No Sleep 'Til San Diego: Motorhead

IT'S BEEN A TOUGH five years for Motorhead. The English heavy metal quartet, which appears Saturday in Santa Monica, Sunday in San Bernardino and in San Diego and Long Beach next week, was enormously popular in England and boasted a rabid cult following elsewhere after the release of its No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith live album in 1981. But a series of personnel changes disrupted the group's momentum after that and an even bigger setback was an extended legal battle with their old record company that kept its current line-up out of the studio for 14 months.