Motörhead Releases 'Leavin’ Here' Video From Recently Discovered 1976 Tapes

Summary

• Motörhead unveils “Leavin’ Here” from the long-lost Manticore Tapes, recorded during their raw 1976 sessions at Manticore Studio in Fulham.
• The tapes, once forgotten, were restored by Cameron Webb and mastered by Andrew Alekel, preserving the band’s early unpolished aggression.
• The Manticore Tapes drops June 27, offering deluxe vinyl, CD, and digital formats for those who want a first glimpse into Motörhead’s chaotic early days.

After nearly five decades of dust, decay, and general disregard, Motörhead has cracked open the time capsule no one saw coming.

The band has just dropped a music video for “Leavin’ Here”, a snarling slab of rock that also happens to be one of the oldest recordings from the Lemmy–Eddie Clarke–Phil Taylor era.

It’s pulled straight from The Manticore Tapes, a long-lost 1976 session that’s now been buffed, polished, and primed for a 2025 release.

You can thank a forgotten pile of tapes and a mobile studio operated by a guy named Ron Faucus for this unexpected detour through rock history.

Vintage Mayhem

The video for “Leavin’ Here” isn’t your typical posthumous slideshow. It’s a chaotic blend of surreal model animation, archival Motörhead footage, and enough grit to sandblast a city bus. It screams nostalgia in a way that doesn’t beg for attention, it snarls and throws a bottle at your head instead.

The track was recorded during the infamous Manticore Studio sessions in Fulham, back when the band had nothing but potential, attitude, and a manager who used to schlep gear for The Who.

This was the Lemmy/Eddie/Phil power trio in its embryonic chaos, locked in a converted cinema owned by Emerson, Lake & Palmer and grinding out the first real taste of what Motörhead would become.

The Manticore Setup

In August 1976, Motörhead settled into ELP’s bizarrely grand rehearsal space, a repurposed ABC cinema that doubled as their recording lab and mythical beast-themed sanctuary.

Yes, Manticore was named after that Persian lion-scorpion chimera you’d expect to see airbrushed onto the side of a suspicious van.

Inside this monster’s belly, Lemmy and crew laid down one of their earliest recorded assaults, captured using Ronnie Lane’s mobile studio, no relation to modern laptops.

Road manager Frank Kennington, whose name rarely appears in the Motörhead origin myth, deserves a gold star for this mess.

He booked the Manticore session at a time when Motörhead’s future looked like the kind of thing you’d scrape off a rehearsal room floor.

That gamble paid off, almost 50 years later.

Lost, Then Found

The tapes were nearly lost to time and bad storage habits. Ron Faucus originally handled the recording duties with what was, at the time, shockingly decent results.

The tapes were shelved, forgotten, maybe used as doorstops, who knows, until long-time Motörhead engineer Cameron Webb dug them up and handed them over to Andrew Alekel for mastering.

The result is a fascinating slice of proto-Motörhead mayhem, raw enough to cut you and loud enough to wake Lemmy in his grave, if that were physically possible.

Webb didn’t modernize the sound with trendy studio trickery. It’s not polished, it’s preserved. Like finding a feral cat, giving it a bath, and still letting it hiss at your guests.

It captures the band before the fame, before the iconography, when everything was still held together with duct tape and nicotine.

Formats and Merch

The Manticore Tapes isn’t just getting dumped onto streaming platforms. You’ll be able to grab it as a deluxe double LP with a bonus 7-inch, a no-frills single LP, CD, or a digital release if you enjoy sacrificing sound quality for convenience.

Whether you’re a vinyl snob or a Spotify scroller, there’s a format waiting for you to regret not buying more shelf space.

The whole thing lands on June 27, just in time to make you rethink your summer playlist.

And let’s be real: there are only so many times you can pretend to like modern rock before crawling back to the source.

Lemmy, Still There

Even ten years after Lemmy’s death, his presence looms large. He’d probably laugh at the idea of becoming a myth. “He would have cackled,” the press release suggests, and that’s a fair bet.

This wasn’t a guy who thought of himself as a legend. He was just trying to make enough to pay for Jack and smokes. Immortality wasn’t on the checklist.

But here we are, nearly half a century later, digging up ancient noise from a band that wasn’t supposed to survive a year.

It turns out Motörhead did more in one abandoned cinema than most bands manage in a decade.

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The Manticore Tapes drops June 27. If you’re even remotely interested in where rock’s teeth and attitude came from, keep an eye on iMotorhead.com and prepare to get punched in the ears.

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