1975. West London.
Lemmy needs a ride.
Pushing 30. The most notorious road warrior in British rock doesn’t know how to drive.
A kid called Phil Taylor offers him a lift to the studio.
Somewhere in the hazy hours that follow, Taylor makes a claim.
He’s a drummer.
At the studio, guitarist Larry Wallis delivers the verdict:
“What a horrible little cunt. He’s perfect.”
“Double up or quit”
Over the next two years, Motörhead received very little attention. They still had no label. Night after night, they played to empty rooms.
And so by 1977, “Philthy Animal” Taylor and “Fast” Eddie Clarke (Larry Wallis’s replacement) decided to quit.
Motörhead decided to arrange their own funeral – a final farewell show at the Marquee Club in London on April 1, 1977.
It was here Lemmy took his first big gamble. Scheduled for April Fool’s Day.
He asked Ted Carroll, owner of Chiswick Records, to record their final show for posterity.
Because the Marquee Club wanted £500 for the recording rights – which Carroll refused to pay – he instead offered the band two days in a recording studio to record a single.
Fueled by amphetamines, Motörhead completed the session in the allotted 48 hours with no sleep.
They recorded 13 tracks, 8 of which would complete Motörhead’s debut album.
But Lemmy’s gamble paid off.
The album reached number 43 on the UK charts.
“Born to lose, live to win”
Over the next few years, Motörhead made their mark on the rock’n’roll scene.
Their second album, Overkill (1979) established them as one of the fastest, most aggressive, contemporary bands. And their third album, Bomber (1979) peaked at #12 on the UK albums chart.
Now it was time to record album #4.
First order of business was to enlist a new producer. Their last one, Jimmy Miller – the man behind the Rolling Stones’ greatest records – had been losing his own war with heroin during the Bomber sessions.
Vic Maile was different.
A soft-spoken diabetic who didn't drink or smoke.
Motörhead quickly realised something terrible…
They – literally – couldn’t touch him:
“If it was anyone else, we'd have told him to go and f*** off and die... [But Vic] was very delicate because he was a diabetic. We couldn’t f***ing shake him, you know what I mean? He might die! So we had to listen to him.”
So for the first time in their existence, Motörhead did as they were told.
When Maile wanted a percussive clack in the middle of “Ace of Spades” – what Lemmy fondly recalled as the “tap-dancing” section – he handed the band pieces of wood and pointed at a microphone:
“He said: ‘This is what we’ll do’,” Clarke explained. “We were pissed or speeding and we were totally against it. ‘Well, we’ll do it cos it’s you, Vic, but we ain’t gonna fucking use it.’ He set up a nice Neumann mic, and the three of us stood there with the blocks. Of course, at first we’re all doing it at different fucking times: ‘Come on, Phil, for fuck’s sake!’ ‘No, man, it’s you!’ But when we heard it, we thought: ‘Oh, it’s not bad.’”
All because the nice, quiet man asked them to.
(Quick aside: while Clarke remembers the band doing it together, Phil Taylor later joked that he had to do it himself because the “stunt tap dancer couldn’t make it”.)
Lemmy tracked his vocals for the song in a take or two. The lyrics hadn't taken much longer. He wrote them on the toilet, or in the back of a van doing 90 down the motorway. The story shifted depending on the mood you caught him in:
“He might have written it in the fucking shitter for all I know […] We’d say: ‘Man, we need some fucking lyrics for this.’ So he used to go for a shit and write the lyrics. But if he said he wrote it in a Transit van, then you’ve got to believe him.”
The lyrics, according to Lemmy, didn’t have a lot of substance behind them. Poker clichés, mostly.
The funny thing was that Lemmy didn't even play cards. He preferred the slot machines, but, as he put it:
“‘The Three Red Sevens’ doesn’t have the same ring.”
He never thought it was better than any of his other songs.
And nobody even noticed when he sang “the eight of spades” on stage for more than two years – probably just for his own kicks.
“And don't forget the joker”
5am. The eve of the Ace of Spades tour.
Band and crew are lifting each other over each other’s heads… a test of strength the band called “roadie games”.
Philthy goes up.
And then…
Crashes down on his skull.
“Of course, Phil fell on his head. We had to cancel quite a few things due to his habit of punching and kicking things.”
The injury left a permanent calcium lump on the back of his neck.
He fondly nicknamed it his “knob”.
For most drummers, that would have been the end of the story.
But this is a man who once broke his hand punching someone… and played the next shows with the drumstick gaffer-taped into his fist.
