No Place to Run

No Place to Run, UFO's eighth studio album, was released by Chrysalis in January 1980 (CDL 1239 in Britain, CHR 1239 in the United States). It was their first studio record with Paul Chapman, the former Lone Star guitarist who took over from Michael Schenker after Schenker walked out in November 1978; Chapman had briefly played with the band before, and a year on the road had prepared him for these sessions. Phil Mogg, Paul Raymond, Pete Way and Andy Parker completed the line-up. Chrysalis brought in George Martin, the Beatles' producer, in the hope of a hit single, and the band recorded at AIR, the studio Martin had just opened on the Caribbean island of Montserrat; the sleeve also lists AIR in London, and Geoff Emerick engineered. Looking back forty-five years later, Mogg called the pairing a "complete mismatch", though he remembered Martin as "a lovely chap" who would tell Emerick at six o'clock that it was time for a gin and tonic on the veranda. The single "Young Blood" stopped at 36 in Britain. Hipgnosis photographed the band at night beside a set of petrol pumps for the cover, which came in several differently tinted versions. The album entered the British chart in the week of 19 January 1980 and rose to 11; it joined the Billboard 200 the same week and peaked at 51 in February. That January the band toured Britain, with dates in Liverpool, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and Chapman later recalled this as the tour on which UFO began headlining in America. A 2009 remaster added an alternative version of "Gone in the Night" and three songs recorded live at the Marquee in London in November 1980. On 15 August 2025 Chrysalis issued a two-CD and three-LP edition that pairs a new remaster with a newly mixed recording of the Marquee show of 16 November 1980, eleven of its fourteen songs previously unreleased.