The Wild, the Willing and the Innocent

The Wild, the Willing and the Innocent, UFO's ninth studio album, was released by Chrysalis on 16 January 1981 (CHR 1307). It was the first album with Neil Carter on keyboards and guitar, in place of Paul Raymond, alongside Phil Mogg, Paul Chapman, Pete Way and Andy Parker, and Carter also sang backing vocals and played saxophone on "Lonely Heart". After working with George Martin, Mogg recalled, the band talked Chrysalis into letting them make this record their own way, with an engineer and no producer, and the sleeve duly credits the production to UFO. The studios named are AIR, Wessex Sound and Utopia. Mogg has called it the most enjoyable album of their career to make. The arrangements layered strings and keyboards, and Mogg describes the result as "more cinematic" than a set of plain, straightforward songs would have been; Paul Buckmaster arranged and conducted the strings. The lyric of "Profession of Violence" grew from a book of the same name about the Kray twins and London's East End in the 1950s. Mogg remembers Carter as "a breath of fresh air", a musician who could play anything and sing as well. The album entered the British chart in the week of 24 January 1981 and peaked at 19; in America it joined the Billboard 200 on 31 January and reached 77 in February. "Couldn't Get It Right" and "Lonely Heart" were issued as singles, the latter reaching 41 in Britain, and the band's concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on 29 January 1981 was recorded. A 2009 remaster added three live tracks from that show and from the Marquee, and on 1 May 2026 Chrysalis issued a two-CD set, which adds both 7-inch edits and an alternative mix of "It's Killing Me", and a three-LP set, both carrying eleven newly mixed songs from the Hammersmith concert.