Expanding on Vic’s role, Eddie affirms that: “He certainly had his own idea. He’d put his little bits in, little bits and bobs, and he would subtly just try and steer you a bit. Like if my guitar was a little too dirty, he wouldn’t pull his punches. But he did it in such a way where you didn’t want to argue with Vic. You tried to please him if you could. It was a good relationship, really. Especially for a band like Motörhead. And if you listen to the two albums before you hear it—it just seems a little bit more presentable, Ace of Spades. Plus we were growing as a band, and like I said, because the material was becoming more difficult, we had to spend more time on it. And so we had it in one form to start with, and then we took that to Rickmansworth with Vic, and then Vic would say, ‘Look, why don’t you try doing this?’”
“And that’s how the ‘Ace of Spades’ lick changed from what it was on Dirty Love to Ace of Spades,” says Eddie, citing what is a graphic example of this idea where songs were labored over this time ’round, rather than just considered fine, ready to go, from the start. “It was a discussion we had about the riff being a bit ordinary the way it was. And let’s try something else. So we came up with that, which isn’t a normal kind of riff—it’s slightly odd. And remember, the album was as yet untitled. But we had decided to write at Rockfield. Motörhead didn’t really do the country thing, so we spent a lot of time drinking and falling over and at first, did very little work. After about a week, we did start to do a bit of playing, surprisingly, and the songs started to take shape. We recorded the songs as they were so far and split back to London.
“Eventually, we decided to go to a studio and put some vocals on the tracks and this was the first time the title ‘Ace of Spades’ appeared. Lemmy threw down a few lyrics and we moved on to another track. Not much more was said at this time as they were, after all, only demos for the album. We started laying down the backing tracks but when we got to ‘Ace of Spades’ we decided that the riff needed a makeover. This was unusual for us, as we were always in a hurry. The result was that the main riff was completely changed and wedded to the old part of the song. We all got very excited about the new arrangement and we knew we had a killer track on our hands. This new approach was then applied to some of the other songs and the results were equally impressive. It was only a matter of hours before we agreed the album title would be Ace of Spades.
“But that’s us thinking about the material,” reflects Eddie, again, showing that confidence in the band’s writing abilities might have already been slipping in the lead-up to Ace of Spades, or, more positively pointed, that the guys were now smart enough to know better—and likely do better. “Yes, and of course the follow-up to that was Iron Fist. We were struggling big time for material for Iron Fist. The pressure was on from the record company for an album, and in contrast to Ace of Spades, we struggled. And unfortunately with Iron Fist, Phil and Vic Maile fell out. So Phil wouldn’t work with Vic anymore and we had a problem there.”
Past the career-making opening track and onto the second selection, “Love Me Like a Reptile” demonstrates Vic’s work in pushing Lemmy to sing more, a necessity for this fast yet very melodic track. “Shoot You in the Back” opens with the exhortation “Western movies!” which sets the cinematic scene for a second track on the album, playing up this Mexican or southern U.S. or Wild West banditry theme, as does the punchy riff and drumming from Phil, who also credits Maile with improving his sense of timing. Of note, the original version of the song sported a chorus that was too much of a lift of the band’s own “Like a Nightmare”; this was changed, with the tempo increased as well.
“Live to Win” and “Fast and Loose” keep the pedal to the metal, while Lemmy continues to plunk down a philosophy steeped in the Wild West but just as applicable to bikers and the new metalheads showing up at gigs in droves. “Live to Win” is as punky and bass-churned as anything Motörhead had ever done, but is rendered bleak from Eddie’s dissonant licks, while “Fast and Loose” demonstrates the band’s sophisticated use of circular, Budgie-like riffing over an expert ZZ Top shuffle that comes easy to Phil, who also adds double bass drum accents to his performance.
“We Are the Road Crew” is yet another fast-paced and cantankerous rocker, built on a Taylor rhythm that had him whacking the snare on the one and the three.
