UFO TRIVIA
Trivia
UFO left their mark in Japan in the 1990s too. On the 1992 tour for High Stakes & Dangerous Men, the album that brought Pete Way back after ten years, they recorded a show at Club Citta for the live album Lights Out in Tokyo, pairing new songs such as "Running Up the Highway" and "Borderline" with classics like "Lights Out", "Rock Bottom" and "Doctor Doctor", and closing with Eddie Cochran's "C'mon Everybody". Cleopatra Records describes the choice as an obvious one, given how big the band's pre-Michael Schenker line-up had been in Japan. In 1993 Schenker and Andy Parker returned, reuniting the classic line-up, and Parker recalls that after a short German tour that December the band played several shows in Japan in June 1994, before starting work on Walk on Water with their old producer friend Ron Nevison that December.
In their first years it was Japan, not Britain, that took UFO to heart. UFO 1 made little impression at home or in America, but Japan and, to a lesser extent, Germany unexpectedly embraced the new band, giving them enough momentum to carry on with their spacey early sound a while longer. That run culminated in the 1971 album Live, after which guitarist Mick Bolton left. Decades later Cleopatra Records, describing its double CD of High Stakes & Dangerous Men and Lights Out in Tokyo, wrote that the first line-up, before Michael Schenker's arrival, had been greeted in early-1970s Japan with something approaching Beatlemania.
Andy Parker was seventeen when he became UFO's drummer, in the summer of 1969. As he tells it, he was having a few pints with friends at his favourite pub, The Golden Lion in Hoddesdon, when Phil Mogg, Pete Way and Mick Bolton walked in looking for somewhere to audition drummers, having just fired theirs. One of Parker's friends had been at school with Way, so they got talking, and Bolton said his band needed a drummer. Hearing that Bolton had a Marshall stack, a Gibson Les Paul and even a manager, Parker decided this was the big time; he auditioned and got the job. At the time he was in a blues band with Steve Casey, later the unseen guitarist with the Michael Schenker Group.
UFO 1 came out on Beacon Records in 1970, and Andy Parker had to wait for his eighteenth birthday before he could sign the contract: his parents, convinced he was being ripped off, refused to sign it for him. Parker admits they were right, since the band never saw any money from the Beacon recordings, but he still thinks he chose well, because those records made the UFO name known around the world and opened the way to bigger things. The album itself did very little business in Britain, partly because the label was short of money, and even less in the United States, where Motown's Rare Earth imprint licensed it the following year.
Germany's official charts list two early UFO singles: "Boogie", which entered on 22 February 1971 and peaked at No. 30, and the Beacon single "Prince Kajuku", which entered on 4 October that year, reached No. 26 and stayed for ten weeks. Among albums, Decca's release of Live entered on 15 September 1972 and climbed to No. 23, which remains the band's best placing on the German album chart, ahead of A Conspiracy of Stars at No. 28 in 2015. Of the studio albums released in Michael Schenker's time, the best performer there was Force It, which entered on 15 August 1975 and peaked at No. 35.
UFO's story on the UK singles chart is a short one. "Doctor Doctor", Chrysalis's first UK single from Phenomenon in 1974, failed to chart at all, and the band's first appearance came only in August 1978, when "Only You Can Rock Me" reached No. 50. The live "Doctor Doctor" from Strangers in the Night, which entered on 27 January 1979, climbed to No. 35 and gave them their first Top 40 hit. The only other was "Young Blood", No. 36 in January 1980: of the eight UFO singles that made the chart, those two are the only Top 40 entries. The last, in March 1986, was "Night Run" at No. 94.
UFO reached the UK top ten only twice on the albums chart. The higher of the two was the live Strangers in the Night, which entered at No. 7 on the chart dated 10 February 1979 and stayed for eleven weeks; the other was Mechanix, which entered on 20 February 1982 and reached No. 8. In between, No Place to Run came close with No. 11 in January 1980. Lights Out, by contrast, got no higher than No. 54 in June 1977 and was gone after two weeks, and Obsession managed No. 26 the following year.
