Even though the 40th anniversary of Motörhead’s landmark Ace of Spades album is still half a year away, the band has dropped a strobing new lyric video for their signature song on Friday. They’re dubbing May 8th “Motörhead Day,” as “Ace of Spades” sounds a little like “Eighth of May.” Frankly, though, every day should be “Motörhead Day.”
The band’s frontman, Lemmy Kilmister, often groused during his lifetime that “Ace of Spades” became their hit. “When we wrote it, we were just doing an album,” he told Rolling Stone once. “It’s just fucking another song. I thought it was pretty good, but I didn’t think it was that good. … I was surprised when the song took off. It’s no better than all the others.”
He added that even though the song was about gambling, he wasn’t really a card player. “I don’t have any good gambling stories; I have lots of bad ones,” he said. “I’ve lost a lot of money. … I’m not a poker player; I play slot machines. I’ve been playing them since I was about 18, when you were getting into bars. I don’t trust any form of gambling with people involved in it; I like the machines better.”
Gambling aside, the clip perfectly plays off the band’s biker-cowboy look from the album art.
In addition to the lyric video, the band is driving home its “Motörhead Day” concept with Facebook and Instagram filters that superimpose the band’s Snaggletooth logo over people’s faces. They’re also selling merch that sports the title of the Ace of Spades track “(We Are) the Road Crew,” the proceeds from which benefit Live Nation’s Crew Nation initiative, in turn supplying relief to concert-industry workers during pandemic-related shutdowns.