UFO in Monserrat (l-r): Andy Parker, Paul Raymond, Paul 'Tonka' Chapman, Phil Mogg, Pete Way (Image credit: Aubrey Powell/Hipgnosis)
UFO stood poised on the precipice of the big time as the 1970s drew to a close, their tough-kernelled, irresistible melodies and a seemingly unquenchable appetite for hedonism placing them among the decade's most fascinating and entertaining bands.
Things had grown incrementally for the London-based quintet over the course of five studio albums that featured the German wunderkind Michael Schenker on guitar - an artistic and commercial evolution that looked set to establish UFO among the biggest rock groups in the world.
For all of his undisputed genius as a musician, Schenker was temperamental. He and his party-animal bandmates clashed violently on a number of levels, and Schenker - still only 23 years old - had quit the band and been talked back on board on a number of occasions before walking out for good in 1978 during the mixing of their double live album Strangers In The Night.
Schenker's exit wasn't due to the ongoing rivalry with singer Phil Mogg (a tense relationship that had at times become physical). Nor was it about Schenker's stage fright, or the meds he took to control it. It wasn't the latest argument about the respective lifestyles of what had clearly become two factions: Schenker on one side, and Mogg, bassist Pete Way, guitarist/keyboard player Paul Raymond and drummer Andy Parker (i.e. the rest of the band) on the other, although all of those reasons played cumulative parts.
In the end, what pushed the Schenker over the edge was producer Ron Nevison's refusal to allow him to polish up his performance on the guitar showcase track on Strangers, Rock Bottom.
"Ron had insisted on leaving Strangers In The Night as it was, but Michael had wanted to change something - two notes, probably - and that's when Michael walked out of the studio with the words: 'Poor, poor Rock Bottom'," Mogg recollects with a shake of the head. "It was the last we saw of him."
The singer continues: "By that point, Michael was getting such fan worship, he had probably started believing it. Also, he wanted to start doing his own thing - to be his own boss. It was quite a shame, because by then UFO were right on the cusp of moving from arenas into stadiums. Of course we were pissed off, but the way we looked at things the band's value was worth more than just one person.
And so it would prove. The album that demonstrated that life could continue - and indeed flourish - within UFO was No Place To Run. Their first record of the new decade welcomed back a familiar face in Paul Chapman, who for a year had been UFO's second guitarist to Schenker from 1974, followed by a stint on a US tour in '77 due to one of Schenker's 'disappearing acts'.
Although it would prove to be the right choice, the notion of re-hiring the former Skid Row and Lone Star man, whose drinking capacity landed him with the nickname Tonka (after the supposedly indestructible children's toy of the 70s), was not unanimous. Paul Raymond once told me that he had been "dead against" bringing him in.
"That may have been so, and I suppose I can see why," Mogg reasons now, "but Paul's joining was for the good of the band. And from what I remember, the objections of the other Paul [Raymond] were not terribly vocal."
Pete Way would also claim that none other than Edward Van Halen had expressed an interest in auditioning to replace Schenker, before deciding he "didn't have the bottle". Although Raymond backed up this story ("the entire course of rock history could have been rewritten"), Mogg is keen to play it down.
"We were looking at Steve Hunter [an American session guitarist who played with Alice Cooper and Lou Reed, among others] and we met a couple of other guitarists, but it was important that we got along with whoever came along next," he insists. "We had already worked with Paul, and he was an experienced guy, so he became the obvious choice."
Over the course of three further albums, Chapman would bring an admittedly chaotic sense of stability to UFO, until they crash-landed again in 1983, leading to a soap opera-style series of break-ups, line-up changes and reunions so complex they could fill an issue of Classic Rock.
"Paul was also a bit of a livewire," Andy Parker reflects now. But, bless his heart, he was a lot more reliable than Michael had been. Paul would always show up and play."
Ultimately, UFO survived their post-Schenker fallout, and that was largely attributable their album No Place To Run, which they created in a studio on the sun-kissed small Caribbean island of Monserrat, assisted by the expertise and technical know-how of the man sometimes called the fifth Beatle, producer George Martin.
As a band, UFO ceased to exist when their farewell tour of Europe was cancelled in 2022, as a consequence of Mogg suffering a heart attack.
Before delving into the minutiae of No Place To Run, it's a good idea to explain the circumstances of this story. Regrettably, Paul Chapman and Pete Way are no longer with us, having passed within months of each other in 2020, and Paul Raymond died in 2019, leaving Mogg and Parker as the last two members that made the trip to Monserrat, where George Martin had built a studio, having fallen in love with the island during his time in the Navy.
Back in 2016, days after Martin lost a battle with stomach cancer at the grand old age of 90, Way spoke at length to Classic Rock about the album's birth.
"George was like one of the boys, really," Way said in that 2016 interview. "He never threw his weight about or reminded you of his reputation. He was very interested in the way that we liked to work, because it really was an experiment on both sides of the equation.
