After being kicked out of area rock band Hawkwind following an arrest in Canada for possession of cocaine (the fees have been later dropped since he really had methamphetamine), Lemmy Kilmister fashioned Motörhead, named after a tune he wrote for his former band.
By the time they launched their third album, 1979’s Bomber, the band had developed a powerful underground following in England with a sound that combined the swing of early rock ‘n’ roll, the groove of blues and the pace of punk. North America didn’t catch on till Motörhead’s fourth full-length studio album, the barreling, bruising Ace of Spades, which got here out Nov. 8, 1980, and which featured the timeless title monitor, which stays the band’s signature tune.
Motorhead, “Ace of Spades”
Kilmister was happy that “Ace of Spades” turbo-charged his profession, but he was all the time upfront about his confusion with the general public’s response. “I keep telling people this, but they think I’m fucking lying, but I’m not: I didn’t think it was any better than any of my other songs and I still don’t,” he informed Decibel.
That view is debatable, however one factor’s clear: “Ace of Spades” was the storming anthem the band wanted to interrupt into a brand new market and Ace of Spades was the best residence for the tune and different band classics. The album is stuffed with raging, ripping songs that helped outline the group, no less than in North America. “Fast and Loose,” “(We Are) the Road Crew,” “The Chase is Better Than the Catch” and “Love Me Like a Reptile” stand alongside “Ace of Spades” as some of the band’s best materials.
“Sure, I like Ace of Spades, but no more than most of our other albums,” Kilmister informed me in 2013. “The only one I really didn’t like was Iron Fist and that’s mostly because the production was no good.”
By distinction, the manufacturing on Ace of Spades is obvious and savage, which is shocking because the album was produced by Vic Maile, who was recognized for his work with Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin.
The thought of the producer taking over a ragged slugfest by Motörhead and protecting it uncooked appears counterintuitive on paper. And, Maile had some unorthodox concepts that appeared unusual for a gritty rock ‘n’ roll band (Lemmy by no means embraced the time period “metal”). “If it was anyone else, we’d have told him to go and fuck off and die or tied ’em to the car and run around the car park with them,” guitarist Eddie Clarke informed Uncut. “[But Vic] was very delicate as a result of he was a diabetic. We couldn’t fucking shake him, you recognize what I imply? He would possibly die! So we needed to take heed to him.”
While many of the songs on Overkill and Bomber were churned out riff by riff over a short period, Motörhead put more time and effort into Ace of Spades, which in no way detracted from its spontaneous, from-the-hip vibe. The band wrote and demoed the tracks at Rockfield Studio in Wales, before they recorded them with Maile at Jackson’s Studios in Rickmansworth, England over a five-week period in August and September 1980. The songs were pretty much there, but Maile helped fine-tune them and suggested textural touches that made them more impacting.
“He certainly had his own ideas,” Clarke said in Martin Popoff’s Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers: The Rise of Motörhead. “He put his little bits in, little bits and bobs, and he would subtly just try to steer you a bit. Like, if my guitar was a little too dirty, he wouldn’t pull his punches. But he did it in a way where you didn’t want to argue with him.”
The most notable example of this is “Ace of Spades,” in which Maile convinced the band to use rhythmic wood blocks to enhance the sound of the tune. “We’re there with these blocks of wood banging them together,” Clarke told Uncut. “He put loads of reverb on and that’s the sound you hear – ‘dang dang dang dang dang dang CLACK.’“
Motorhead, “(We Are) the Road Crew”
Unconventional tracking also accompanied “(We Are) the Road Crew,” a tribute to the band’s roadies, one of whom was so touched, he cried when he first heard it. Clarke says the song was literally thrown together. “We had the riff going, and Lemmy came up with the title when we only had a riff,” he told Popoff. “And what occurred was that the title took over the tune. But we by no means actually completed the tune – you possibly can variety of hear that on the finish. We variety of [left it alone] a little bit bit as a result of the lyrics have been so robust, and we beloved the groove of it. But it doesn’t have a correct refrain.”
“My Chief Memory of ‘(We Are) the Road Crew’ is Eddie lying on his back in the studio, helpless with laughter, his guitar feeding back all over the place, halfway through what was supposed to be his solo,” Kilmister wrote in his memoir White Line Fever. “And we left it on because it was so fucking funny. The song was my first 10-minute lyric: That’s how long it took me to get the words down in the studio.”
