my dream is to fly over the rainbow so high reggae

But he did it in a way where you didn’t want to argue with him.” Like, if my guitar was a little too dirty, he wouldn’t pull his punches.

“He put his little bits in, little bits and bobs, and he would subtly just try to steer you a bit. “He certainly had his own ideas,” Clarke said in Martin Popoff’s Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers: The Rise of Motörhead. The songs were pretty much there, but Maile helped fine-tune them and suggested textural touches that made them more impacting. The band wrote and demoed the tracks at Rockfield Studio in Wales, before they recorded them with Maile at Jackson's Studios in Rickmansworth, England over a five-week period in August and September 1980. While many of the songs on Overkill and Bomber were churned out riff by riff over a short period, Motörhead put more time and effort into Ace of Spades, which in no way detracted from its spontaneous, from-the-hip vibe. We couldn’t fucking shake him, you know what I mean? He might die! So we had to listen to him.' “ was very delicate because he was a diabetic. 'If it was anyone else, we'd have told him to go and fuck off and die or tied 'em to the car and run around the car park with them,' guitarist Eddie Clarke told Uncut. And, Maile had some unorthodox ideas that seemed strange for a gritty rock 'n' roll band (Lemmy never embraced the term “metal”). The idea of the producer taking on a ragged slugfest by Motörhead and keeping it raw seems counterintuitive on paper. “The only one I really didn’t like was Iron Fist and that’s mostly because the production was no good.”īy contrast, the production on Ace of Spades is clear and savage, which is surprising since the album was produced by Vic Maile, who was known for his work with Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin. “Sure, I like Ace of Spades, but no more than most of our other albums,” Kilmister told me in 2013. “Fast and Loose,” “(We Are) the Road Crew,” “The Chase is Better Than the Catch” and “Love Me Like a Reptile” stand alongside “Ace of Spades” as some of the band’s finest material. The album is filled with raging, ripping songs that helped define the group, at least in North America. That view is debatable, but one thing’s clear: “Ace of Spades” was the storming anthem the band needed to break into a new market and Ace of Spades was the ideal home for the song and other band classics. “I keep telling people this, but they think I’m fucking lying, but I’m not: I didn’t think it was any better than any of my other songs and I still don’t,” he told Decibel. Kilmister was pleased that “Ace of Spades” turbo-charged his career, yet he was always upfront about his confusion with the public’s reaction.

My dream is to fly over the rainbow so high reggae