'Rock Commando': was a comic only sold at the now infamous July 1980 Bingley gig which Motorhead headlined. Then Motorhead manager, Douglas Smith, asked Helen Taylor and I to write a page each for it, which we did, but the copy bought on the day disappeared somewhere along the line.
But yesterday, a copy appeared as a 'Buy It Now' on EBay, so I snapped it up, and it will be nice seeing my 30 year old scratchy 'best school handwriting' again.
Just before this, when Douglas used to "OK" the fanzine before it went to press, he asked me to change the front cover. A local artist / friend had drawn a biker riding a motorcycle for it, but the biker's head was the Motorhead War-Pig. Original, I thought, and felt a bit annoyed with Douglas as I had paid the artist £25 for her work.
But when I saw the cover, and then the inside pages of 'Rock Commando,' I understood why he had refused it. 'Rock Commando' artist, Klaus Blum's cover was quite similar, well, similar enough for Douglas to notice the resemblance and turn mine down.
So that's the story, and it'll be nice owning a copy once again.
It was a nice gesture by Douglas, as the magazine, which is printed in sets of 4 pages, had 2 of them blank, and he offered them to us to promote what we were doing back then. He needn't have bothered. Yet because he did, those 2 pages are part of the Bingley era Motorhead history, which is great.
Pre-Internet and email at the time, it was something of a gun-to-your-head last-minute idea, and it had to be written and posted by snail-mail very quickly to make the printer's deadline.