PHIL CAMPBELL is a true Rock and Roll legend, having played with Motörhead from 1984 until their end in 2015. Campbell recorded 16 albums with Motörhead and was responsible for such classics as ‘Orgasmatron’, ‘Killed by Death’, ‘Going to Brazil’, ‘Eat the Rich’, ‘Stone Deaf in the USA’, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and more. He will be here in Australian in September and promises a set heavy with Motörhead classics to celebrate the 50 years of Motörhead! It’s always a pleasure to get to regularly catch up with Phil whether its to shoot the breeze on old Motörhead war stories or to talk about new music from the Bastard Sons.
MARK: Phil how are you sir?
PHIL: How you doing Mark? I’m Fine, how are you? It’s been a little while.
MARK: I’m great thanks Phil, it’s been too long. I think I missed you last album release. I was looking back through some of our old interviews trying to find something about playing Australia and I came up with this one: “It would have to be the right offer; we don’t want to be playing restaurants and places like that. We don’t want to play a chicken-in-the-basket gig.”
PHIL: (laughing) I can imagine me saying that (laughs)
MARK: I think we’ve managed to get you some good venues, none of which I’m reliably informed serve any basket meals!
PHIL: (Laughs)
MARK: I’m so looking forward to seeing you Downunder. In the meantime, you seem to be so incredibly busy at the moment – you’ve got shows everywhere!
PHIL: Yeah, yeah, we’re always incredibly busy really. We were lucky that we just had three months off from November till February, so that was good to recharge. We’ve got a few shows now up until April and I’m not sure then – then we’re into the Summer Festivals.
MARK: And out with Judas Priest after that!
PHIL: Yeah we’ve got a bunch of shows with the Priest lads – the O2 Arena with Alice Cooper and Priest in London – I think that’s the biggest indoor arena in Europe now. I only went there once Mark to watch Monty Python, but it was a bit too big, it didn’t come across that good actually. There’s just something not quite right about Python in a massive arena. But any Python is good.
MARK: It’s timeless. As is Motorhead and this year of course is the 50 years.
PHIL: Yeah, so we’re gonna play a bunch of Motorhead songs in the set as well as a bunch of our own original material, so everyone should… well no one should be disappointed at the end of the night. We’re gonna mix it all in and make it a really strong set of everything.
MARK: It will be the tenth anniversary of Lemmy’s passing this year too, and that seems to have gone in the blink of an eye.
PHIL: Yeah, yeah, it’s gone pretty quickly I think, it’s hard to believe it’s been ten years already.
MARK: I’ve had some fantastic memories of the band over the years. I remember the first time I went to see Motorhead, I always used to see them at Rock City in Nottingham, and Lemmy would always come out and talk to you at the back there where they were doing the loading in.
PHIL: Yeah.
MARK: That was one of the things tat stuck with me over the years is that he always had time for everyone.
PHIL: Yeah he did, he’d talk to anyone Lem, that was the guy that he was.
MARK: I’ve been looking at some of your recent setlists, so I know that we’re going to e treated to a great night. I just wanted to dig a little deeper into your history with Motörhead to start off with. Some great albums over the years and one of my favourite was te first you were involved with ‘Orgasmatron’.
PHIL: To be honest Mark, I thought the songs were pretty good but to be honest me and Lem were never really happy with the production at the end. The production was a bit strange for the time, I don’t think it quite worked. I’d love to remix that, get my son to remix it actually. Maybe one day we can get that done? But lots of people like the album so who am I to say. We worked hard on it I know that.
MARK: A god song is a good song at the end of the day. And Todd with his production on ‘Kings of the Asylum’ which I think is wonderfully produced, he’d do a fantastic job I reckon.
PHIL: Yeah, he managed to get a big fat sound without it being overly produced. It’s got all the power. I think ‘Kings of the Asylum’ is bang on what I want the band to sound like now.
MARK: It’s definitely my favourite of the three.
PHIL: Oh definitely. If we could have put that sort of sound on ‘Orgasmatron’ it would have sounded incredible.
MARK: Let’s hope we get to hear that sometime soon. I was looking back on some old interviews at the time of that first record and reading about how you and Wurzel both auditioned for the guitarist role and both of you famously landed to job! That must have been interesting to say the east. How exactly did it happen? I know the vacancy at the time wasn’t well publicised, there was no print ad or anything like that. Obviously we all knew that your predecessor had left but that was about it.
