When it comes to crossover, Motorhead achieve the nigh-impossible by uniting punks and headbangers. Not only that, they're impossibly hairy. The only slightly less hairy Chris Holland-Hill broke bread with the great men. George Bodnar made them do silly things in front of a camera.

Motorhead. The name sort of says it all really. The grungiest, heaviest rock'n'roll band in the known universe. And after a very noticeable absence they're back! The new album 'Orgasmatron' is the first to feature the newish line up of Wurzel (lead guitar) Pete Gill (drums), Phil Campbell (more lead guitar) and the inimitable Lemmy fronting the whole thing.

Meeting four of the most dangerous musicians the other side of Bethnal Green is bound to fill your average journalist with just the teensyweensyest feeling of trepidation. I approached the house with knees-a-trembling and tape recorder thrust out in front of me, like Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter with his cross just as Dracula has just leapt out of the woodwork. The door creaks open, answered by a sleepy looking Wurzel.

'Oh, hello... er... which one are you?'

One-Two-Zig-Zag I inform him and I'm admitted to the sitting room where Lemmy sits along with Sylvie Simmons of Kerrang watching an American documentary on Raquel Welch.

'Oh this is a great one!' Lemmy enthuses as Raquel delivers a cutting line to a game show host.

'Like a drink?' I reply in the affirmative and a can of cold Special Brew is shoved into my hand. A couple of minutes later the video ends and Lemmy disappears upstairs to speak to a French journalist on the telephone. Ms. Simmons leaves and Wurzel comes and plonks himself down on the sofa. With a sense of relief he announces that Motorhead are going into a lengthy stunt of activity. At last.

'Well we've got Donington coming up and we did some radio tours in Europe and then one over here all over England. We were going to do a gig in Toronto but that got cancelled. Yeah the next thing we've coming up is Donington and then we start touring around the second of September. Ozzy or Iron Maiden or Metallica are touring over here so we'll probably tour in the States first but we are going to do a U.K. tour. The sooner the better 'coz I'm fucking bored. It's awful when we're not working.'

He rushes off to find some more cigarettes and I survey my surroundings. The walls are covered with pictures of the band in its various incarnations. Their ghoulish mascot/logo hangs up under a light and about forty model aeroplanes are hung up around the place, all painted in full authentic colours. Records and videos are strewn over the floor in between piles of magazines. All in all it's what you'd call 'lived-in' and, especially in the company of this softly spoken guitarist, very relaxing. With two interviews going on in various parts of the house, Motorhead are obviously very much in demand these days, but the media attention doesn't seem to bother them.

'Well you've got to do them and they're quite good to do anyway. If people are interested enough in you to ask questions then it's only polite to do some sort of interview'.

Wurzel, Phil and Pete are still relatively 'new boys' in the band even though the current line up is about two and a half years old.

'When I joined Phil was still with us. He left after we did the 'Young Ones' and then Pete joined. Lemmy, did an interview in the Melody Maker and said that he still hadn't found a guitarist and he'd probably end up with an unknown player. I thought to myself "Fucking Hell, I'm probably the most unknown player ever" so I wrote him this note saying that I was the most unknown guitarist there was and a little photo of me pulling a stupid face and a tape I hadn't finished off but all the solos were on it. He wrote back and told me to audition. So I went down and there were sixty three people and that got narrowed down to eight people. There was another audition with just me and Phil Campbell and we both got in.'

A pretty big change from being a total unknown to the guitarist in a near legendary band but Wurzel remains unperturbed.

'I thought it would be really different because I'd been trying to do it professionally for years but I had a pretty good idea what it would be like, you know lots of women and booze but there's even more women and more booze than I expected!' A smile spreads across his face 'It's great, I love it!'

At this point Lemmy, who the night before had had the dubious pleasure of seeing Sigue Sigue Sputnik, comes in and collapses into an armchair. Have Motorhead ever considered doing a ballad?

'We were going to do a version of 'Charmaine' by the Bachelors but we couldn't work the chords out!' Wurzel laughs while Lemmy launches into the chorus of the aforesaid song.

'Yeah I've thought about ballads but they always turn out to be faster than the others'. Lemmy sighs in resignation and pours himself a quadruple Jim Beam and Coke. 'We wrote three slow songs once but when we were rehearsing them I kept saying "Sound good a bit faster lads". A lot of good [bands] write great ballads but not a lot of people play like us.'

