The rock world mourned when Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister, legendary Motörhead frontman, died from prostate cancer and heart failure in December 2015.
Soon afterwards, Katon de Pena, vocalist for California thrash-metallers Hirax, launched a crowdfunding campaign to immortalise him with a statue. The campaign ended on $22,771 – more than the initial $21,000 goal – and the statue was erected in August.
Now director Rocio Romero has released a short documentary detailing how the initial idea for the statue became reality. Watch the six-minute film below:
At the start of the film, de Pena explains that it all began when he sent a Facebook post saying there should be a statue of Lemmy.
“By noon that day, so many people had left comments saying we should start a petition,” de Pena said. He then started the crowdfunding campaign.
Artist Travis Moore, who created the statue, explains that he met with Mikey Maglieri, who runs the Rainbow Bar and Grill where Lemmy was a regular, to discuss how they wanted the statue to look.
Some of his preliminary sketches can be seen in the video. He said in previous interviews that the statue took around five months to build, and took a team of twenty people.
“We were thinking of so many different ways to honour Lemmy and what we could do, and I don’t think there’s anything better than having a life-size bronze statue,” says Maglieri in the documentary.
Watch an archive interview with Lemmy below.
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