Does all that different kind of promotion—you guys have had a couple of songs on WWE—do you feel that that is more natural for Motörhead to exist in that environment rather than a radio existence?
I don’t know. We might be a great radio band, but it has to be on our terms. That’s the whole thing. The whole thing starts by writing music, and then the big million dollar question is, ‘Am I writing music just to sell albums or am I writing music because I love music and because this is what I do?’ The answer to that question is the second deal. I’m not out here to write music just to sell albums and to be rich and be played on radios everywhere. That is a bonus, but you can not base your foundation on that. That’s the point that Motörhead is making.
People barely believe you when you tell them, ‘Look, that it really, really does not matter if you like it or not.’ Of course it matters, in a way, and I feel a lot better when people come up and say, ‘Great album Mick, you guys are fucking cooking chicken on this baby here, right.’ But if they come up and say, ‘I gotta tell you, I think this record is fucking crap,’ I say, ‘Alright, but I don’t think so. The three of us don’t think so.’ And that’s where we base the foundation for Motörhead.
‘Born To Raise Hell’ for instance, that was a fairly radio friendly song for this country. And it was out everywhere, radio played it more than any other song we had. Even ‘Ace Of Spades’ got forgotten for a few years. That was great, but I guarantee you we didn’t write the song for the radio. But it happened to be one. Hopefully, one of the tracks on this album will be picked up by a station that plays it, and it kind of escalates. That’s great. I’m not saying there’s something wrong with that, or that we don’t want to be a radio band, I would love to be played on the radio all the time, but that to us, that’s more the bonus. That’s not the reason why we’re doing this. A lot of other bands you can hear that they’ve been sitting around a table with ghostwriters and producers and record company people and piece every bar together all around the simple fact that it’s going to be a hit. That is not the way we work. That’s the only difference. It doesn’t mean that we don’t want to—we just see it a little differently than some other bands do. For us, that part, that is the bonus part. If you like it, that’s the bonus.