So he refused to cancel. He went out on the Ace of Spades tour in a neck brace.
Go and watch the “Ace of Spades” video.
Click above to watch the “Ace of Spades” music video.
The three men look indestructible as they charge through the song in front of a heavy-duty industrial fan which creates a dramatic, windswept effect.
Nothing in the footage tells you one of them was about to spend a tour drumming with a fractured spine.
The song swaggers.
“I don't wanna live forever”
Philthy had just staked his spine on this same bravado.
“The pleasure is to play”
Two years earlier, following their new record deal with Bronze Records, Philthy treated himself to a new kit.
While setting it up, Taylor began experimenting by playing his new bass drum at the same time as his old one.
He's messing around. Not really sure what he’s doing.
Lemmy and Eddie walk in.
Embarrassed, he stops. But they urge him to keep going.
This thundering double-bass drumming that would appear on the song “Overkill” paved the way for the thrash sounds of the mid-eighties, both Lars Ulrich (Metallica) and Dave Lombardo (Slayer) citing this song as a key influence.
“I had never heard anything that sounded like that. It blew my head off.”
The drummer who “blagged” his way into Motörhead because he could drive is the same drummer who designed the blueprints for thrash metal… mostly because he didn’t know how to play his new kit.
He knew how to gamble.
And win.
“Pushing up the ante”
“Ace of Spades” opens with Lemmy, strumming his bass like a rhythm guitar:
“Lemmy’s not a bass player. He's a guitar player playing a bass. And there's no bottom end there, so I do a lot more tom fills than other drummers”
Then a four-bar snare roll crescendos until the full band enters.
Lemmy’s bass announces the song, but it’s Taylor’s drums that give it the full, explosive momentum.
Instead of tight, controlled hits, Taylor plays loose, fast quarter notes on the hi-hats.
This open sound, combined with the occasional unpredictable closing of the hats in the middle of a groove, creates a sense of reckless velocity – the feeling of constantly “tipping forward” like a runaway train.
“Read 'em and weep
The dead man's hand again”
As noted, Lemmy insisted that the lyrics were simply a mish-mash of gambling clichés written in the “shitter”.
But the same year Ace of Spades was released, Lemmy went to the Hanky Panky in Amsterdam's Red Light District. There he tattooed the phrase that would become his – and the band’s – motto on his forearm: “Born to lose, live to win”.
Click above to watch Lemmy talk about his tattoos
This sentiment is echoed in the song:
“You win some, lose some, it's all the same to me”
From 1977, they’d been willing to stake their existence on “final shows” at The Marquee and sleepless 48-hour recording sessions.
And if the band’s pre-tour, spine-breaking, roadie games made anything clear, it was that they didn’t expect to “live forever” – they were literally willing to stake their necks on a good time.
“Read ’em and weep
The dead man's hand again”
The dead man's hand consists of a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights. It’s the hand famous gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok was reportedly holding when he was shot in the back, mid-game.
So whether Lemmy’s singing “The Ace of Spades” or “The ‘eight’ of Spades” – it’s still the same hand.
A good hand in poker, by all accounts.
A winning hand for a man whose luck had finally run out.
“Take one look and die”
Philthy was fired from Motörhead in 1992:
“I don’t think that Phil ever got over [being ‘let go’ by] Motörhead, that’s my belief [...] It left him very bitter and twisted. I know, because I experienced something very similar. The biggest tragedy of all was that losing his mojo would cut short his playing career.”
Fast-forward to November 6, 2014.
Motörhead are tearing through "Ace of Spades" onstage in Birmingham.
Now Phil Campbell plays guitar and Mikkey Dee is behind the drum kit.
Both “Fast” Eddie and “Philthy Animal” had been replaced years ago.
But then Philthy walks on stage.
He doesn’t take Mikkey’s place.
Instead, he just waves to the crowd. Then leaves.
One year later, Philthy was dead. Liver failure.
He was 61.
Lemmy’s response was flat, and prophetic:
“I think this rock 'n' roll business might be bad for the human life. Oh well.”
Within six weeks, Lemmy too was gone.
Eddie Clarke died two years later, on January 2018.
The man whose drums fill the spaces in “Ace of Spades” and drive the song to – what feels like – its premature ending found himself spinning out of control in the years that followed.
But still, if his promotion from Lemmy’s chauffeur to the drummer on Motörhead’s most iconic song tells us anything, it’s that Philthy ‘lived to win”, even if he was born losing.
🤘 Horns up 🤘
Shane
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media