Larry Wallis

The guiding fire behind the latter-day Pink Fairies, a founding member of Motörhead, and a house producer during Stiff Records' first flash of maverick brilliance, Larry Wallis is one of the legends of the British rock underground, an astonishing guitarist, and author, too, of one of the classic singles of the punk era, "Police Car." He was one quarter of the Takeaways supergroup (alongside Nick Lowe, Sean Tyla, and Dave Edmunds); he blazed across Mick Farren and the Deviants' seminal Screwed Up EP; and he was single-handedly responsible for proving to the punk rock cognoscenti that long hair (Wallis' reached past his armpits) wasn't necessarily a sign of old-fart redundancy. In an age when Angry Young Man-style guitar was valued above any other musical attribute, Wallis played angrier (and younger) than virtually anyone you could name. Wallis' pedigree reaches back to the early '70s, and a roll call of bands that included free-festival favorites the Entire Sioux Nation, former T. Rex percussionist Steve Took's Shagrat, Blodwyn Pig, Lancaster's Bomber, and, briefly, metal heroes UFO, before he joined the Pink Fairies in time for their third (and possibly finest) album, Kings of Oblivion. The band broke up following its release and, in 1975, Wallis reappeared in Motörhead -- a move that the guitarist unhesitatingly describes as preordained: "It was just as if the serendipity fairy had arrived, Lemmy had been 'imprisoned in Hawkwind,' and was now flexing his leathern wings.... It just had to be." Together, Wallis and Lemmy alchemized one of the hardest-hitting bands of the entire pre-punk era, and the handful of shows that the group played during this period was nothing short of the absolute revision of all that had taken place before. Certainly their label of the time,...