The Night We Blinded Lemmy.

It’s 1981 and a bunch of 15 year old lads from Halifax are excited to be out in in the big city. We'd travelled the 10 miles from our hometown by train and are here to see the world’s loudest, dirtiest, drunkest and wartiest band of the 80’s, Motorhead.

Dressed in the NWOBHM uniform of denim jackets with the sleeves torn off with band patches sewn all over them. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal was at it’s height and there were more bands than there was time in the day to listen to them all.

I had a large patch sewn on the back of my jacket from the Fly By Night album cover by Rush. I didn’t even like Rush but they were metal so that as reason enough.

We got inside the venue an watched the first two support acts. First up were Lightning Raiders, who quite frankly weren’t going to get anywhere with that name, they sounded like a brand of confectionery.

Then came the forgettable Tank, I can’t comment on these as I don’t remember a thing about them.

The third act were Trust and these were much more interesting. These were a French metal band, the drummer Nicko McBrain joined Iron Maiden when they became massive. Their signature song Anti-social was covered by Anthrax a few years ago.

While these were on we were standing by the sound desk in the middle of the audience when my mate suddenly started pointing excitedly.

Look behind the sound desk, it’s Lemmy he said.

Sure enough there stood the Lemster himself, talking with the sound engineer and watching Trust while swigging a can of Carlsberg Special Brew and chain smoking Marlboros.

We couldn’t concentrate on Trust at this point, Lemmy would have to walk through the crowd to get out of the sound booth so this would give us a chance to get his autograph. The fact that none of us had pen or paper didn't occur to us.

Sure enough near the end of Trust's set Lemmy stepped out into the crowd . No-one else seemed to notice although I don’t know how, to me he looked about nine feet tall. He made his way through the crowd away from us and we made our move. The biggest and oldest of us decided to get Lemmy’s attention by reaching out to tap him on the shoulder.

As he did so, Lemmy, for reasons known only to himself, turned around and my mate's finger poked him in the eye.

Lemmy let out a roar and flailed his arms around, spraying special Brew all over us. We did the only sensible thing and panicked, scattering into the crowd with visions of the concert being cancelled due to Lemmy being blinded and ourselves being lynched by enraged Motorheadbangers.

None of us washed our jackets after that, although to be honest we had never washed them before it and had no plans to wash them in the future, not with Lemmy's Special Brew all over them.

So we can say that we poked Lemmy in the eye and got away with it.

Unless he reads this blog.