Technically he was a better guitarist than Eddie but ultimately he wasn’t right for Motörhead’ Lemmy admitted. As Phil Alexander says ‘the whole band felt wrong… their popularity waned massively at that point because the Iron Fist tour hadn’t gone too well and the arrival of Robbo. He just didn’t fit the band and fans felt it immediately. The reports from the shows in the US was that the band was a mess with him on board’. This was the very next day. Phil Alexander was at the gig and remembers ‘Robbo came on wearing shorts, seemingly playing a different song from the rest of the band as the opener. It was terrible’. For the lifelong fan to the newcomer, you can also complete your record collection with our huge selection of Motörhead LPs and re-released albums.

At the start of the decade Lemmy was to return to Stoke, then north Wales in successive years, to headline football stadiums with his band. The two gigs would go very differently. Twisted Sister had it’s first ever performance in England (sic)’ recalled the band’s frontman Dee Snider in 2015. ‘No record out, nobody had ever seen the band there…was opening for Motörhead at a football stadium…huge show.. Motörhead were huge… and we had to go on in the daylight…never done that before…we’d heard that bands that wore make up had been unceremoniously bottled off stage. We were pretty terrified….and Lemmy, he knew the smell of human excrement! He came in and said ‘I wanna introduce you guys’, which I thought was the most gracious thing for a headliner to do’. So perhaps, despite the low crowd, perhaps the Racecourse gig of 1982 was ultimately beneficial for Motörhead going forward. With forty years under his belt as lead singer and bassist of Motörhead, Lemmy made a name for himself and was in very high demand for collaborations. Lemmy worked with many artists, including Doro, The Ramones, Slash and Airbourne, although Probot was one of the most well-known albums Lemmy was involved in. It was a heavy metal side project put together by Foo Fighters' lead singer Dave Grohl. Snider called it ‘one of the most memorable reactions of my career’ and is to this day grateful for Lemmy’s intervention in Wrexham for helping them on the way during their first trip to Europe.

This line-up would make one album together, 1983’s Another Perfect Day, an album Lemmy considered ‘very good’, despite it getting a pasting in the press. Robertson was fired shortly after its release. The following year No Sleep ’til Hammersmith became the first live album ever to go straight into the UK album chart at number 1, although the band were in the USA at the time, supporting Ozzy Osbourne.

Much like Wrexham AFC, who had just been relegated to the Third Division, Motörhead were on their way down. Advert for the Motorhead, Racecourse, Wrexham showThis was a crushing disappointment to the band’s fans. James Hetfield certainly wasn’t the only one to feel so strongly about the ‘Three Amigos’. As future Kerrang! and Mojo editor Phil Alexander says, ‘we loved Eddie and the classic line-up and seeing it fall apart felt sad’. Motörhead’s first UK gig since Clarke’s departure was to be on July 24th 1982 at The Racecourse, a venue which showed the kind of numbers that were expected. It didn’t happen. As the Wrexham Evening Leader reported, ‘the large open spaces on The Racecourse tell the story of a festival that turned out to be a flop… the expected 10,000 crowd never materialised and the festival was attended only by an estimated two thousand people’. The gig was a massive success, the crowning point of the ‘classic line up’s’ (Lemmy on bass and vocals, ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke on guitar, Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor on drums) imperial period. Fast’ Eddie Clarke confirmed the band-as-gang philosophy; ‘the three of us became a unit…all for one and one for all… it felt like that because the industry didn’t like us’.