Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  “I’m not quite sure how we come up with that idea,” reflects Eddie. “It might’ve been a management/band chat thing. We were discussing with management what we were doing for the next album cover, and I think that’s when it was mooted that we should dress up as 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. So we really took it seriously. And we went up to this place, a sand quarry in Barnet, North London, and it was a wonderful day. Of course, a lot of people think it was taken in the Arizona desert. But of course, Motörhead’s budget wouldn’t stretch to that.”

  The trick worked, partially because the weather cooperated, but by this point, well, Lemmy, Phil and Fast Eddie were known to us, as was Motörhead’s plight on this globe, and the band’s smart fans all knew there was no way Motörhead was going to ponce about and go to Mexico for a cover shoot. This was the band and Bronze making do, and we were all in on the joke.

  “It was about midday, 1 o’clock, as I remember,” continues Clarke, on the South Mimms shoot, “and it was all over by about 4 o’clock. And in fact, I think the last one we did was us standing by a door somewhere. And then of course we tried to repeat that with Iron Fist. We did a sort of little movie for Iron Fist, in the same spot, around the same area, but it never works when you try and follow a path, you know what I mean? We were waning on Iron Fist. We should’ve had more time to ourselves. But Ace of Spades, really, why I keep referring to that time so much is because Ace of Spades was probably the peak—we were flying up. Ace of Spades just had that little cherry on the top.”

  As for that title, that emblazoned credo, “Well, it just came when we were fucking about writing the tunes. We would say, ‘Lemmy, come on, we need some lyrics.’ I definitely remember deciding, let’s call it Ace of Spades, because we had the song ‘Ace of Spades,’ and we hadn’t thought of a title at this stage. And it just seemed to be the right thing to do—and it’s the best title in the world as well.”

  Underscoring the contention that Motörhead’s zeitgeist-capturing record was no more particularly inspired than Bomber, Eddie explains that, “Ace of Spades is the third record in the series, as I call it. And by then, we were starting to struggle. It was becoming more difficult to come up with the riffs. Bands are good for two or three albums and then it gets difficult. And so Bomber was really the highlight of just, ‘Yeah, here’s another one, man! Great!’ It was like, ‘Oh, and I’ve got another one here.’ It was just like that. We just literally, we were in the rehearsal room, and said, what about this? Yeah, fucking fantastic, let’s do it. It was that good. We were so on top of our game during Bomber. As I say, Ace of Spades wasn’t quite so easy. We went to Rockfield to do a sort of demo album first, and wrote most of the material, and then we went and recorded it, changed some of it as we went.

  “So that was a longer process,” continues Clarke. “Overkill had been a build-up as well, of a long period before. We had maybe four or five of the songs we already had written when we got to deal with Bronze. Things like ‘Damage Case,’ ‘Limb from Limb,’ ‘I’ll Be Your Sister’; we’d done them on the John Peel show during that summer. So we have some material for Overkill but we had to write extra material to make up the album, as it were. Whereas with Bomber, we had to start from scratch. Where we started on, say, September 10, and by October 30, we had an album done. It was brilliant, you know, just brilliant. It just had a huge sense of ease about it. We were excited, and I remember when it came out and went in the charts. I think it got to, I don’t know, No. 6 or something, but better than before. We seemed to be going in the right direction, as it were.

  “But with Ace of Spades, we did that in another studio, Rickmansworth. I hired in a Yamaha drum machine for some rhythms, just to add a little bit of spice onto the thing. And you used to try very hard in those days; that’s what people don’t get now. You’ve got your fucking computer and stick it on and you plug in and you’ve got a great sound and that’s the end of it. Back in the day, you were working 24/7 trying to improve your sound. You were cleaning your guitars, you were changing the frets, you were changing different strings, trying different pickups, trying different amps. It was all about getting better all the time. And the recording techniques . . . see, when you’re playing live, all of that’s gone. And it was full-time trying to get the gigs sounding better. You know, fuck me, how can we get the sound better? It was a real concern to us all the time and I think that’s what made it so marvelous.”

  Ace of Spades, recorded over a five-week period in August and September of 1980, was issued on November 8, hot on the heels of its world-beating title track. Not that this would mean mass success for the band now, soon or ever, but remarkably, Ace of Spades would be the first Motörhead album domestically issued in America, through Bronze’s longstanding distribution arrangement with Mercury Records. It’s simply the case that records could be optioned for the U.S. or not, and now, finally, one of Motörhead’s was.