“‘We Are the Road Crew’ was actually a very simple tune we came up with,” notes Eddie, “and it never really got finished. We had this riff going, and Lemmy came up with the title when we only had a riff. And what happened was that the title took over the song. But we never really finished the song—you can kind of hear that at the end. We kind of let it be a little bit, because the lyrics were so strong, and we loved the groove of it. But it doesn’t have a proper chorus. Just the ‘We are the road crew’ is the chorus, in a way. So it’s kind of a strange tune, because I never felt it was finished, and yet it worked fine. Sometimes you get tunes like that where you really don’t have to go far if it’s all working. And yet other tunes you think, well, this need something else, and then you struggle around and put a bridge or chorus in or something. But no, that one, we used to laugh about it, but it turned out to be one of our greatest tunes, really.”
Nice idea, that, writing a song for your crew. Roadie Ian “Eagle” Dobie was particularly touched by the track, but then again, road crews worldwide have adopted the song as their anthem, Lemmy deftly capturing the repetitive grind of the crew’s tough job with little sleep and bad food.
“By the time we got to this stage, Ace of Spades/No Sleep era, the road crew had obviously been through thick and thin with us,” explains Clarke. “We had been through quite a lot together, Europe and all that. And they had joined up when we weren’t doing so well. So they were more like friends, you know what I mean? We were like a team, the whole thing. And they prided themselves on what they did. And they fancied themselves as one of the best road crews around. And there was a lot of talk that they were a good road crew. And just because of that, we just wanted to do something that was a thanks to the road crew. So we bumbled about with a riff for it. Lemmy didn’t have too much trouble with the lyrics; the lyrics are quite basic. We just sat down in the rehearsal room and banged out a riff and then tidied it up a bit. We didn’t really write our songs in depth. We just kind of jammed them out.
“We had a really great road crew, to be honest,” says Eddie. “We had our guy called Mick Murphy. He was kind of our minder. He was a real tough nut; he had to be. There was a time when he first got involved, there was a really big . . . no, I’m not going to go into that—fuck it. I don’t want to come off too stupid. But our crew were probably, at the end of the day, on reflection, a little bit too powerful, as it turned out. They almost ran the band, a tad. It gets like that because they were always in competition with other road crews. And of course we always had punishing work schedules and they’d always pull it off, come up trumps. And when we took the Bomber out, that was supposed to be beyond the pale, but we got it out there. But the road crew, they used to get in at six in the morning and they had to unload. And once we finished, they had to pack it all up and make it to the next show. So they never got any sleep. So that’s where the No Sleep ’til Hammersmith thing really started from. Because the road crew never got any sleep. Fortunately, we were speed freaks, so they could keep going on the ol’, you know. They were a wonderful crew. I mean, they worked their fucking bollocks off. A couple of them fell by the wayside—it was that punishing, a little bit worse for wear—and had to retire as it were. But hats off to them, you know?”
~
Opening side two of the original vinyl of Ace of Spades was “Fire, Fire,” another blistering fast track pounded into submission by Phil and interestingly “strafed” by Eddie, oddly, a guitarist in a heavy metal trio that still had to pick his spots. “Jailbait” conversely finds Eddie front and center, lacing in a strident NWOBHM riff atop a fast Taylor pattern with interesting counterpoints, Phil getting to show
off his double bass drums as well.
“When Ace of Spades came along, it was all a bit of a blur, to be honest,” says Phil, already tiring of life in Motörhead. “We were just working so much all the time, and as soon as we came off the road, we had maybe a week off and then we went into rehearsals to write another album, and into the studio, etc. And once you’ve done the songs and you’ve recorded them and you’re playing them live, it sometimes becomes a bit of a blur, and you don’t much think of them as being songs, the way the fans do, anymore. I’m not saying it because it’s like a job or work, but to a certain extent, you play them automatically, put it that way. Most of the time. But then every two or three gigs, we’d get one gig where it was really excellent and the old fire would come back. But most of the time we were just trying to get it right, and stay sober.”
