Ace of Spades

Ace of Spades, released on 8 November 1980 by Bronze as BRON531, is the album Motörhead are best known for. The players are Lemmy Kilmister on bass and vocals, Eddie Clarke on guitar and Phil Taylor on drums. Early in 1980 the band holed up at Rockfield Studios in South Wales to rehearse the follow-up to Bomber. Eddie Clarke has said that Lemmy was not much interested in rehearsing, so the riffs came out of the hours he and Taylor spent playing on their own — "Ace of Spades" among them, recorded as an instrumental at Rockfield with vocals and overdubs added later in London. The album was cut at Jackson's Studios in Rickmansworth and produced by Vic Maile, who had worked with Hawkwind. Clarke has also said that Lemmy's bass had no bottom end, which made it very hard to play along with, and that the band only got the hang of it here because Maile insisted. Released as a single in October 1980, again with little or no airplay, the title track entered the UK chart at No. 15, and the album went straight in at No. 4. The gambling language in the lyric is exact: "snake eyes" is double one on dice, and Lemmy explained that the "dead man's hand, aces and eights" was Wild Bill Hickok's hand when he was shot. The fortieth-anniversary edition of 2020 gave all twelve songs official visualisers. Victor issued a Japanese pressing on 21 November 1986 as VDP-1152, and Teichiku's Metal Mania imprint another in 1989 as 18DN-56.