By Martin Popoff
One of the nastiest, dirtiest, most beloved live albums of all time, No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith has just experienced an amazing makeover, Metal-Is reissuing this '81 classic with 18 bonus tracks stacked on top of the 11 that came with the original album way back in the thick of Britain's monstrous metal explosion. It was a fierce crew, this band of three, Lemmy, Fast Eddie and Philthy Phil making seven albums before the first of many line-up changes would ensue, and this was the band at their peak, No Sleep now offering up two discs of those original versions plus others from the short No Sleep tour sessions.
In addition to a bunch of punchy prime Motorhead classics, No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith Expanded includes liner notes from Kerrang's esteemed Phil Alexander, plus the usual gaggle of goofy photos, plus a No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith discography, just so you can see how many bloody releases and re-releases this one trumps.
Original guitarist Fast Eddie Clarke gives us the goods on the album's new elongated nature. "We had a situation with the record company, whereby I got involved with this, doing the mixing on it. What happened was, we didn't really want to change No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith, the original, because it was a classic record. But as it turned out, the record company would have done this anyway, as record companies do. They want to give away more later just to keep a little bit of something going. So I spoke to Lemmy and Phil about it and we agreed that because I'm here in the country, I should at least go in and keep an eye on it and do a bit of mixing on it. So that's kind of how that came about. I didn't want people to think it was just being thrown out there for any old reason. We did as much as we could. We are all very pleased with it."
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