Along with “trying to get it right,” Motörhead would also wind up playing their bounty of fast songs even faster. “I mean shit, we played so fucking fast, it was like, ‘Fucking ’ell, quick, stop me,’” says Phil, with a flourish of air drums. “It was just so fast that unfortunately a lot of our playing was not really heard. Lemmy would just speed up and speed up and speed up, and of course he would always accuse me and Eddie of slowing down. It was never him slowing down. It was always me and Eddie slowing down. And I mean, compared to the album versions, most bands speed up when they play live, but not as much as we did. Our songs really went into overdrive, you know, overkill. And I kept noticing that our set was getting shorter and shorter and shorter, but we still had the same amount of numbers in it.”
The Apollo in Coventry, U.K., November 19, 1980.
© Alan Perry/IconicPix
But it was having an impact on making those who were inspired by Motörhead faster as well. “Obviously there was Metallica,” recalls Phil, “like when we first saw Metallica was when they supported us. Christ, I think it was 1982 or 1983; I forget where it was now, just a few gigs of a little tour we were doing over here in America. I remember at the time thinking, ‘Fucking hell, what kind of music was that?!’ Because it was so fast, you couldn’t tell what the fuck was going on. And I never thought that Motörhead was like that. And to be honest, I didn’t even remember their name until they became famous. And so I did see and hear other bands that just seemed to be playing incredibly fast. But you know what? I don’t think any of us ever picked up on the fact that they were doing it intentional, trying to copy us. I don’t know if they were or not. Because after all, there were bands like Iron Maiden that were coming up that weren’t playing thrash stuff. And there were still bands around like Thin Lizzy and they weren’t a thrash band. But Metallica . . . it’s a great compliment. Seeing that they are so successful, it is a very great compliment. I can’t say anything about that, really, except that I’m very flattered.
“I guess it was unlike anything that had been heard before, but again, we only realized that years and years later, with hindsight,” continues Taylor, addressing punks and their aggressive tempos as well. “We just realized that we played a lot faster than most bands that were around. But we didn’t do any of that stuff consciously. I mean, at the time, we lived in London, and we all lived along at Chelsea, which was sort of the bit where your Malcolm McLarens and the Pistols were from; that was Chelsea—rich area. You got a better class of pauper, a better class of squat, which was us, and a lot of punks. It was not just the music, I mean, for us, either. We came up with Billy Idol and the Damned, because they’re buddies that go to the same boozers. In Chelsea. So I don’t know, it was a social thing as well as a music thing. We didn’t discriminate between metal or punk or rock or big band or jazz or whatever—or black or white—or anything. It’s just like, ‘Oh, where’s the party, where’s the action going on?’ As you are, wherever it was happening, that’s where you went. And so we mixed and rubbed shoulders with all kinds of people, as one does.”
Back on Ace of Spades, “Dance” perpetuates the formula of relatively note-dense riff set next to a simplistic and accelerated punked-out churn, which is pretty much all that “Bite the Bullet” is as well. Not that it was designed to be much more.
“Yeah, that was really the front of ‘Chase is Better than the Catch,’” says Eddie. “It was like a little flash to introduce ‘The Chase.’ And so actually, they’re part of the same tune. It was the introduction, because we liked ‘Chase is Better than the Catch’ so much. I mean, Phil and I wrote that, we were in our flat, and he didn’t have a drum kit there, and I had me little guitar, and in the old days you had a cassette recorder, a four-track recorder, a little Tascam. I was always into recording. It was one of my things I used to like. And I had this spare room in the flat we were in—it was the junk room—and so we kicked around and got a cardboard box, put a pedal on it, so that he could use it as a bass drum. And I stood in there with a tiny little amp, and we put the recorder on, and we came up with ‘Chase is Better than the Catch.’ Phil and I were just pissing about. We liked the groove so much, but we felt it was a tad laid-back, hence we put ‘Bite the Bullet’ on it. And live we always did it that way—it was the intro. So that was why ‘Bite the Bullet’ seems so small.”
