Former Motorhead guitarist, Michael ‘Wurzel’ Burston, passed away at the weekend. The 61-year-old was suffering from heart disease but played a short set at the Cally festival in London on July 7. Apart from frontman Lemmy, Wurzel (as he was known), was the face of the hard-rocking British band.
Wurzel said of joining the band in 1984 "I wrote [Lemmy] a letter and sent a tape, and he phoned me up for an audition. He also said, 'We'll probably end up with an unknown guitarist', and there was no one in the country who was more unknown than I was."
But the former army corporal was to become an integral part of the band: a joker in the pack as he revealed in the band’s wild performance of The Ace of Spades on the classic Eighties comedy show, The Young Ones (see here). His nickname, which included an umlaut on the ‘u’ at Lemmy’s insistence, derived from Burston's resemblance to the TV scarecrow, Worzel Gummidge.