So it appears that the great Motorhead monster will never change...

'I hope not.'

'Only if I die.' Lemmy says looking very determined in away that only Lemmy can. Wurzel doesn't seem quite so resolute. 'Well every album is a little bit different to the last.'

'I find that with a lot of the new heavy metal bands, not that we listen to them, we just hear them at record company offices and stuff, and they all sound exactly the same. It's not that I'm getting old or senile, or that I don't care, but they do all sound the same.'

Heavy Metal is not something that Lemmy is terribly fond of, or so it appears and certainly does not count his own band as part of that extremely dodgy bracket.

'It's only because we've got long hair that we're called a heavy metal band. When we started out we were in the punk racks, then they saw pictures of us and thought "Oh fucking Hell, we'd better put them in the rock rack". I mean every body knows' he says with sarcasm, 'if you've got long hair then you're into heavy metal. We're just a rock'n'roll band.'

'We just have a good time, and that's really important that you should have a good time and not take yourselves seriously. Well just a little bit seriously.' Wurzel continues.

'As long as you take your original playing ability seriously until you're comfortable on stage. Then you can fuck around.' And Lemmy is a man who should know. His first attempt at playing bass was one fateful night in 1970 when Hawkwind's bassist hadn't shown up but his bass had. Lemmy volunteered himself as bass player for the night after months of telling the band what a great player he was. In actual fact before that he had only played guitar in a band called The Rocking Vicars and had never picked up a bass in his life. Still he carried it off and stayed with Hawkwind for five years until he formed Motorhead in 1975.

The New album 'Orgasmatron' is the first thing the band have put out since their leather sleeved compilation 'No Remorse' in 1984 and with that and the last tour sold out in the States, could this be the album that heralds the long expected and deserved world domination?

'What, like Adolf?' grins Wurzel. 'Same tactics but we havent got any concentration camps yet. We have got the bunker at the top of the garden, have you seen that?' He proceeds to show me a corrugated garden shed that looks rather like a WWII air raid shelter with 'Der Bunker' sprayed on the side in large wobbly, black spray canned letters.

'It's just our shed, we let the next door neighbour's kids play in it. We torture them and things, and throw gas pellets in, ha ha ha! Well when I went to the States,' he says, changing tack. 'For the first time I suppose the places we played were about two thirds full, but last time we were over there we sold out everywhere we went.'

If fortune should smile upon them, success will have to accept them as they are. No smoked glass limos for them, or Wurzel at least. 'I think that it's important not to change. People seem to go over the top once they become successful and won't do anything. They won't go to the pub or anywhere and won't talk to anyone. I always thought that you wanted to become famous so people did recognise you but they wander down the road in sunglasses and big hats so people won't see who it is. You shouldn't let it go to your head, you should keep it under control. But people don't.'

'Yeah and look at them,' adds Lemmy pouring himself another wickedly large Jim Beam and coke.

Motorhead's last studio album proper, 'Another Perfect Day,' showed the band veering from the path and however good the album was it wasn't popular with the fans.

'A lot of people thought it was over when 'Another Perfect Day' came out you know. Our fan club went from about six thousand to under a hundred in two years.'

The problem lay mainly with Brian Robertson, ex-Thin Lizzy guitarist, who stepped into Fast Eddie Clarke's shoes after he left to form Fastway (complicated all this rock history innit?). Brian added a melodic strain to the music, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but live his prima donna antics displeased the fans no end.

'He's a great guitarist, you couldn't ask for better but he's not a road person. He can't take life on the road, put him in a studio though and he can come out with amazing solos and that's what he should be doing.'

So there's no hard feelings. It shows a healthy sense of proportion with every other rock band's splits turning into never ending feuds, fuelling the pages of the gossip columns and turning bands into a laughing stock. Not this band. This band will go on until no-one wants to listen and they'll probably carry on even then just to get on a few nerves.

The rest of the evening was spent with a very friendly Lemmy watching videos. If you're tearing your hair out because you read this looking for the hallowed words 'Sam Fox' fear not. How did you meet Sam, Lemmy?

'At a spaghetti eating contest.' 'Nuff said.