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A blistering slice of proto-thrash metal with catchy riffs and a chantable title, “Ace of Spades” was the opening track on the 1980 album of the same name and became Motörhead’s biggest hit. It appeared again a year later on the live album No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, which topped the charts and established the band as the standard-bearers of a rapid-fire form of heavy metal that also appealed to punks such as Vyvyan Basterd from the anarchic BBC student comedy The Young Ones.
The band made a memorable appearance on the show in 1984. The Young Ones regularly featured groovy new acts such as Rip Rig + Panic and Amazulu. But it was the not-so-young heavy metal band that shook British TV screens, opening with the thundering sound of singer and bassist Lemmy Kilmister’s Rickenbacker. It was a Damascene moment for some younger viewers as Lemmy pointed at the camera and yelled, “Don’t forget the joker!”
This was the last vestige of Motörhead “mark one”. Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, the drummer, had already quit but agreed to come back to sit alongside two new guitarists who had not played on the original recording. Nigel Planer, who played the hippie Neil in The Young Ones, later said Motörhead were the most professional band to appear on the show.
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The song is played at a brisk tempo of 140bpm and has set alight countless mosh pits as its descending guitar riffs and two exemplary guitar solos burnish an unrelenting rhythm pattern. The vocals are delivered in Lemmy’s distinctive guttural style. Apart from a brief rhythm interlude — which the band called the “tap-dancing section” — it doesn’t stray too far from a simple rock and roll structure. Slim Jim Phantom of rockabilly band the Stray Cats later said that kids listening to “Ace of Spades” probably didn’t realise they were really listening to Eddie Cochran.
Lemmy, who wrote the lyrics either in the back of a Transit van or on the toilet, depending which interview you read, was inspired by a tattoo on his forearm featuring the “death card” and the motto: “Born to lose, live to win”. The refrain “I don’t want to live forever” was later appended with “apparently I am” when played live by Lemmy, who seemed indestructible until his death in 2015.
Lemmy grew weary of the song and came to dread drunken fans shouting it in his face after shows. “I’m sick to death of it,” he wrote in his 2002 autobiography White Line Fever, saying that the band shouldn’t have been “fossilised” by their hit. He nonetheless recognised that it needed to be played. “If I go to see Little Richard, I want to hear ‘Long Tall Sally’, and if I don’t I’m going to be thoroughly pissed off,” he said.
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The ferocity and speed of the song sowed the seeds for the thrash metal explosion in the US in the 1980s featuring the likes of Metallica and Anthrax, who idolised the British band. Some metal bands — notably Sodom — have tried to go harder and faster with “Ace of Spades” covers but still fail to match Motörhead.
A TV performance of “Ace of Spades” triggered another Motörhead shake-up in 1995 when Lemmy performed a brass-heavy version on the Channel 4 TV show Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush with pianist Jools Holland’s band. It was the first time he had performed the song without Motörhead. As reported by Lemmy in White Line Fever, Wurzel, one of those new guitarists in 1984, quit the band as a result.
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The legacy of “Ace of Spades” has travelled far beyond metal. Minneapolis trash rockers The Replacements produced a blistering live version in their early unhinged days in 1982. Six years later, Dutch psychobilly band Batmobile seemed rather less menacing. In 2015 Ugly Kid Joe roped in Motörhead guitarist Phil Campbell and continued their long tradition of butchering beloved songs. Body Count paid tribute after Lemmy’s death with a rollicking version as Ice-T spat lines like “Take one look and die!” with relish.
Lemmy’s association with The Young Ones — which he described as sitting alongside The Goon Show and Monty Python as Britain’s comic legacy to the world — continued for years. The spoof metal band Bad News, featuring most of the show’s main cast, played under Motörhead on the bill at the Monsters of Rock festival in 1986 and were rewarded by being pelted with plastic glasses filled with urine.
“Ace of Spades” came full circle when the folk group The Bad Shepherds, fronted by Adrian Edmondson, who played Vyvyan, released a not-very metal but likeably gentle version in 2010.
Let us know your memories of ‘Ace of Spades’ in the comments section below
The paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Chambers
Music credits: BMG; Nervous; Metalville/UKJ; Century Media; Monsoon