The band took its name from the UFO Club in London, the venue where Pink Floyd played some of their earliest shows with Syd Barrett and which later became a favourite haunt of Swinging London's stars. The first choice had been Hocus Pocus. It was at the club that singer Phil Mogg, guitarist Mick Bolton, bassist Pete Way and drummer Andy Parker were spotted and signed by the independent Beacon Records. Parker's own account of how he joined in 1969 confirms the earlier name: on their first meeting, Bolton told him he had a band called Hocus Pocus and was looking for a drummer.
Michael Schenker and Phil Mogg remember his arrival a little differently. Mogg says that he and Pete Way had seen Schenker playing with Scorpions and agreed he was exactly what they wanted, without knowing how to get him; then came a day when guitarist Bernie Marsden never turned up, and Schenker jammed with them instead. In Schenker's version the two bands were touring together when UFO's guitarist lost his passport, so for a couple of days he played the opening set with Scorpions and then stood in with UFO, and that was when they asked him to join. He had long told Scorpions he would go if a British band ever called, he adds, because rock in Germany was dead and disco ruled. Even his age is told two ways: his official site says he was 18 when he joined at the end of 1973, while in a 2014 interview he recalled being 16 when he doubled up with both bands.
Asked how the band coped when Michael Schenker joined speaking almost no English, Phil Mogg admitted it was difficult, but said their situation left no choice but to make it work. The one real snag he remembers was a mix-up over what a particular note was called, and they got past even that mostly with humour; Schenker, he adds, was quick to learn. Songs started life on cassette. Schenker would hand Mogg tapes of riffs and long solos, Mogg would improvise vocals over them, and the band would knock the results into shape in rehearsal; Pete Way brought tapes of riffs and ideas of his own. Schenker's own summary is that UFO were a psychedelic band when he arrived, and that once he started laying down riff after riff for Mogg to sing over, they became a completely different group.
The riff of "Doctor Doctor" was brought in by Michael Schenker when he was new to the band. Using a Watkins Copycat tape echo he had kept from his Scorpions days, he layered harmonies on both lead and rhythm guitar and made a rough demo on a handheld cassette recorder, which he played to Phil Mogg on a London Underground escalator on the way to a meeting at Chrysalis. Schenker had just moved to Palmers Green in north London, with Mogg living down the road, and Mogg still laughs that cardboard boxes stood in for the drums on that tape; he set Schenker's player up beside his own and recorded words over it. The demo was so complete the band barely touched the arrangement. The lyric sounds like heartbreak, but Mogg says it came from a road episode in which Pete Way and Andy Parker got mixed up with some nurses and ended up needing a doctor — a story Schenker did not know when he proudly played the song to his parents in Germany. Producer Leo Lyons, the Ten Years After bassist, rated it one of the strongest tracks on Phenomenon, although the band privately wondered if it was a bit too poppy.
At every Iron Maiden show, "Doctor Doctor" plays before the band walks on. Bruce Dickinson explained the ritual at a spoken-word show at The Vic Theatre in Chicago on 11 February 2022: everybody knows it, he said, there are five minutes of "Doctor Doctor" before the intro tape, and it is the crowd's cue to get out of the toilets, finish their pints and find their seats. Maiden eventually recorded the song themselves during the Blaze Bayley era; Louder's ranking of the band's ten best covers lists that version under 1996 and places it fourth.
When Steve Harris picked eight songs that changed his life, one of them was UFO's "Love to Love" — and specifically the live version on Strangers in the Night. What gets him is the light and shade and the dynamic build-up; he used to put the album on while driving his children to school, and it fired him up for the day. He called Michael Schenker and Paul Chapman brilliant guitarists and Phil Mogg a great singer, and recalled that Iron Maiden played two shows supporting UFO in 1981, at Long Beach and San Bernardino in California. Maiden would have loved to take UFO out with them in return, but for some reason it never happened. Years later, Mogg's new band Moggs Motel recorded its debut album at Harris's studio in Essex.
