Photograph: Redferns/Gijsbert Hanekroot 
 
 The Lemmy who sits before me this afternoon to promote Motörhead’s 22nd official studio album, Bad Magic, seems stripped of myths, though. Four days before we meet, when Motörhead played at Glastonbury, they followed Ace of Spades with Overkill, but Lemmy continued to sing Ace of Spades. “Rock’n’roll sounded like music from another planet,” he says. After cutting his teeth in beat bands in the 1960s,he spent time as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix before his first taste of stardom with British space rockers Hawkwind, singing the band's biggest hit, biker anthem Silver Machine, in 1972. And you get a lot of drinks and a lot of presents. "It's not my kind of music - which, to a layman, might seem to be the same music as ours, but it's not."
– The rock world is mourning Lemmy Kilmister, the hard-living Motörhead frontman who once seemed almost indestructible. Lemmy, as his legions of fans knew him, discovered he had cancer on Saturday—just two days after his 70th birthday—and died on Monday, the BBC reports. The British-born rocker, a former Jimi Hendrix roadie, formed Motörhead in 1975 when he was kicked out of Hawkwind after a drug bust in Canada. "Our mighty, noble friend Lemmy passed away today after a short battle with an extremely aggressive cancer," the band said on its Facebook page. "We will say more in the coming days, but for now, please ... play Motörhead loud, play Hawkwind loud, play Lemmy's music LOUD. Have a drink or few." Lemmy, who made a total of 22 albums with Motörhead, including the 1980 classic "Ace of Spades," rocked—and partied—as hard as anybody in the business, though despite the band's massive influence on thrash metal and other genres, he never cared for the term "heavy metal," feeling more kinship with punk bands like The Damned, reports the CBC. Health problems didn't slow him down much in later years: The band completed a North American tour in September and was due to begin a European one in January. In August, he told the Guardian that death was the only thing that could stop him. "As long as I can walk the few yards from the back to the front of the stage without a stick," he said. "Or even if I do have to use a stick." (We also lost "Louie Louie" singer Jack Ely this year.)