The two surviving Mötorhead members, Phil Campbell and Mikkey Dee, appear in Sabbaton’s impressive video for “1916”.
Phil and Mikkey follow the Sabaton members and the crowd on the street mourning for the sadly departed soldiers, while Eddie Rocha, the band’s tour manager and former member of Mötorhead’s crew is walking in the middle holding a framed picture of Lemmy.
The song was originally featured in Mötorhead’s 9th studio album with the same name, which was released on January 1991.
Lemmy was inspired by a documentary he watched on TV about the “Battle Of Somme”, where an 88-year old veteran was crying reminiscing his friend who died in his arms with half his face blown off. The battle took place from July to November 1916 near the French river Somme and was one of the most fatal of the entire WW1, with a total of 1,2 million deaths, 400.000 of them British soldiers. On the first day of battle alone 19,240 British soldiers were killed, in the biggest tragedy in the history of the British Army.
“It came to me in a flash,” Lemmy once said. “The old guy is 88 all something, and he’s still in tears about it. He walked through 25 feet of muddy s–t into the teeth of machine gun fire, all for nothing: 19,000 Englishmen killed before. Think! All those lives. And some bastard on a white horse probably got a medal for it too. You can imagine the bastards can’t you? Back at the club.”
“1916” is included on Sabaton’s “Stories From The Western Front” EP, which is out via Nuclear Blast.
