The year 2025 will mark a decade since the death of Lemmy Killmister, the iconic bassist and frontman of Motörhead, one of the biggest and most influential heavy metal bands there has ever been.
Even many people who have never heard Overkill or Killed By Death will have been influenced by Lemmy and Motörhead’s style, from skulls on stainless steel rings to bullet bandolier belts, chains, spikes and almost everything that is linked to the “heavy metal style”.
Probably the most distinctive piece of iconography that is exclusively seen with Motörhead, besides perhaps the Ace of Spades, is Snaggletooth, also known as the Warpig.
Often seen not only on many of Motörhead’s album covers from their self-titled first, the Warpig with its chains, rings, spikes and horns is an iconic and classic piece of heavy metal design, and whilst as ubiquitous as Iron Maiden’s Eddie, appearing on all but two of their albums it arguably proved to be even more influential.
According to its creator, artist Joe Petagno, who met Lemmy through his work with design house Hipgnosis for Lemmy’s previous band Hawkwind, the inspiration for Snaggletooth came from a type of primordial anger.
Motörhead was a naturally cathartic, rage-filled band, and Mr Patano wanted to bring that to the forefront with a combination of various bestial skulls.
Ultimately, he settled on a combination between a gorilla, a wolf and a dog, completed with some oversized boar horns. Once Lemmy saw it, he added a helmet with spikes, chains and a trickle of spit coming from the mouth.
For its first appearance, the original design was turned into a negative, giving it a particularly iconic look that fits in almost any style or setting you could put it, from the side of a WWII aeroplane for Bomber, a badge on the Ace of Spades cover, as part of a gauntlet of skulls on Iron Fist and as a train for Orgasmatron.
It has since transcended the band itself and become a staple icon of heavy metal, one that perfectly fits around a finger of a hand raising the horns high.
