Ace of Spades

The song opens with an overdriven bass intro played by Lemmy. It came out as a single in October 1980 as a preview of the album and the autumn tour, and Bronze also pressed a 12-inch in Christmas picture sleeves, limited to 50,000 copies, with a photograph of the band in Santa outfits taken at the Aylesbury Fair.

Lemmy wrote that he used gambling metaphors, mostly cards and dice. He said he was more into slot machines but could not really sing about spinning fruit. Most of the song, he said, is poker, and the line about aces and eights is the dead man's hand that Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot. He also admitted he was sick to death of it, since people only thought of that song when they thought of Motörhead. In 2011 he told Mojo he was glad they became famous for it rather than some turkey, but that he had sung 'The eight of spades' for two years and nobody noticed. Later he softened, saying the song had been really good to the band and was one of the best he wrote.

Afterlife

It became the staple of the live set. Lemmy compared it to Little Richard fans expecting Good Golly Miss Molly: the band could not ditch it. The band played it in February 1984 for the Bambi episode of the British television series The Young Ones, the first song Phil Campbell and Würzel played with the band. A live version from the Giants of Rock Festival in Hämeenlinna, Finland, on 2 July 1988 was issued as a single and withdrawn when the band noticed it had been chosen as the A-side instead of Traitor. At Glastonbury, a Guardian writer reported, Lemmy kept singing Ace of Spades after the rest of the band had moved on to Overkill. The original has also been used in adverts for Pot Noodle and IKEA.

The listings are long. Q placed it at number 27 among the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks in 2005, NME at 155 in 2014 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and Rolling Stone at 442 on its 500 best songs and at three among the 100 greatest heavy metal songs. Louder Sound put it second in its 2021 ranking of Motörhead songs. In January 2016 it reached the top of the UK Rock and Metal singles chart, and had sold 208,830 digital copies by then.