  Still, the album would go gold on home turf, and give to the world an artful and intriguingly inscrutable autobiography in its speed metal title track. “Ace of Spades” was a lethal update and improvement on the wall of sound that was “Overkill,” improved in terms of the complexity of the riff at hand over both that crude song and over the original “Ace of Spades” demo that Phil and Eddie scratched heads o’er.

  The song would become a bit of an albatross, because, let’s face it, in the most distilled, simple, abbreviated telling of this band, Motörhead is known for one defiant and abrasive song alone, an anthem nonetheless banished to the fringes so deftly that we can’t even call Motörhead one-hit wonders. They are no-hit wonders, because “Ace of Spades” wasn’t even a hit. And yet it has barged into the pop culture lexicon and will likely be part of it forever. It’s a similar situation to the Ramones, who are represented by “Blitzkrieg Bop” at hockey and football games and yet never had much of a hit with that “Hey ho” anthem or any other of their beloved songs. But “the brudders” sure punch above their weight in T-shirt sales, as does Motörhead. Both acts represent a walk on the wild side for eschewers of hard rock, and in Motörhead’s case, it’s because of Lemmy and his three-minute blast of nihilism, “Ace of Spades.”

  “Well, every band gets that,” shrugs Lemmy. “Every band is attached to one song: Lynyrd Skynyrd, ‘Free Bird,’ Eric Clapton ‘Crossroads’—but he’s got a few actually—Hendrix, ‘Purple Haze.’ All these bands with different songs, you have to just grin and bear it. And we were lucky—we got famous from a good song; ‘Ace of Spades’ is a good song. I don’t mind playing ‘Ace of Spades’ because it’s good. But imagine if you are famous for a fucking turkey, and have to play that for the rest of your life.”

  Playing it is one thing, but being asked about it in interviews all the time is another. “No, I like doing interviews if they’re good questions,” explains Lem. “If someone has done their homework and they don’t want you to do all the work for them . . . because you get some people that say, ‘So, tell me about “Ace of Spades.”’ Oh, fuck off. I mean, there are only a certain amount of things you can say about one fucking song.”

  I asked Lemmy if it’s ever come to a head, where perhaps he’s got to go in for some superficial and short TV chat at eight in the morning and it all went pear-shaped. “Well, I won’t go there at eight in the morning. I’ll probably kill somebody. Especially in TV. No, I usually breeze through it, it’s certainly not something new to me. I’ve never walked out of an interview. Except me and Phil Campbell did once, because this chick was really a pain in the ass, and she insisted on doing an interview in the bathroom for some reason, and it was very echoey. You can imagine all the tiles and all that, and the hallway. And she said, ‘Did you ever do anything really funny in an interview?’ And Phil said, ‘Yeah, well, me and Lem once got up and walked out of an interview and never came
back.’ And then we got up and walked out and we never went back. And one time we were waiting for a radio guy, Radio Clyde, from Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland, and me and Eddie missed a sound check to go and do this fucking interview because it was so deathly important. And like this guy kept us waiting for half an hour, so we put the fire hose inside the fucking studio, shut the door and turned it on and left.”

  “Ace of Spades” offers a ruthless peer into Lemmy’s carpe diem life credo, which is roughly live fast roughly and play the game for the rush of playing it. Even though you win some, we are all born to lose. It’ll be proven in the gambling and all the games that make up our illusory lives, and then, ultimately, as intimated in the last verse, death will play its card, the ace of spades. And therefore, back to the opening sentiments: roll up to the table, ante up and play the game.

  Inspiration for the closing sequence, particularly the reference to the dead man’s hand, derives from the tale of Wild Bill Hickok holding those cards when he was shot dead. As for wider influence, Lemmy qualifies that he’s more of a slot machine gambler than a card shark, but where’s the drama in that? Nonetheless, his recent left forearm tattoo of the phrase “Born to lose, live to win” circling a spade might also have played a role in the lyric’s birthing.