"Rock Bottom" came together almost on the spot. As Michael Schenker tells it, the band were sitting around looking for one more song when he played the riff, and Phil Mogg jumped up shouting that this was it; they built the song from there. Its middle section was left open for free playing, which Schenker calls perfect for someone who loves pure self-expression: the chord underneath leaves room to try fresh ideas every time, so although the basic structure stays, his solos have changed over the years. On the live Strangers in the Night he stretched it into an eleven-minute guitar showcase.
Michael Schenker credits Pete Way with the riffs that started both "Only You Can Rock Me" and "Lights Out": Way came up with the opening figure, and Schenker, inspired by it, supplied the rest. Phil Mogg remembers "Lights Out" differently. In his account it grew out of a rehearsal jam — he thinks Schenker began playing the riff, Paul Raymond joined in, everyone followed and it took off, with most of the chorus arriving a little later. Stryper recorded "Lights Out" for their 2011 covers album The Covering, and Michael Sweet has acknowledged that Stryper's own "More Than A Man" came out of it: a different melody and a different lyric, but the same riff.
Lights Out was where UFO changed producers. Phil Mogg says that after No Heavy Petting and earlier albums with Leo Lyons he felt the band had to change and raise their game, and the name that kept turning up on their favourite records, as engineer or producer, was Ron Nevison. They asked for him, Chrysalis made it happen, and the band were booked into AIR Studios, which the label had just gone into with George Martin. Everything was on 24-track tape, and Mogg still admires how Nevison could cut out a flawed passage without anyone ever noticing the edit. The epic "Love to Love" grew in the usual way: Michael Schenker's middle section with the solos was kept, and the rest got longer at every rehearsal — and, Mogg jokes, after every trip to the pub.
The tapes for Strangers in the Night were made on the American leg of the Obsession tour in the autumn of 1978. To minimise the risk of disaster, Chrysalis hired the Record Plant's remote truck and sent Ron Nevison, producer of the band's previous two albums, to record six shows, most of the album coming from Chicago and Louisville. It opens with gravel-voiced stage manager Steve Brooks introducing the band to the Chicago crowd. Mike Clink, later the producer of Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, helped Nevison run the truck — and Nevison admits he cannot even remember recording the Louisville, Kentucky show. Phil Mogg, for his part, says he never wanted to make a live album at all: at that point the band's form went up and down depending on who had been doing what.
How much of Strangers in the Night was doctored has long been argued over. Because the sleeve name-checks Paul Chapman, Michael Schenker's eventual replacement, a rumour spread that Chapman had touched up Schenker's guitar parts in the studio after he left. On that point, for once, Schenker and producer Ron Nevison agree: Schenker says you would be able to hear it if it were true, and Nevison says he has never even met Chapman. There were fixes all the same. To fit the set onto four sides of vinyl, Nevison had to rearrange the order in which it had been played, and two songs, "Mother Mary" and "This Kid's", were re-recorded in the studio afterwards and dressed with crowd noise from the tour. The 2009 reissue put the songs back in their original order and added "Hot 'N' Ready" and "Cherry".
It was a take of "Rock Bottom" that finally pushed Michael Schenker out in 1978. While the band were mixing Strangers in the Night at the Record Plant in New York, he objected to the version of his showcase that producer Ron Nevison had picked, and insisted on either a different take or the chance to overdub it; Nevison refused. More than thirty years on, Schenker still says there are wrong notes on it, and that he hates mistakes. Nevison's view is that Schenker was listening only for Schenker. Phil Mogg remembers him walking out of the studio muttering about poor "Rock Bottom", and that was the last they saw of him. Schenker had already warned that he would leave after the Obsession tour, but nobody expected him to go so suddenly — and he had quit once before, around 1977's Lights Out, until Pete Way talked him out of it.