PHIL: Yeah that’s right, whoever applied, and this was pre-internet days remember, had to do some research. I think Lem did it on purpose so that whoever applied had to make a real effort. I think I had to write a letter to the record company first and then find out the management company and write to them or phone the up. So we had to make a bit of an effort – there was no sending something in on the internet, or YouTube or nothing like that. So we went down and auditioned (Phil and Wurzel) and he just left us alone one night in a club and he was on the machines, and he could hear me and Wurz talking about material, Motörhead songs – you know ‘If you did his bit, I could do this bit’ and all that. I think Philthy wanted one of us and Lem wanted the other one, and I’m not sure who wanted who. But two days after we joined anyway Philthy decided to leave the band, typical timing of a drummer!
MARK: (laughs)
PHIL: You know! Then Pete Gill got involved which was great. I can’t remember it all, but it was such an exciting time even if the details are gone.
MARK: It was, wasn’t it, it was so different in those days. I remember reading that you had to stay on Lemmy’s houseboat after the audition as you couldn’t get back home!
PHIL: That’s right yeah, I asked him if I could borrow a tenner to get home to Wales and he didn’t have a tenner on him, so he had to ask the chick he was living with at the time on the boat to lend him a tenner to lend to me! So I managed to get home!
MARK: Great days!
PHIL: Yeah they really were much simpler times.
MARK: And then of course when Wurzel left many years later you went back to a three piece and that lasted until Lemmy passed in 2015. Did you feel a lot of pressure reverting back – when all the guitars were down to you, at least initially?
PHIL: Well, it was actually down to me. I said to the boys after Wurzel had left “Listen I think we can make this work really well as a three piece, and look if it doesn’t work believe me I’ll be the first to let you all know if we need someone else!” (Laughs)
MARK: (Laughs)
PHIL: But we went into rehearsal and after two or three songs it was apparent to all of us that it sounded killer. So we just kept it like that. It still kept all the power going, it was just that I had to do a bunch more solos (Laughs) which was pretty hard work at times!
MARK: Motörhead was one of those rare bands that everyone loved especially if you were from the UK, there was just a huge crossover appeal and a simplicity and an honesty ‘We are Motörhead and we play Rock and Roll’ hit the nail on the head. Punks liked Motörhead, Rockers liked Motörhead, Metalheads did! Motörhead was a great British institution.
PHIL: I think it was just that we were a down to earth band, I think the energy of the band was unique, the sound of the band was unique and our attitude was unique. And I think that just appealed to the working man. Lem always used to say that he always wanted the working man to be able to afford tickets, he never wanted to start charging extortionate fees for tickets and I think people appreciated that. Plus the music was majorly kick arse as well! Nobody had heard anything like it!
MARK: Absolutely!
MARK: One of the things I always loved about the band is that it was a real band, a three way partnership…
PHIL: Yeah, yeah.
MARK: Everyone wrote the songs, everyone is credited, it’s an even split.
PHIL: Yeah, we weren’t put together like fucking Simon Cowell’s bands! No One Direction, that’s for sure (laughs).
MARK: Over the years with such a catalogue you must have some favourites to play live?
PHIL: Oh I didn’t know Mark, I always get asked this, if I’m honest it’s a really boring answer, there’s too many! (laughs) I like playing pretty much any song we did with Motorhead. But I do love t pull some obscure ones out now and again. That’s the joy for me. When you play a song you haven’t played for ages it always sounds so fresh. There’s certain songs you’ve gotta play, like ‘Ace of Spades’ and things like that. And luckily it’s a great song – like Lemmy said “Imagine if our biggest hit was a real turkey of a song and we had to play it every night!!”
MARK: (laughs)
PHIL: That would have been horrific! The energy on stage in Motorhead was always electric, and even playing those songs now and our own material – the energy is still there. So I’m still enjoying myself on stage like I always did, and with The Bastard Sons it’s just as cool.
MARK: You mentioned earlier that it would be cool if we could remix Orgasmatron. There are still a lot of releases coming out under the Motorhead banner – how involved do you get with that side of things?
PHIL: We’re pretty involved. Me and Mickey take a listen to them all and we comment on them, give our feedback if it’s not good enough or if it makes the grade. But we listen to everything basically. Some releases are better than others but it’s still material that people want to hear.
