Lemmy Kilmister has been in the news again for ill-health and for some reason Ozzy Osbourne’s “No More Tears” album came to mind. Great album and if you want a great review of it, look no further than the one that Bob Lefsetz did.

You see, while Ozzy Osbourne went onto another victory lap with the “No More Tears” album, selling millions, Lemmy continued his niche career, putting out “1916”, “March Or Die” and “Bastards” within a year of each other.

History will show that if it wasn’t for good old Lemmy writing some killer lyrics, the album would have been a different beast as two of his tracks proved cross-over hits.

Several of the tracks “I Dont Want To Change The World”, “Mama, I’m Coming Home”, “Desire” and “Hellraiser” were all co-written with Lemmy from Motorhead. In a Hot Metal interview from October 1991, this is what Ozzy said about the Lemmy Kilmister connection;

“The reason I got Lemmy to help out with some of the lyrics is that I like his tongue in cheek attitude. He’s cynical, but he can say fuck you in four sentences. One the greatest lines he wrote was “Tell me I’m a sinner, I got news for you, I spoke to God this morning and he don’t like you.” I’d hum a melody and sing “Mama I’m coming home” and he would take it from there. It’s really weird coz I listen to that song and it’s as if i wrote it. It’s as he’s read my mind.”

Lemmy further recalls the arrangement in his autobiography “White Line Fever”.

“That was one of the easiest gigs I ever had – Sharon rang me up and said, ‘I’ll give you X amount of money to write some songs for Ozzy’, and I said, ‘All right – you got a pen?’ I wrote six or seven sets of words, and he ended up using four of them…I made more money out of writing those four songs than I made out of fifteen years of Motörhead – ludicrous, isn’t it?!”

Ludicrous alright.

The “No More Tears” album was meant to be called “Say Hello To Heaven”. At the last-minute, it got changed. Ozzy said in a Hot Metal interview from November 1991, that the album was originally scheduled to be released at the beginning of 1991, however it took a significantly longer time to see the light of day. It finally came out in September 1991.

First there was the change of producers from “Thompson/Barbiero” to “Rick Rubin” to “Duane Baron/John Purdell”. The shift from Thompson/Barbiero to Rick Rubin involved the scrapping of all the work on the grounds that it was too much like Black Sabbath.

 

As with previous Ozzy projects, a certain bass player from the past was also involved up to a certain point.

Bob Daisley got another SOS call from Ozzy’s camp after all of the songs were written and played on the whole album. Daisley was also the original lyrical writer for the songs, however according to Daisley, Sharon Osbourne didn’t want to pay him and that is where Lemmy came into the picture.

However, Lemmy would also experience some of the pain that Bob Daisley and Jake E.Lee experienced about not been credited for their work. In an interview on Banger.com, this is how Lemmy put it.

“I wrote two songs on that album (Ozzmosis)-one they didn’t fucking credit me for! And I did four on “No More Tears”. So that’s six. Ozzy and I are old friends and he asked me to give him some songs for the new album-I gave him ten, he used two. It’s not a very inspiring album, I didn’t think, especially after “No More Tears”

History will show that Ozzy Osbourne wrote every song on the “Bark At The Moon” album and history will also show Lemmy as having one songwriting credit on Ozzmosis.

That’s show business, where the people with the money get to do what they want and the ones that actually contribute something worthwhile get shafted.

And Lemmy is a true superhero. For him it was all about the music. His output is massive.

Live long Lemmy.