With Michael Schenker gone, UFO made No Place to Run with the Beatles' producer George Martin, at the AIR Studios he had newly opened on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. To the label, an island with an air of sophistication and a distinct shortage of bars looked like a far safer workplace than London or Los Angeles; Pete Way's verdict is that you could still get so drunk on rum that you fell over. Martin kept regular hours, starting around 11am and breaking at six, when a man in a white jacket would bring him a gin and tonic. Phil Mogg says nothing summed up the mismatch better than Martin telling engineer Geoff Emerick at six o'clock that it was time for a G&T on the veranda. Martin fretted about the lyrics that had not arrived while Mogg was down at the beach waterskiing, and his playbacks were so quiet that, once he had gone, Way and Paul Chapman cranked the volume right up. The hit single never came: "Young Blood" stalled at No. 36.
Paul Chapman joined UFO twice. The Welsh-born guitarist, who had replaced Gary Moore in Skid Row in 1971, first came into UFO in 1974 but left after about a year over personal differences and formed Lone Star; Phil Mogg recalls that the two lead guitars, Chapman's and Michael Schenker's, simply clashed. Chapman returned in 1978 as Schenker's replacement and stayed until the split in 1983, playing on No Place to Run, The Wild, the Willing and the Innocent, Mechanix and Making Contact. In 2015 he described Schenker as an organised player in the Ritchie Blackmore mould and himself as a freer one in the vein of Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, and said he used to urge Schenker to let loose some nights, because his beautiful solos came out almost identical every time. Chapman died on 9 June 2020, his 66th birthday.
Paul Raymond arrived in 1976 because UFO had not found the right balance. Phil Mogg recalls that the band's two lead guitarists, Paul Chapman and Michael Schenker, had clashed, and that trying keyboards on their own did not work either: UFO was not a keyboard band. Raymond, who had been in Savoy Brown, could play both guitar and keyboards and had a blues background, so he slotted straight in. Before that he had also succeeded Christine McVie in Chicken Shack when she left to join Fleetwood Mac. Across four separate stints with UFO he played on Lights Out, Obsession, No Place to Run and the live Strangers in the Night, and from 2003 he was a regular fixture of the line-up. He also played in Schenker's Michael Schenker Group and in Pete Way's Waysted.
Founder member Pete Way played on UFO's first ten studio albums, from UFO 1 in 1970 to Mechanix in 1982, then left with the idea of forming Fastway with Motorhead guitarist "Fast" Eddie Clarke. Problems with his record contract forced him out of Fastway before they could record their 1983 debut. After a brief stint with his good friend Ozzy Osbourne on the Speak of the Devil tour, he formed his own band, Waysted, who went on to open Osbourne's Bark at the Moon tour. Waysted became a second home for UFO people: Andy Parker drummed with them briefly in 1984, after UFO had wound down in April 1983, and Paul Raymond and Paul Chapman both spent time in the band. Way died in August 2020, aged 69, of life-threatening injuries he had suffered in an accident two months earlier.
The 1993 reunion came with conditions. According to Michael Schenker, when Phil Mogg came to Los Angeles asking him to breathe new life into UFO, Schenker said that if he was going to put his energy into it, he wanted 50 per cent of the UFO name. At first it worked: Mogg turned up for the sessions looking a different man, happy and fit, and Schenker calls 1995's Walk on Water a blessing after seventeen years. It did not last. Schenker stayed for Covenant (2000) and Sharks (2002), but he says he had always warned Mogg never to reunite without the original set-up, producer included, and that with Andy Parker and Paul Raymond pushed out and Mike Varney producing Sharks in place of Ron Nevison, the band's natural chemistry was gone. In 2002, he says, Mogg asked for the name back, and Schenker gave it to him for nothing — and that was the end of it.
