Phenomenon

After Mick Bolton left, Bernie Marsden joined UFO in 1972, his first professional band, but he did not get on with the others, and in 1973 a London show even saw fists thrown on stage. Phil Mogg has said that he and Pete Way had watched Michael Schenker playing with Scorpions and knew he was what they were looking for, and that on a day when Marsden failed to turn up, Schenker jammed with the band. In June 1973 the 18-year-old Schenker was recruited from Scorpions, and Marsden moved on that year to Glenn Cornick's Wild Turkey. Leo Lyons, the Ten Years After bassist, was already producing for Chrysalis when the label, aware that UFO had sold records in Germany, asked him to cut a couple of songs with them; the session took half a day at a studio in Chipping Norton, and one of the songs, "Give Her the Gun", came out as a single in Germany. Now on Chrysalis, Mogg, Schenker, Way and drummer Andy Parker recorded Phenomenon at Morgan Studios in London with Lyons producing. Schenker and Mogg wrote six of the ten songs together; "Too Young to Know" is Way and Mogg's, "Oh My" belongs to all four, "Lipstick Traces" is Schenker's alone and "Built for Comfort" is Willie Dixon's. Schenker brought in the riff of "Doctor Doctor" and first played Mogg a rough cassette demo of it on an Underground escalator, on the way to a meeting at Chrysalis. Released in May 1974, the album missed the British chart, and in the United States it got no further than No. 202 on Billboard's Bubbling Under the Top LP's list of 31 August. Even so, it marked the point at which UFO left their unprofitable space rock behind and started again as a melodic hard rock band. "Doctor Doctor" made no impression at first either, but a live version reached No. 35 in Britain as a single in 1979, and in a spoken-word show in 2022 Bruce Dickinson said that Iron Maiden play it before every concert, just before they walk on stage.