MOTORHEAD STILL HAS FUEL TO BURN

“Not bad for someone old enough to be your father,” boasted Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister to a full house of tanked-up head bangers at the Santa Monica Civic on Saturday. Now pushing 40, the guiding light of the British heavy-metal quartet has been slogging the concert trail for nearly two decades and still has enough attitude and energy to fuel an army--an extremely belligerent army. Sucking basic four-chord rock back down into the primordial ooze, Kilmister and cohorts staged a show with all the gory grandeur of a virgin being tossed off a Mayan pyramid.

Motorhead’s subject matter is the usual heavy-metal fare--warnings to insubordinate women, cartoonish evocations of Satanism, and of course, alcohol and drugs.

Motorhead’s sound amounts to little more than a deafening, cloudy eruption, and yet, and yet . . . there’s something different and inexplicably benign about this band, which can be distinguished from the rest of the shag haircuts on the sludge-heap thanks to Kilmister’s wonderfully irreverent sense of humor. So, in case you’ve been wondering, punk’s not dead--its hair just got long, lank and dirty.