Ian Kilmister, near universally known more simple as, Lemmy is a name synonymous with rock and roll and it’s arguable that no musician in history lived as hard as he did. Weirdly though, Lemmy turned down the opportunity to have a reality TV show made about him because he thought his life was boring as shit.
If you’re only vaguely aware of who Lemmy is because of all the Facebook posts you saw featuring his grizzled, permanently scowling face shortly after his death in December of 2015, he is without a shred of hyperbole, a fucking legend of our era.
Lemmy essentially subsisted on a diet of red meat and cigarettes for his entire adult life and famously drank a bottle of Jack Daniels every day for about 30 years straight. According to a popular anecdote from Lemmy himself, when his doctor found out about his habit of swilling a bottle of bourbon a day, he pleaded with him to consider drinking more water so that he wouldn’t, you know, die. Lemmy would later recalled that his doctor nearly shit out a lung when he went for a check-up a few weeks later and was asked how he’d increased his water intake by responding “I started putting ice cubes in my whiskey“.
Lemmy was also, despite possessing a face that looked like it had been worked over with a leathery tire iron, a veritable sex machine, with conservative estimates claiming that he’d had sex with well over a thousand women by the end of his life and he later admitting that he’d “fucked chicks of every colour, shape, religion and persuasion” during his career. On top of all of this, Lemmy smoked like a vape addicted chimney, took drugs in excess and openly collected and displayed Nazi memorabilia. When quizzed about that last thing, Lemmy explained his hobby by saying “it’s not my fault the bad guys had the best shit“.
With all this in mind you’d think a fly-on-the-wall reality TV show about Lemmy’s life would have been fucking amazing, but Lemmy wasn’t convinced and turned down the chance to have such a show made about him twice because he felt that his life wasn’t that interesting. Lemmy apparently told the production company who approached him that making a reality TV show about his life would be a bad idea because all he did when he wasn’t on tour was play video games, alone in his shitty apartment that he only lived in because it was next door to his favourite bar. A sentence that would be depressing if it wasn’t about a man who probably had filthy, illegal-in-13-states sex on every surface of that same apartment.
When the production company said that they could make his life appear more interesting using creative editing, Lemmy again turned them down, citing his desire to just play his damn video games and drink some bourbon when he wasn’t belting out the Ace of Spades to 40,000 screaming fans. Lemmy only relented on his desire to just be left the fuck alone when he was approached by someone wanting to make a documentary about his life and was informed that it would basically consist of footage of his friends talking about how great he was.
Even then, the documentary still featured a shockingly large about of footage of Lemmy playing video games in his apartment, because honestly,what else is a man whose penis can orgasm in 13 languages and spent 40 years of his life turning his liver to granite going to do with his downtime?
