Ozzy Still Can’t Believe Lemmy Did a Week’s Worth of Writing + Reading in Four Hours
Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister was a larger than life figure but there's still some significant details being added by friends that color the perception of the man. During a recent chat with Backstage Pass (viewed below) about his longtime friend, Ozzy Osbourne recalled Lemmy being an extremely fast worker, so much so that it caught the Prince of Darkness by surprise.
"I'm good at starting lyrics, but I can't finish them," said Osbourne, adding that he had turned to Lemmy for help on occasion, one of them being "Mama I'm Coming Home."
In one instance, Osbourne stated, "I'd give him a tape, and I had this book on World War II. I haven't read it and I told him, 'Tell me what you think. And I have a bunch of these lyrics - whenever you can...' I'm thinking, it's gonna be a week. And he says, 'Come back in about four hours.'"
"So I got back, and he goes, 'What do you think about these?' And I go, 'Oh, great,'" recalls Ozzy. "He then goes, 'What about these?' I go, 'Oh, you got two...?' He goes, 'No, I got another one - three.' I go, 'You had written three sets of lyrics?!' He said, 'Yeah, and that book was crap!' I said, 'What book?' He says, 'The book you gave me.'"
As Ozzy tells it, "He was a speed-reader! He could read really fast. He was amazing! You look at people like Lemmy and you think, 'Oh, he's a yob.' But he was very well-educated."
Within the same chat, Osbourne referred to Lemmy as his "rock god," calling out the Motorhead leader as a guy who "shot from the hip every time."