Lemmy Kilmister

“Born to lose, live to win, never shave.”

91STACH SCORE

✂ Horseshoe Musician Era: 1980s Born 1945 🏆 HOF Inductee

Is this a Legendary Stach?

Stach Stats

Stash Power94

Ruggedness99

Curl Factor20

Legend Status92

Stats are for entertainment purposes. The mustache committee's decisions are final and occasionally arbitrary.

Style: Horseshoe
Peak Era: 1980s
Born: 1945
Hall of Fame: Inducted 2025
Fan Votes: 0 legendary · 0 meh

The Story

About Lemmy Kilmister

Ian Fraser "Lemmy" Kilmister (1945–2015) was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England, and was playing in bands by his teens. He worked as a roadie for the Jimi Hendrix Experience in the late 1960s, joined the space-rock band Hawkwind in 1971 (singing lead on their hit "Silver Machine"), and after being fired in 1975 formed Motörhead, named after the last song he wrote for Hawkwind.

Motörhead played loud, fast, and unapologetically for forty years. Overkill (1979), Bomber (1979), Ace of Spades (1980), and the live album No Sleep 'til Hammersmith (1981, a UK number one) influenced both heavy metal and punk, and the band toured almost constantly until Lemmy's death in 2015, four days after his seventieth birthday. He won a Grammy in 2005 for a Metallica cover.

Lemmy played a Rickenbacker bass through an overdriven amplifier, sang with his microphone tilted high above his head, and held court for decades at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip. The mutton chops and horseshoe mustache were part of the uniform from the beginning.

The Verdict

Why the Stach Became Iconic

Lemmy's mustache does not exist in isolation. It is the crossbar of a facial-hair system that includes enormous mutton chops and a horseshoe that drops down to meet them, framing the famous moles and a face that looked like it had been carved from the side of a tour bus.

It is the definitive heavy-metal mustache, worn without irony and without a single change in style for forty years. If you are wearing a Motörhead shirt, the mustache is on it somewhere.

On the Record

Appearances

Hawkwind, "Silver Machine" (1972)
Motörhead, Overkill (1979)
Motörhead, Bomber (1979)
Motörhead, Ace of Spades (1980)
No Sleep 'til Hammersmith (1981)
Airheads, film cameo (1994)
Lemmy, documentary (2010)
Motörhead, Bad Magic (2015)

Fun Facts

He worked as a roadie for the Jimi Hendrix Experience before joining Hawkwind.
Motörhead's No Sleep 'til Hammersmith (1981) reached number one on the UK album chart.
He won a Grammy in 2005 for Best Metal Performance, for Motörhead's cover of Metallica's "Whiplash."
He was a longtime regular at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in West Hollywood, where a statue of him now stands.
He died on December 28, 2015, four days after his 70th birthday; the band was still touring that year.