“The Chase is Better than the Catch” is of course a Motörhead classic, and one surmises it’s gotten that way because it’s a nice plodding break from all the breakneck music at any given Motörhead live show. On the lyrical front, it’s a lecherous stack of words, but in between the lines, one sees echoes of the credo espoused on “Ace of Spades,” namely that the living is in the playing of the game, not the victory, because, as they say, arriving marks the end of the dream—it’s the death of hope.
As mentioned, the “Chase is Better than the Catch” was mainly composed by Phil and Eddie, like a lot of the songs on the album were. As Eddie put it, “Yeah, most of them Phil and I’d done at Rockfield [in Wales] together while Lemmy was otherwise engaged. Phil and I would spend a lot of time playing, because we used to get bored. But Lemmy wasn’t that kind of guy. You know, he never got bored. He always had a bird with him and a bottle of Jack and a book. Trying to get him to rehearse was difficult at times. Even at Rockfield, he was up in his room, ‘Come on, Lemmy,’ ‘Oh, fuck off, I’m busy.’ I remember one time, Phil and I, we had been playing all day, and we were pissed and it was two in the morning. Lemmy turns up, comes down and says, ‘I wanna play now.’ Of course Phil and I can hardly fucking stand up. ‘For fuck sakes, Lem, we’re gone.’ It wasn’t always like wine, women, and song with Motörhead; we did have our ups and downs, as you can imagine. So there were tensions over rehearsals and doing work.”
Reinforcing this attitude that Lemmy thought it was sufficient just to be Lemmy, a sort of anti–rock star but some kind of star about town nonetheless, plus the band’s scribbler, Eddie’s proclamation that it was up to him and Phil to bang together the music was very much a complaint of Phil Campbell and Mikkey Dee up into the modern era as well.
Flash forward through the decades, and not much would change with respect to Lemmy’s perception of his role in the band. Noted modern-period Motörhead guitarist Phil Campbell in 2000, “We’ll probably be practicing all day and stuff and Lemmy will be working on the pinball machine, and then he’ll come in for an hour or so and say, ‘Change this around,’ this and that. But me and Mikkey start off with the basics of it and most of the guitar riffs are mine. Mikkey, he’ll sing riffs in my head. He’s quite musical for a drummer. He’s got a chromosome missing for a drummer; he’s quite good. Lyrics, we leave that to Lem. He’s said, ‘Boys, go write some lyrics if you want,’ but we can’t come anywhere near to Lem’s lyrics so we just leave it to Lem. He’s probably one of the best lyric writers in the heavy metal business. A lot of his songs are sort of love songs, just set to hard music.
“But Lemmy, he likes to have a good time,” continues Campbell, guitarist on 16 Motörhead studio albums. “He constantly reads, very well-versed in literature, European history an
d stuff. None of us suffer fools gladly. I don’t know about the full psychological profile of him, but there are probably slight traces of megalomania in him, which he will admit as well. I’m not going to go into it too deep, but since he moved to the U.S., he became a lot happier. He enjoys the sunshine and the girls wearing less clothes. Better quality drugs over here too, I think. He’s never been happier.”
Lem settling in for a rare studio shoot.
© Piergiorgio Brunelli
On the other hand, Phil Taylor’s assessment of Lemmy, as told to Ronnie Gurr in 1980, went something like this: “He’s a selfish bastard. We all are to a certain extent. He’s very level-headed when decisions need to be made. He’s a great geezer, fun to be with. He’s the best loony I know. He spends money like mad. He can go out with a hundred quid, and it can be gone in ten minutes. I get totally annoyed with him. Me and Eddie fight but I could never hit him. I’ve never attacked Lemmy, even though sometimes I would like to kill him. Me and him just tend to argue more; we sometimes stay up all night arguing things out.”
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