MOTÖRHEAD ‘THE LÖST TAPES’ SERIES

Cassette tapes. Remember those? Those things with the dual spools and loads of wide brown plastic recording string that’d occasionally unravel and hang out of the shell, requiring a pencil and firm wrist to spin back into place?

Yeah, well, once upon a time, old-school sound systems contained cassette decks for the express purpose of recording shows, and these “cassette” things were a standard part of every tour. Motörhead were certainly no exception, recording show after show. They contain gold, pure aural gold, and had for many years sat hundreds of feet underground in a small cave Lemmy owned, guarded by small, hairy centurions in Roman armor with small spears and bad attitudes. Only the magic password would release them, and thankfully, Lem had scribbled it down and left it inside an old sketch book for us. There were loads of the dirty, dusty, greasy little buggers gathered, with the likes of Malmö, Madrid, Heilbronn and Norwich scrawled in biro on the tiny labels alongside a date…and thus we started to make available this unique collection of live gems via carefully digitized transfers, in a series of releases titled The Löst Tapes.

To date five concerts from these tape cassette documents of Motörhead’s ear splitting live performances from across the decades have been released digitally, with volumes 1 to 4 also receiving limited edition vinyl editions. Now, due to overwhelming demand the collection of volumes 1 to 5 is now available as a CD box set collection, with the latest volume 5 also pressed on vinyl.