  “If you listen to the lyrics in the song, it kind of sums it up,” reflects Eddie. “‘I’m born to lose, gambling’s for fools,’ you know what I mean. ‘That’s the way I like it, baby.’ All that sort of thing. ‘I don’t wanna live forever.’ The lyrics for the song are kind of like a rock anthem in a way. It’s like how I don’t give a shit and I’m doing what I want to do. And, fuck it—if I lose, I lose, if I win, I win.”

  And then it’s all over, in a scant 2:47 stuffed to the gills. “We used to want to keep our songs punchy,” notes Eddie. “Apart from ‘Overkill,’ generally our songs were quite punchy, aside also from ‘Stone Dead Forever.’ Lemmy always said three-minute songs. He always loved three-minute songs. He didn’t go in for any of this fucking, as he called it, jamming. He said, you know, there’ll be no fucking jamming in this band. I said, ‘What do you mean, Lem?’ He used to say things, I didn’t know what he meant. Because we actually did used to jam.”

  What Lemmy also didn’t like was slow or turgid hard rock, what Clarke calls “ploddy, ploddy,” and nor did Phil. This is why Lemmy wasn’t a big Sabbath fan, it’s why he didn’t have a wet, warm and fat bass tone, and it’s why Phil and his circular, over-active, often near violent approach was a perfect fit for the razor-wired chicken coop of a band that was Motörhead, as exemplified on this track, where indeed everybody seems to be playing above the clef.

  “Yeah, and that’s why at the beginning it was quite difficult,” muses Eddie, “because once you get it under wraps and you start learning to work together, it’s creating this unique thing. And Phil was a really major part of that. He never liked the ploddy ploddy much, the power drummers. He always had a slightly jazzier approach.

  “Phil and I spent a lot of time writing tunes together, and his drumming just brought something. It filled in holes, where if you didn’t have Phil, there would be a big hole there. Like my guitar, I brought a little bit of melody to it. It sounds strange, but there’s a lot of melody in what I did, and then Lemmy could sing over my melody. And Phil would fill in the gaps. So we would complement each other all the way around, and it actually worked very well. But of course you take that away, and you’ve just got ploddy ploddy, really, with some sort of singing on top. Whereas I used to put a little thing underneath, for Lemmy to sing against, which we do in ‘Ace of Spades,’ where Lemmy sings and I throw in a lick. ‘Only way to feel the noise . . .’ so what he’s doing, he’s got somewhere to put his vocal on. And then Phil would keep the bottom end lively and interesting. I mean, you could call him a busy drummer—and he was—but what he did was he filled in the spaces.”

  And therefore sonically, Lemmy, Eddie and Phil create a seething cauldron of sounds, a veritable wall of sound, Lemmy scraping from his throat and from his bass, Eddie lashing with licks and Phil frantically displaying his effortless energy but also his signature high-hat roil. Everything has its place in the mix, but the situation is uneasy and threatening, each sound grinding against the next.

  “But Ace of Spades was actually the start of the more difficult period, as it happens,” says Eddie, “but it was probably our pinnacle, inasmuch as it rolled off the tongue relatively easy, but not nearly as easily as Overkill and Bomber. First we went to a place called Rockfield in Wales. They have a studio, but they also had a rehearsal house, where obviously you could rehearse your band. And then, I guess, the idea was to go to the studio and record. It was a good little place, but I never recorded in the studio. Although the very first Motörhead album, the one I wasn’t on, the On Parole album, was done at Rockfield, with Dave Edmunds. But that album has nothing to do with me. So we just used the house. We went down there and stayed for a couple of weeks. They had a big room there and we set up, and when we weren’t drinking and falling about, we played a little bit. And so we wrote a few tunes. In fact, quite a few tunes. I mean, it was quite difficult, because by then we were on our fourth album, and by then it gets more . . . Every time you write an album—and I’m sure other bands have told you this—they get harder to write, as you go along, because you get restraints, really. Because you’ve had a couple of relatively successful records, you start to feel a little bit hemmed in. Oh, we can’t do one like that because the fans won’t like it—that’s one of them. So you already put in restrictions on yourself.

