Motörhead’s Phil Campbell and Mikkey Dee didn’t have time to say goodbye to Lemmy Kilmister: “I couldn’t even go to the funeral”

Phil Campbell, the guitarist of Motörhead, sat down for an interview with My Global Mind a while ago and understandably, Campbell’s former band came up.

Campbell was asked if he and his bandmates knew that all was not well when they had to cancel several gigs due to the declining health of Motörhead frontman Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister.

“Yes, yes we knew, but Lemmy just wanted to move on at the time. I remember on the last tour one or two shows had to be cancelled because I had to go into hospital. Then I came back and we finished the tour. That was our last tour; the last show was in Berlin. So in the last week of Motörhead, it was me who was in the hospital,” Campbell says.

He adds: “But we couldn’t have imagined – as we went our separate ways at the end of that tour – that it would be the last time we would see each other. Me and Mikkey [Dee] didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to him. I couldn’t even go to the funeral because my doctor advised me not to – I was quite ill myself at the time“.

Motörhead played their last concert on 11 December 2015 in Berlin. On 28 December, Lemmy Kilmister passed away.