Lemmy‘s Motorhead bandmate Phil Campbell has gone into further details regarding the illnesses which have afflicted the frontman this year and caused the band’s European tour to be postponed until next year.
“Lem had a pacemaker fitted earlier in the year because he’d been suffering from irregular heartbeats, and then his diabetes started playing him up,” Campbell has told WalesOnline. “But his ticker’s fine now and he’s made sufficient changes to his lifestyle and diet in order to combat the diabetes, it’s just that he felt he wasn’t 100% ready to go back on the road just yet.”
Lemmy was revealed to have suffered a haemotoma after shows were cancelled back in June, but he had hoped to be fit enough to join Motorhead on a winter tour of Europe which would have brought them to the UK this month. Instead, those dates are now due to take place in the February of 2014.
“The main problem is that he’s displayed such a hard persona all his life that it makes it difficult for him to let people in,” Campbell continued. “He’s like the John Wayne of rock – always wanting to soldier on and handle things on his own, you know?”