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The band made a memorable appearance on the show in 1984. The Young Ones regularly featured groovy new acts such as Rip Rig + Panic and Amazulu. But it was the not-so-young heavy metal band that shook British TV screens, opening with the thundering sound of singer and bassist Lemmy Kilmister’s Rickenbacker. It was a Damascene moment for some younger viewers as Lemmy pointed at the camera and yelled, “Don’t forget the joker!”
This was the last vestige of Motörhead “mark one”. Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, the drummer, had already quit but agreed to come back to sit alongside two new guitarists who had not played on the original recording. Nigel Planer, who played the hippie Neil in The Young Ones, later said Motörhead were the most professional band to appear on the show.
Lemmy, who wrote the lyrics either in the back of a Transit van or on the toilet, depending which interview you read, was inspired by a tattoo on his forearm featuring the “death card” and the motto: “Born to lose, live to win”. The refrain “I don’t want to live forever” was later appended with “apparently I am” when played live by Lemmy, who seemed indestructible until his death in 2015.
Lemmy grew weary of the song and came to dread drunken fans shouting it in his face after shows. “I’m sick to death of it,” he wrote in his 2002 autobiography White Line Fever, saying that the band shouldn’t have been “fossilised” by their hit. He nonetheless recognised that it needed to be played. “If I go to see Little Richard, I want to hear ‘Long Tall Sally’, and if I don’t I’m going to be thoroughly pissed off,” he said.
Let us know your memories of ‘Ace of Spades’ in the comments section below
The paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Chambers
Music credits: BMG; Nervous; Metalville/UKJ; Century Media; Monsoon
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