The Head Cat, the rockabilly supergroup featuring late Motörhead main man Lemmy Kilmister along with Stray Cats’ drummer Slim Jim Phantom and double bassist Danny B. Harvey, are set to have their catalogue reissued. The news came in a new interview with Phantom, who spoke to eonmusic.
Speaking about first meeting Lemmy in the early ‘80s, Slim Jim commented; “Lemmy, I met in 1980. He was one of the original scenesters that came to see the Stray Cats play. We had an audience of twenty, and Lemmy was one of them, Joe Strummer was one, Chrissie Hynde was another one, Glen Matlock. It was a bit of a scene, and we were able to deliver. We’d been doing it for quite a while already, and Lemmy was one of my original friends, and he loved rockabilly. He was a rockabilly at heart.”
He continued; “The first night I met him, he asked about a particular Gene Vincent song, and I didn’t know it, and he was mortified! So, after a night at the clubs we had to go back to his house and have him find a reel-to-reel tape, that he had, on the microphone in front of the radio in the ‘50s when he was a kid, taped the Gene Vincent radio BBC concert. And he found it, played it for me. We were friends, really since 1980. I would see him every time I was in England, and I lived in London for a few years and then moved to L.A., so we were neighbours for the longest time.”
On the formation of The Head Cat, he said; “Someone asked me to do a track for an Elvis Presley tribute record, and who better than Lemmy? So we finished the song in like ten minutes, and we had another four hours of studio time, so; “let’s do this one!”, and “let’s do this one!”, “Okay, let’s come back tomorrow and do a few more!” So that was the birth of The Head Cat, and that track led to the birth of a long kind of, side project for Lem and me."
When asked if it was nice to help Lemmy realize that inner rock and roller that he always was, Phantom said; “Exactly right. He always wanted to play Carl Perkins right? I got to play Carl Perkins for my job, and he wanted to have a hobby, like outside of your regular job, and he wanted to play rockabilly music, and he loved it, man. So we used to work a lot when he had the time off. They had a schedule, Motörhead, so we always used to find holes in it, and that’s what he wanted to do. He didn’t want to have time off; “fill that two weeks off!” “Alright”, so we made two albums.”
On plans to reissue the catalogue, he said; “There’s going to be a bunch of stuff coming out, because we recorded a lot of stuff properly, live shows, and a film that we did, a DVD concert video, so it's all going to come out very soon.”.
Read the entire interview at eonmusic.
