Motorhead’s Lemmy and Mikkey Dee Describe Scary Moments With Band’s ‘Bomber’ Light Rig

The famous ‘Bomber’ light rig has been a highlight of Motorhead shows since the late ’70s, but it’s put band members at risk on more than one occaision. Fans love when the giant, steel airplane lowers to the stage and out over the first few rows of the audience. Lemmy Kilmister and drummer Mikkey Dee … they’ve learned to respect it.

“I used to cling onto it in ‘Overkill’ and it used to fly me up on the walkway, and I used to jump down maybe four feet or so from the tail,” Dee says in the video below. “But the thing is this time it moved forward and out on stage. It was way up there in Wembley Arena and my legs are kicking up there, f—ing twenty meters in the air. They had to land it again to drop me off.”

“I once got in it at Nottingham Royal Theatre,” Kilmister adds. “I got in the bomber at the encore, they lifted it up. I had a curly lead that was stretched straight, you know, and it was pulling me out of the bloody plane. I thought, ‘You bastard — if you get me down from here alive I’ll f—ing kill you.’ He lowered me down, but he’d gone. He was out the building before I got on the floor.”

Dee’s first experience with the legendary prop was a bad one. In 1992 at Hammersmith he had an incident that almost smushed him.

“They’d measured my drum riser when it was down — it was a hydraulic riser,” he says. “So when we actually did the show of course the riser is like five or six feet further up.”

“So when the bomber starts coming down, it came down big time. Before they stopped it … the thing was crushing me,” he adds. “It was hilarious, cymbal stands were falling all over the place and drums were being crushed. I barely made it.” The two men seem to enjoy the risks that come with the heavy plane. At least they can laugh about it now.