Gambling and rock and roll have always made strange bedfellows. Motorhead’s Lemmy was so devoted to fruit machines that, as Classic Rock writer Mick Wall has recounted, his own nickname is said to have come from his habit of collaring everyone he met to “lemme a fiver” so he could keep feeding the slots. Iron Maiden built an entire track, The Angel And The Gambler, around the same pull toward risk and reward, part of a habit that has run through heavy metal for decades. It is that same pull toward the casino floor that a new piece of chart analysis has just put some numbers on, and this time the songs themselves are the subject rather than the artists behind them.
Ten tracks that all share one word in the title, Casino, have been ranked by how often that word turns up per minute of music, and two proudly British entries make the cut: Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and Shed Seven’s Casino Girl. The research, highlighted by WhichBingo, home of the new online slots UK players have been turning to this year, took the ten tracks, counted the lyrical uses of “casino” in each one, then divided that total by the song’s running time. The result is a mentions per minute score that rewards short, word-dense songs over longer, more atmospheric ones, which explains why a two and a half minute country single tops the whole list rather than anything with a longer runtime.
That single is Tucker Wetmore’s Casino, which uses the word eight times in just over two and a half minutes for a score of 3.04, enough to top the table by some distance. Radium Dolls sit in second on 2.79 despite using the word more often than anyone else in the study, 12 times in total, simply because their track runs to four minutes eighteen seconds and the extra length drags the average down. Solo artist Niels takes third with 2.52 from an album called The Lost Tale: Bandoleros, and London rapper Ambush Buzzworl rounds out the top four on 2.17 with a track sharing the same one-word title as half the list.
Indiana blues rockers Houndmouth follow in fifth with Casino (Bad Things) on 1.13, just ahead of Wilco’s Casino Queen on 1.10. That song is named after a real riverboat casino on the Mississippi in East St Louis, which is still open for business today under the DraftKings at Casino Queen name, giving the track a genuine, mapped location rather than a made up backdrop. The Nashville Cast take seventh with a score of 0.86, keeping the top half of the table dominated by American acts.
Then come the two names British readers will know best. Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, the title track and second single from their 2018 album of the same name, lands eighth on 0.85, a modest score simply because Alex Turner only reaches for the word once across the whole track. Grimlxck sits ninth on 0.77, and York rockers Shed Seven close out the table in tenth with Casino Girl on 0.76, rounding off a list that runs from Nashville to Sheffield to North Yorkshire without ever leaving the same three syllables behind.
None of the ten acts in the study are metal bands, but the theme sits comfortably next to the crossover stories this site has run before, from slot reels built around Guns N’ Roses to machines dressed up in Motorhead artwork. It says something about gambling’s grip on musicians generally that ten well known tracks could be found with the word sitting right there in the title before anyone even got as far as the lyrics themselves. Whether it is a Nashville hit factory or a Sheffield art-rock band five albums into a career of reinvention, the casino keeps proving itself an easy metaphor for chasing something that might not pay off.
For readers who fancy testing whether their own luck holds up better than the songwriters’, there is more crossover coverage to dig through on MetalTalk’s news pages, where the overlap between the two worlds keeps turning up fresh angles. Whether it is Wetmore’s gamble on love or Turner’s imagined hotel and casino, the pull of the tables shows no sign of leaving the setlist any time soon, and on this evidence, songwriters are no better at reading the odds than the rest of us.
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Arctic Monkeys And Shed Seven Feature In New Ranking Of The World’s Most Casino-Obsessed Songs first appeared on
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