By Martin Popoff
Simple question: why has this album endured?
"I don't know. It's to do with the whole Motorhead attitude, what we kind of stood for back in those days. I used to think the show had a lot to do with it, having the bomber and stuff like that, and generally so f**king loud you couldn't hear yourself think, but obviously you can't include that on the record. So I think it is just the thought that somehow we did capture that as well. When it came out, the kids and everybody who was a fan of Motorhead used to enjoy the live gigs so much that a live album sort of takes them back there. So they get a little piece of the magic of the gig. Because our gigs were kind of special. Obviously the sound used to vary because of the volume and stuff, but it was always a good show, you know what I mean? We had sold about 150,000 or 200,000 of Ace Of Spades here in Britain. And I mean, in this country that's pretty good. It was our peak time. The bummer about the album, No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith, was that we were in America when it came out, and it went straight to No. 1. And normally you'd be in the f**king pub and in the clubs, right? Everybody'd be buying you drinks (laughs). But of course we weren't there. Typical Motorhead (laughs). We were in America doing some stuff with Ozzy."
No Sleep wasn't exactly recorded on the Ace Of Spades tour. Eddie explains. "We never recorded anything so we had to go out and do a special three gig tour, or five gigs it was, and three of them were recorded. It was two Newcastle and one Leeds that it was taken from. The support band had been Girlschool, I believe. So that tour was specifically to do the live album, because we hadn't recorded ourselves live before (laughs). We weren't very together."
MOTORHEAD - Long Loud Look Back... Page 3