No Heavy Petting

With Force It on the American chart, Phil Mogg, Michael Schenker, Pete Way and Andy Parker took on a fifth member, keyboard player Danny Peyronel from the Heavy Metal Kids, and the general expectation was that this would be the record to break them. They went back to Morgan Studios in London, with Leo Lyons producing for the third album running and Mike Bobak engineering. Schenker, Way and Mogg's "Natural Thing" opens the record. Peyronel joined in the writing: "Highway Lady" is his alone, and he wrote "Can You Roll Her" and "Martian Landscape" with Parker and Mogg. "I'm a Loser", "Belladonna" and "Reasons Love" are Schenker and Mogg songs, and "A Fool in Love" is a song Frankie Miller wrote with Andy Fraser. Hipgnosis again supplied the sleeve, a photograph of a young woman with her pet monkey. Released in May 1976, the album sold less than Force It; it peaked at No. 169 on the Billboard 200, was gone after four weeks, and did not chart in Britain. One night on an American tour, in Saginaw, Michigan, UFO opened a bill headlined by Nazareth, and Pete Way got talking with Paul Raymond of Savoy Brown, who were also playing. As Raymond tells it, UFO wanted someone who could play rhythm guitar as well as keyboards, because Peyronel did not play guitar, and Way asked him to join. Raymond went on to take Peyronel's place.