One of the nastiest, dirtiest, most beloved live albums of all time, No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith has just experienced an amazing makeover, Metal-Is reissuing this '81 classic with 18 bonus tracks stacked on top of the 11 that came with the original album way back in the thick of Britain's monstrous metal explosion. It was a fierce crew, this band of three, Lemmy, Fast Eddie and Philthy Phil making seven albums before the first of many line-up changes would ensue, and this was the band at their peak, No Sleep now offering up two discs of those original versions plus others from the short No Sleep tour sessions.

In addition to a bunch of punchy prime Motorhead classics, No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith Expanded includes liner notes from Kerrang's esteemed Phil Alexander, plus the usual gaggle of goofy photos, plus a No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith discography, just so you can see how many bloody releases and re-releases this one trumps.

Original guitarist Fast Eddie Clarke gives us the goods on the album's new elongated nature. "We had a situation with the record company, whereby I got involved with this, doing the mixing on it. What happened was, we didn't really want to change No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith, the original, because it was a classic record. But as it turned out, the record company would have done this anyway, as record companies do. They want to give away more later just to keep a little bit of something going. So I spoke to Lemmy and Phil about it and we agreed that because I'm here in the country, I should at least go in and keep an eye on it and do a bit of mixing on it. So that's kind of how that came about. I didn't want people to think it was just being thrown out there for any old reason. We did as much as we could. We are all very pleased with it."

Simple question: why has this album endured?

"I don't know. It's to do with the whole Motorhead attitude, what we kind of stood for back in those days. I used to think the show had a lot to do with it, having the bomber and stuff like that, and generally so fucking loud you couldn't hear yourself think, but obviously you can't include that on the record. So I think it is just the thought that somehow we did capture that as well. When it came out, the kids and everybody who was a fan of Motorhead used to enjoy the live gigs so much that a live album sort of takes them back there. So they get a little piece of the magic of the gig. Because our gigs were kind of special. Obviously the sound used to vary because of the volume and stuff, but it was always a good show, you know what I mean? We had sold about 150,000 or 200,000 of Ace Of Spades here in Britain. And I mean, in this country that's pretty good. It was our peak time. The bummer about the album, No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith, was that we were in America when it came out, and it went straight to No. 1. And normally you'd be in the fucking pub and in the clubs, right? Everybody'd be buying you drinks (laughs). But of course we weren't there. Typical Motorhead (laughs). We were in America doing some stuff with Ozzy."

No Sleep wasn't exactly recorded on the Ace Of Spades tour. Eddie explains. "We never recorded anything so we had to go out and do a special three gig tour, or five gigs it was, and three of them were recorded. It was two Newcastle and one Leeds that it was taken from. The support band had been Girlschool, I believe. So that tour was specifically to do the live album, because we hadn't recorded ourselves live before (laughs). We weren't very together."

"There were a lot of parties," recalls Eddie, when asked about the band's level of craziness on the road at that time. "We used to party all the time really. Except we didn't like to go on stage out of it. So we would party all night but we would sleep all day and play the gig and start again. It was kind of like that. Except one or two times in the early days we did make the error of getting a bit too gone, you know what I mean? And we made a pact that we shouldn't do that. But fights, yeah, me and Phil used to fight a lot. We used to have this running thing. And it was usually about the sound. We'd have these differences about the sound. And Phil, being a drummer, he had a very short fuse. So I'd be sort of trying to reason with him and all of a sudden he'd thump me (laughs) and I'd have to thump him back and a couple of times we ended up rolling around hotel foyers. But because we were such great mates it used to be a right laugh. We used to have a laugh and a drink afterwards. It was nothing real bad. We did have some shitty stuff that I don't want to go into, but you have to imagine that it was pretty much full-on..."

Snap back to modern times, and Motorhead is going strong with their current longstanding line-up, having just released a DVD and shortly, a new studio album. Phil is apparently out in L.A. somewhere. Eddie is producing and wants to get a band together but pretty much just a live thing. He performed with Motorhead last year in Brixton and is not averse to working with ol' Lem and Phil again if the opportunity ever presented itself.

Finally I had to corral Clarke on the band's reputation as the loudest band on the planet.

"Man, it wasn't our fault," sez Eddie. "I was forever trying to hear myself. So I was forever adding fucking amps over my side, and Lemmy was just adding more and more on his side, and then Phil had bigger monitors; see what I mean? I mean there were times onstage — I'll tell you what man (laughs) — your ears would shut off. And all you got with it was this "bbbbbbbbbzzzzzzzzz" and you had to just kind of look around and watch Phil and what his hands were doing just trying to keep a 'where are we?' You'd be thinking, 'I'll watch his hands and hopefully I'll know roughly where we are.' It was one of those. But each one of us, because we never really interfered with each other's stuff, I let Lemmy get on with his and Phil get on with his and vice versa. So I'd be over my side trying to hear what I wanted to by adding more and more stuff. And of course, they'd be doing the same over on their side. It was like, 'hey guys, why don't we try turning down and starting again?'. It was too late for that (laughs)."