The sudden passing of Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister yesterday was a shock to just about everyone, even those that had known it was coming. In an interview with Rolling Stone, longtime manager Todd Singerman says that test results had just come back on Saturday, showing that he had inoperable brain cancer. They’d ordered the tests several days after his 70th birthday show less than two weeks ago, as Singerman was concerned about his speech:
“Why is he not talking much? He was slurring really bad,” says Singerman. “We took him for the X-rays and they said, ‘Oh, my God, there’s stuff all over his brain and his neck.’ On Saturday, two days ago, the doctor came by the house, brought the results and told us all that he has two to six months to live.”
He says that Lemmy took the news better than anyone else, saying “oh, only two months, huh?,” and while his inclination was to just state that the frontman was ill, Lemmy told Singerman that he wanted the world to know, and a press release was slated to go out after friends and family were told. His bandmates were informed on Sunday, and were planning to come and visit. Ozzy was also due to come by yesterday or today. As the announcement stated, the video game console from the Rainbow was brought over to Lemmy’s apartment (which is across the street from the bar), and he spent a lot of his final hours playing that. Singerman wants to know why his cancer wasn’t caught earlier, despite all the hospitals he’d been to in the last year:
“Here’s the shocker for me and everyone else: He’s been to a thousand doctors and hospitals throughout the world, but nobody caught this,” says Singerman. “To be told you have terminal cancer with all the blood tests he’s taken in his life and everything else? It’s very hard to grasp that. It’s not like he had a fucking chance here. This was outright: ‘You got no more than six months.'”
It turned out he didn’t have anywhere near that long.