  “And then of course you play a riff or solo, you go, oh, we did one like that on the last album,” laughs Clarke. “So all these little things start coming and Ace of Spades was the start of that. But fortunately we got through it. I mean, Phil and I were doing a lot of writing at a time. We were living in a flat in London together for a while, and we wrote things like ‘Chase is Better than the Catch,’ and Phil and I used to play an awful lot, just jamming the drums and the guitar. So it meant we could develop a couple of riffs. So when Lemmy was around, we could present to him what we had. And then of course he could join in and then stick some lyrics on. Which worked very well at that time. So we did some demos in those Rockfield sessions on an eight-track—a little eight-track mobile turned up. We just recorded everything, and later we put some vocals on those back in London, just for the crack to see how they were sounding. And they weren’t sounding too bad. So we had sort of like the makings of a good record. But it wasn’t until we went into the studio with Vic Maile that it really started to take shape.

  “He was a nice little fellow, he was,” continues Eddie, on the subject of producer of choice this time around, Vic Maile, gone from this world nine years later. “Yeah, he was a quiet, little, reserved kind of chap. But he used to come up with these magnificent mixes. And he used to get our sounds down. He used to piss us off. He had this little studio stuck out somewhere. We had to drive out there every day. It was a real pisser, but we used to like working with him because he didn’t say a lot but he always got a good result. So when you work with someone, you put up with all that stuff. And he didn’t take any shit either, which was quite funny. He was only a little guy but he didn’t take any shit. So we didn’t bother giving him any in the end. So our work down there was quite productive. We had a good productive working relationship. Whereas with the Bomber and the Overkill albums, I thought they were great albums, and I thought Jimmy Miller did a great job, but it was a different circumstance. Those two albums, we were putting out stuff that was all kind of balled-up for couple of years; it just kind of poured out. We didn’t have to write those, really. They just came. But Ace of Spades . . . we had to kind of write it a bit more. So that is why Vic came in very handy.”

  Vic, nicknamed “Turtle” because of his looks, had served minor roles on some major sessions with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, the Who and Led Zeppelin, but his main connection to
the band was that Vic ran the mobile recording unit used for Hawkwind’s seminal Space Ritual live album, on which the seeds of Motörhead are most graphically scattered, in terms of the Hawkwind canon. “Discussions were taking place regarding producers and that is when we were steered towards Vic Maile,” notes Clarke, “who was favored by the record company and management. We didn’t really care too much; we just wanted to record the album and get back on the road.”

  “Vic Maile was one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever worked with,” says Doug Smith. “He was originally the engineer of the only mobile studio in the U.K., Pye Mobile, the only one available, and that’s how we met him, right from the very beginning. He recorded a whole bunch of live stuff for Hawkwind. And Lemmy was very much part of Hawkwind, he was the frontman, he was the singer of ‘Silver Machine,’ etc., so Vic became very close, a great friend, and he was the person that recorded Ace of Spades. And as it happens, we did a few things together outside of that, including the joint Girlschool and Motörhead single, ‘Please Don’t Touch.’ And he, sadly, died of cancer. But he had carried on being an engineer for a number of years.”

  After the Ace of Spades demo sessions, it was over to a little-known studio just north of London, where the heavy lifting took place.

  “Jackson’s was a very nice old little studio out in Rickmansworth, which is out Gerrards Cross way; about halfway to Oxford,” explains Clarke. “It was owned by an old DJ called Jack Jackson, who was very famous, and his son took over. But he had a wonderful old Neve desk in there. It was a particularly nice thing and Vic Maile was a little harmless guy. He had diabetes, and he was a small guy, which I think was good. Because in a way, because he had diabetes and everything, we couldn’t throw tantrums with him, really. If he was a bit of a big strapping bloke, we would’ve probably ended up having fights with him, you know? But because he was a bit fragile and that, we always had the utmost respect for him. Never gave him too much stick. So when he came up with an idea and said, ‘Hey guys, why don’t we go out and stand under a microphone and hit two bits of wood together?’ Instead of saying, ‘Fuck off, you silly twat,’ we’d say, ‘Oh, all right, Vic, if that’s what you want us to do, we’ll give it a shot.’ So to hear on ‘Ace of Spades,’ you know, they got that thing that goes ‘tttrrrrrr,’ and a couple of bits of wood we’d bang together, you can hear it. So he just brought in a couple of little things into the production that we’d never had before. Because we had Jimmy Miller before, and it was all straight-ahead—you know, put it down and rock on. But Ace of Spades was the first time we actually thought about it a bit more. And that was thanks to Vic Maile, really.”