The title monitor addressed Lemmy’s playing behavior: “I know I’m going to lose, ‘cause gamblin’ is for fools / But that’s the way I like it baby, I don’t want to live forever.” “Like it says in the song, ‘The pleasure is to play, makes no difference what you say,’” he informed me. “But no gambler ever wins, not in the long run. The most I’ve lost at any one time is three grand. I won nine grand on one pull of a lever once at the Venetian in Vegas. I put two grand back and took seven grand home. That’s very good for me.”
Motorhead, “Jailbait”
As with the title monitor, most of Ace of Spades is about Kilmister’s rock ‘n’ roll microcosm, laid out down and soiled. “Jailbait,” which Kilmister is shocked he didn’t get any flack for, was written in regards to the enchantment of underage ladies: “I don’t even dare to ask your age, Just enough to know you’re here backstage / You’re jailbait and I just can’t wait, Jailbait, baby come on.”
And “The Chase is Better Than the Catch” is about how attempting to win over ladies is extra thrilling than really hooking up. “Well it is, isn’t it?” he wrote. “I mean, whenever you move in with somebody, it’s fucking gone, you know? They leave their knickers in the bathroom and they have horrible habits that you didn’t know about. To have a relationship is fatal to the relationship.”
One of the elements that slowed down the creation of Ace of Spades, Clarke informed Popoff, was Lemmy’s tendency to solely enter the studio when he was prepared. “[drummer] Phil [Taylor] and I would spend a lot of time playing because we used to get bored,” Clarke mentioned. “Lemmy never got bored. He always had a [girl] with him and a bottle of Jack and a book. Trying to get him to rehearse was difficult at times.”
The first two Motörhead albums had cowl artwork that complimented the ferocity of the band. Ace of Spades didn’t. Instead of depicting the band’s Snaggletooth mascot in some kind of playing setting as followers might need anticipated, the band selected a Wild West motif that made them look extra like Mexican banditos than English punk-metal pioneers. Ironically, the desert scene was shot in a sandpit 10 miles northeast of London close to a city known as Barnet. Still, the band was happy with the quilt and the cowboy theme underscored the thought of Motörhead and rock ‘n’ roll outlaws.
“I’m not quite sure how we came up with that idea,” Clarke mentioned. “We were discussing with management what we were doing for the next album cover, and I think that’s when it was [mentioned] that we should dress up like cowboys. And of course, I thought, ‘Well, fucking fantastic, I’ll be Clint Eastwood.’ Because I was a big Clint Eastwood fan. And so, of course, it got exciting, because we were going to dress up. And it was a wonderful day.”
Ace of Spades was the primary Motörhead album distributed within the U.S., however whereas it made an indelible mark on followers of cutting-edge underground steel, it didn’t excite many file labels, who have been caught up within the NWOBHM Judas Priest/Iron Maiden mould. “We couldn’t get signed in America until well after No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith came out,” Kilmister informed me. “And that was a No. 1 record in Europe! Ace of Spades was No. 4 and Bomber was No. 6. But in America, nobody wanted to know us. I don’t think we looked cute enough. We sort of fit right in between the old surge of British heavy metal like Deep Purple and just before the new surge of heavy metal. So we were fucked for a while.”
To date, Ace of Space has been launched greater than eight occasions in numerous territories, in single disc and double-disc codecs. And the title monitor has been lined by numerous bands, appeared in no less than 16 films, together with Hardware, Zombie Nightmare, Grosse Pointe Blank, Superbad and Smokin Aces. The tune was additionally featured in commercials for Kronenbourg and Kia.
“That song has been really good to us,” Kilmister informed Metal Hammer. “I just wish that people would realize we’ve gone past it now. In America especially, they seem to think we stopped in [1980].”
Indeed, Motörhead launched one other 16 full-length studio albums and quite a few reside data over the subsequent 35 years earlier than the band ended with Kilmister’s demise of most cancers on Dec. 28, 2015.
Loudwire contributor Jon Wiederhorn is the writer of Raising Hell: Backstage Tales From the Lives of Metal Legends, co-author of Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal, in addition to the co-author of Scott Ian’s autobiography, I’m the Man: The Story of That Guy From Anthrax, and Al Jourgensen’s autobiography, Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen and the Agnostic Front e-book My Riot! Grit, Guts and Glory.
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