Motörhead’s immortal Ace Of Spades album is 40 years old, and to celebrate its legacy we revisit our times with the sadly not immortal bassist Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister. Raise a glass, salute the great man, and don’t forget the joker...
Words: Joel McIver Photography: Getty
Four decades since Motörhead released Ace Of Spades on November 8, 1980, and five years since Lemmy died on December 28, 2015, BMG have released a luxurious box set of the album. It’s a tasty artefact, and we have one that you can win – see the end of this feature – but at the same time, box sets like this are a common sight in the rearward-looking era in which we find ourselves. In these pages, we ask what makes this album so special, and we revisit a couple of classic chats with Lemmy, conducted when the world was a better place – because he was in it.
In 1980, with tour dates mapped out and a rising profile, Motörhead needed some new material. Sure, they’d released two albums the previous year, and an EP and a version of their debut album had been made available, but why stop there? Booking into Jackson’s Studios in Rickmansworth, owned by producer Vic Maile, the band recorded their fourth album in August and September.
For some, the title of Ace Of Spades evokes the cover image of the three musicians dressed as banditos from the Wild West, although the shot was actually taken in London. For others, it’s the sound of the lead single, also titled ‘Ace Of Spades’ and by far the most visceral song any band released that year. In the song, which leads off with Lemmy’s instantly recognisable two-note bass riff, he invokes all the classic heavy metal tropes – dying young, living hard, reducing life down to the turn of a card, the roll of a dice and the rattle of ice cubes against a glass of bourbon. Clichés they may be, but they were Motörhead’s clichés, and they sound so, so good to this day.
The Ace Of Spades album may not have possessed the acute lyrical angles that Lemmy introduced in his later career, but it still sounded sharp, muscular and threatening, with the songs taut and planned-out rather than merely frenetic. Part of the key songs’ attraction – and there were many; the obvious title track plus ‘Live To Win’, ‘(We Are) The Road Crew’ and ‘The Chase Is Better Than The Catch’ – was their sleek power, captured thanks to the expertise of the late Maile, who died in 1989. Although Maile hadn’t exactly
