Lights Out

Having made No Heavy Petting and the albums before it with Leo Lyons, Phil Mogg felt UFO had to raise their game. Ron Nevison's name kept turning up on records they loved, so they asked for him; Chrysalis made it happen and booked AIR Studios in London. The band was now a five-piece, Mogg, Michael Schenker, Pete Way and Andy Parker plus Paul Raymond, who came from Savoy Brown. Mogg has said that the earlier pairing of two lead guitarists, Paul Chapman and Schenker, had clashed, and that keyboards alone had not suited them, whereas Raymond, who played both guitar and keyboards, slotted straight in. The album was recorded at AIR and mixed at Pye Studios in February and March 1977, with arrangements for strings and horns. The opener, "Too Hot to Handle", is a Way and Mogg song; Mogg remembers it as Way's simple three-chord piece, finished in a single afternoon. The title song, credited to Schenker, Mogg, Parker and Way, grew out of a rehearsal jam, and Mogg later described its lyric as anti-authoritarian. Side two includes a cover of Love's "Alone Again Or" and closes with the seven-minute "Love to Love". Raymond has said he helped write songs for the album but could not be credited because of an earlier publishing deal. Lights Out was released in May 1977, with Chrysalis running radio spots from the week of release and a British tour booked for June. It entered the UK chart at No. 54 on 4 June, the first UFO album to chart in Britain, and in the United States it climbed to No. 23 on the Billboard 200 dated 1 October, the band's highest American placing. "Alone Again Or" was the British single. "Love to Love" became a song audiences asked for again and again, and Iron Maiden's Steve Harris has named its live version on Strangers in the Night as one of eight songs that changed his life.