MARK: I imagine there’s still some unreleased material too? When you recorded albums back in the day I know that things were sometimes rushed and you might only have a couple of weeks to get an album done, but did you ever get to the point on any album when you had time and where you ended up with a few leftovers?
PHIL: Not really, there’s probably only out of all the albums just a handful of tracks really. There’s lots of mixes that we didn’t use but actual songs not that many. I wouldn’t like to say off the top of my head. We tended to just write enough songs for the album. We were always under pressure to get back out on tour, or we’d have to be out of the studio by a certain day as some other band had booked it. You know all that crap.
MARK: Of all the albums that you played on with Motorhead did you have any particular favourite?
PHIL: I think ‘Bastards’ is my favourite. Produced by Howard Benson.
MARK: Howard produced a few of course in a row but I think that was my favourite of them.
PHIL: It just slams doesn’t it!? The first four songs on there just blow you apart! You can hear from the off, from the first track ‘On Your Feet or On Your Knees’ it’s just a blitzkrieg of fucking sound and power! So I think that’s probably the best one for myself, but I like all the albums to varying degrees. They’re all albums of quality. There’s the odd thing we could have done better, but artists are always like that, it doesn’t matter if you’re a painter or a dancer you always think ‘we should have done that’ in hindsight. That’s just the nature of the game. You’re always striving to improve but you’ve got to know when to let it go and not fuck it up by overproducing it, you know. And that’s an artform in itself: knowing wat to do and knowing where there should be gaps. It’s an interesting process.
MARK: Did the process change much over the years Phil?
PHIL: Well, the last album ‘Bad Magic’ we wrote that in the studio – we thought we’d give tat a go. We did write the odd track or two on some of the other albums in the studio when we needed something. But the bulk of that was in the studio which turned out really cool. I wish we’d done it years before really because everything was really fresh then. You’d just written a song ten minutes earlier, you’d got something you were really happy with, and you could just bang it out on the tape there and then! Nice and fresh, but you could still go over it, still mess with it later if you wanted. It worked well but as usual we were a bit late with the good ideas. (laughs)
MARK: (laughs) Let’s wind things up with a few quick ones. If you could have been a ‘fly on the wall for the creation of any album in the history of Rock and Roll what would you love to have seen being made, just to see how the magic happened?
PHIL: I’d have liked to have seen Jimi Hendrix do ‘Are You Experienced?” but it would be close with Pink Floyd ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ I guess.
MARK: Two classics. Thank you so much for you time Phil, it’s always fun. Can’t wait to see you at the first date in Perth.
PHIL: Brilliant yeah, I look forward to it. Lovely talking to you Mark, all the best mate. You make sure you come back and say hello. See you soon.
MARK: I think I will take you up on that. Take care mate! Safe travels.
LEGENDARY MOTORHEAD GUITARIST PHIL CAMPBELL ANNOUNCES AUSTRALIAN TOUR
For 32 years PHIL CAMPBELL tore up stages around the world and rocked millions of devoted fans as guitarist and one third of Motörhead, perhaps the single most iconic and fabled band in rock music history. He now returns with his own much lauded band, PHIL CAMPBELL & THE BASTARD SONS, which appropriately features his 3 sons – Todd, Tyla and Dane – who are proof positive that genetics play a major role in musical genius.
Joined by powerhouse vocalist Joel Peters, the band has melted hearts as well as faces with blistering performances at Wacken, Hellfest, Graspop and at European stadiums as support with their most famous fans, Guns N’ Roses.
This September will witness the band’s first Australian tour when they deliver a massive set of Motörhead classics as well as a few select tracks from their own incredible material which has won them, amongst other accolades, a Metal Hammer Golden Gods Award for best debut album.
PHIL CAMPBELL & THE BASTARD SONS September 2025 Tour Dates
Tuesday 16th September
PERTH, The Rosemount
Wednesday 17th September
ADELAIDE, Lion Arts Factory
Friday 19th September
BRISBANE, Eatons Hill
Saturday 20th September
SYDNEY, Manning Bar
Sunday 21st September
MELBOURNE, Northcote Theatre
Pre-Sale: Tuesday February 25th at 10:00am Local
General Public on Sale: Thursday 27th February at 10:00am Local
