Treat,’ I said, ‘I’d love to do it.’ So I spoke to the director Charles Martin Smith [who also has acted in ‘American Graffiti’ and ‘The Untouchables’], and he was really up for it. And I said to Dave, ‘Well, let’s do this.’”

King, however, was reluctant, but Clarke was convincing. “I said, ‘Look man, you’re going to have to do it.’ I said, ‘Let’s do it as our swan song,’ our last thing together, because I discovered the guy for f**k’s sake. You know, I wanted to end on a high, rather than the other f**king thing, Waiting for the Roar. So we finally agreed. It was hard going, but it’s a bit like the track I was telling you about, ‘Leave the Light On’ or ‘Say What You Will,’ because it was a little bit strange. It was a little simpler, do you know what I mean? It was a little simpler and of course, I was being directed by Charles Martin Smith. He’d phone me up and say, ‘Look, we need a track for this thing,’ or ‘We need a track for this thing and such and such and such and such – something in that groove, you know that tempo.’ So I listened, just to get the groove and the tempo. And then I got an idea or would sit down and write something. But of course it was all simple because Dave wasn’t really into embellishing too much. It was all done pretty straightforward. And I thought the album came out fantastic. I really did with Trick or Treat.

King, on the other hand, didn’t. “Dave hated it. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. He hated it. Oh man, I’m sitting there, we’re on our last day of mixing, and I didn’t see him after that. He was gone. It was sad really, because I always thought he was me younger brother, you know. We had 10 years between us. I thought we’d been through a lot together, you know. I don’t know. I’ll never understand this f**king business and singers are very f**king hard work, man.”

New Beginnings

At ground zero again after King took almost everybody but Clarke who was left in Fastway and went on to form Q.E.D., Clarke picked up the pieces and teamed up with Hart. By then, however, Clarke’s drug and alcohol addictions had taken their toll, and Clarke was incapable of working much. Hart assumed the reins of Fastway and the result was On Target and Bad Bad Girls.

Fast forward to 2012 and Fastway is back, reloaded with Jepson and drummer Matt E. Eat Dog Eat has, at least to Clarke’s ears, erased some of the bad memories of the diminished states both Fastway and Clarke were in near the end. Tracks like the brooding “Fade Out,” which blooms into something more sprawling in the supernova choruses, and “Deliver Me,” with its sonic crunch, prove that Clarke is on to something, as do the dark acoustic meditation “Dead and Gone” and the driving “Sick as a Dog.”

As for what’s ahead with Fastway, Clarke is hopeful that the band will make a return to U.S. shores, provided that America will welcome them back.

“At the moment, we’ve just got to see … the album’s got to do a bit of business before we put any shows on for it,” said Clarke. “I’m hoping to get some feedback from America, maybe some offers, maybe we can do a few gigs here or there … I mean, I’ve got the guitar. I’m ready to go. I’m waiting, I’m keeping me powder dry at the moment, just going to wait and see what happens … and we’ll see if we get some good news and some positive signs.

Though he admits he’s had his day in the sun, Clarke would like Fastway to take off again so Jepson and Matt E. can experience the kind of wide acclaim he once did. That said, one last tour of America would be the icing on the cake for Clarke.

“Hey man, my dream is to strap on the guitar and take it to America one more time,” said Clarke. “It meant a lot to me when we were there with Fastway, because we did Fastway in England and we died here. Because of the Motorhead connection, a lot of the fans didn’t turn up. And I did think with the end of the tour here … well my career is over. Then we got a call from America saying, ‘Hey man, get over here. F**k, everybody’s playing ‘Say What You Will’ and you’re big.’ American fans saved my life, so I owe it to them … I’d love to do it one more time and play in America.”