Vinnie Moore, who took over from Michael Schenker in 2003, had grown up a UFO fan. He owned some of their records, his guitar teacher showed him a couple of Schenker's solos, and at 15 or 16 he was jamming along to Rainbow and UFO albums in his bedroom, never dreaming he would one day be in the band. Stepping into Schenker's shoes did not worry him much: he had been told UFO had already been through something like 17 guitarists, which made it far less daunting than following a single famous one. In 2005, with Jason Bonham gone to Foreigner, Paul Raymond asked Andy Parker to play the Piorno Rock Festival with the band. Learning that Moore was now on guitar was part of what made Parker say yes; he stayed on for good and recorded The Monkey Puzzle in March 2006.
Metallica's Kirk Hammett joined UFO on stage at the Avalon Theater in Hollywood on 12 October 2019, during the pre-party for the Megacruise, playing "Doctor Doctor" and "Shoot Shoot" with a band then on its farewell tour after fifty years. Hammett has never hidden what he owes them. Hearing UFO and Michael Schenker for the first time changed his whole attitude, he has said, and Schenker and Jimi Hendrix remain among his main influences; the first time he heard "Mother Mary", the second solo's descending lick, the fastest he had ever heard, had him hooked. When the two first jammed together, on the set of That Metal Show in 2015, Hammett admitted he was in full fan and hero-worship mode, and he went on to contribute a solo to Schenker's 2018 album Resurrection.
Phil Mogg decided that the 2019 tour marking UFO's fiftieth anniversary would be his last with the band. It was a decision a long time coming, he said; he had considered stepping down after the 2016 tours, and although he hated the word farewell, these would be his final tap-dancing appearances. According to Vinnie Moore, Mogg's official name for the run was "Last Orders". The first leg, around the UK and Ireland, ended at London's Forum, and eight days later, on 13 April 2019, Paul Raymond died of a heart attack at the age of 73. The band chose to carry on, bringing back Neil Carter, a member from 1981 to 1983 who had played on The Wild, the Willing and the Innocent, Mechanix and Making Contact, and who had come from Wild Horses and gone on to work with Gary Moore. In his tribute, Andy Parker recalled joking that the time he had spent waiting for the always-late Raymond would add ten years to his life — years he said he would now gladly give back.
UFO's last concert was not the one they had announced. The Last Orders tour that began in 2019 lost date after date to the pandemic, and in September 2021 the band announced a final run of shows for 2022, to end on 29 October at the Fuzz Club in Athens, with a public rehearsal for just 80 ticket holders at the Beatbox in Hanover set for 20 June. In June 2022 Andy Parker wrote that this would probably be UFO's last year. Then, two months before Athens, Phil Mogg suffered a heart attack and had two stents fitted in his coronary arteries, and on doctor's orders he stopped performing. The remaining dates were cancelled and never rescheduled, which leaves a show in Germany on 16 July 2022 as the band's final concert. In 2024 Mogg said UFO had come to a conclusion, the 2019 UK tour just before COVID having been, in effect, the end.
After UFO, Phil Mogg formed a new band, Moggs Motel, with his former UFO colleague Neil Carter on guitar and keyboards, Tony Newton of Voodoo Six, drummer Joe Lazarus and The Raven Age guitarist Tommy Gentry; the debut album was recorded at the Essex studio of Iron Maiden's Steve Harris. The second single, "Sunny Side Of Heaven", grew out of a vivid dream Mogg had during the sessions. He found himself floating over Soho to The Intrepid Fox, a pub on Wardour Street, and standing at the bar between two old comrades who had both died in 2020, Paul "Tonka" Chapman and Pete Way. Chapman ordered a pint of wine with a chaser; Way asked for half a pint of sparkling wine and the loan of twenty pounds.
Force It, released in July 1975, came in one of Hipgnosis's typically racy and puzzling sleeves — and for American buyers the cover was changed, with the couple in the photograph made to look almost transparent. None of that held it back: Force It gave UFO their first entry on the US charts and some of the first genuinely enthusiastic reviews of their five hard-working years. In Germany it entered the album chart on 15 August 1975 and peaked at No. 35.