The Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne called Motörhead‘s singer Lemmy Kilmister, his “all-time rock God”. In a BBC Radio 2 interview he told Johnnie Walker: “My rock god is Lemmy Kilmister. Lemmy was a guy – he shot from the hip every time. ‘That sucks,’ or, ‘I like that’”.

The two rock legends were close friends. Lemmy also co-wrote some of the songs for Ozzy’s solo album.

Osbourne said about Lemmy: “I’m good at starting lyrics, but I can’t finish them. And he’d go – he’d write a bunch of lyrics for my songs – ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’. So, I’d give him a tape, and I had this book on World War II. I haven’t read it and I told him, ‘Tell me what you think. And I have a bunch of these lyrics – whenever you can…’ I’m thinking, it’s gonna be a week. And he says, ‘Come back in about four hours.’ So I got back, and he goes, ‘What do you think about these?’ And I go, ‘Oh, great.’ He then goes, ‘What about these?’ I go, ‘Oh, you got two…?”.

“He was a speed-reader! He could read really fast. He was amazing! You look at people like Lemmy and you think, ‘Oh, he’s a yob [a rude, noisy, and aggressive young person].’ But he was very well-educated” – Ozzy added. You can listen to and watch it below.

Lemmy Kilmister died in 2015 of prostate cancer, just four days after his 70 birthday and not long after Motörhead’s last tour. The band’s drummer Mikkey Dee said: “We played the last show the 11th of December [of 2015] in Berlin, and he passed just [two] weeks later. And that tells you, the guy died with his boots on. And both me and [guitarist] Phil [Campbell] were trying to talk him out of starting the second part of the European tour after Christmas. But there was no way in hell we could do that”.

Ozzy also recalled his last conversation with Lemmy: “I’d phone him up; somebody said he was not gonna make it, so I phoned him and I put him on the phone. And I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It was terrible”. Singer continued: “I flew down to South America with him about six months before, and he looked terribly thin and gowned, and my heart broke for him”.

Motörhead music continues to be immortal. The band’s album from 1982 ‘No Sleep Til Hammersmith’ will be reissued in June for the 40th anniversary and its available to pre-order here.