"Sometimes he would ask: 'Is Phil [Mogg] coming in today?' because he was used to John Lennon and Paul McCartney having their lyrics ready," Way continued.
But Mogg's refusal to write his lyrics until the last moment has become a part of UFO folklore.
With a grin, Way continued: "George became anxious about the [lack of] words, and we'd have to placate him: 'Oh, don't worry, they're done,' when we all knew very well that Phil was down at the beach waterskiing."
"Fucking Pete Way. Unbelievable," Mogg mutters today, eyes twinkling. "It feels like he's still here, taunting me. For a start, I've waterskied once in my life, and that wasn't it. But I did have a bit of a block there [in Monserrat]."
"To be fair, we were ahead of the curve. A lot of the prep had been done back in London," says Andy Parker today. "We had riffs and basic ideas, but, as always with UFO, Phil liked to hear the framework of the music and then go away and write his lyrics. It always worked out fine, but it wasn't what George was used to."
"George sometimes read out my lyrics," Mogg recalls, chuckling at the memory. [Speaking in an upper-crust English voice]: "'Joey rides the subway, fast from east to west, on the streets he's number one, some say that he's the best' [the opening lines of Nowhere To Run's title song]. And he'd ask: 'Who is this Joey? And what was he doing on the subway?' There was a bit of a culture clash."
Andy Parker is talking to Classic Rock from his home in Texas, Mogg in a pub in his home town of Brighton - the same one in which he and I had previously spent an entire afternoon drinking beer as Mogg introduced his new project, Moggs Motel.
Eighteen months later, whippet-thin after a nasty brush with norovirus, Mogg is content to nurse a single glass of lemonade, although the air of delicious sarcasm remains. Echoing the sentiments of Way, Parker and Mogg talk with affection and a mild air of disbelief that their band somehow entered the orbit of the man who produced Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (and just about everything else The Beatles recorded).
UFO's label, Chrysalis Records, had felt that Montserrat's atmosphere of sophistication - and its distinct lack of bars - made the place a far less dangerous workplace than London or Los Angeles.
"Rubbish!" snorted Pete Way. "This was UFO! If you wanted to, you could get so completely drunk on rum that you'd end up falling over."
In his 2016 interview, Way had speculated that Chrysalis engineered the liaison with George Martin in the hope of making the band sound poppier, perhaps even teasing out a hit single.
"They wanted us to do what Styx and Foreigner had done - take things to the next level," he said, laughing at the ridiculousness of the notion.
Mogg, who loathes soft rock, wrinkles his nose in disgust. "No. That would be a horrible level. That's a whole different world."
In fact, UFO became teamed with Martin due to his studio, AIR, being available.
"The place wasn't being used as much as George had hoped, so there was an arrangement where if you booked it, he would produce your album," Parker offers.
"Yeah, I think that's how it happened," Mogg says. "But it turned out to be a bit of a mismatch. And as for recording on a Caribbean island? Let's not go there."
UFO spent two weeks at AIR on Monserrat, an island where abject poverty nestled alongside monied privilege. Parker describes facilities there away from the recording studio as "primitive". AIR had its own generator, but elsewhere power cuts were frequent.
"We stayed in bungalows, but most people lived in huts with no windows," he recalls. "When the power went off, so did the air conditioning of course, and everything in the fridges would melt. However, there was a big swimming pool and a very nice golf course."
For reasons that nobody now remembers, UFO were allowed to bring along their wives and families to the island while they were recording, including a very pregnant Mrs Parker, resulting in what Mogg recalls as "a giant hippie movement". Throw in the local brew, a lethally strong brand of rum, and all manner of potential distractions raised their head. With a smirk, Mogg pretends to shake a cocktail: "Tonka. Pete. Me. The other two. Add gelignite and mix it up."
Maybe the album should have been called No Place To Rum?
"No, don't," he responds, offended by the abject nature of the pun. But, sure enough, during their stay moments of Tonka-esque (mis) behaviour ensued. "One night, Paul had an extremely loud argument with his wife, who was Dutch, and her screaming echoed all around the island," Mogg reminisces.
"It sounded as though someone was being murdered. The police were called out for the first time in five years. So we scored there."
I nside the studio, however, things couldn't have been much more different. Working in conjunction with his long-time recording engineer Geoff Emerick, George Martin operated to a strict timetable.
"You'd start recording at around eleven o'clock [am] and at six [pm] there'd be a break. A gentleman in a white jacket would bring him a gin and tonic, and we'd head into the main house for a meal," Pete Way told Classic Rock back in 2016. "It was all very colonial and civilised - though it didn't stay that way when Martin retired for the evening."
"A G&T on the veranda?" Mogg says. "We were more used to: 'Okay lads, the bar's open.'"
UFO and George Martin came from very different worlds. In 1994, not naming any band in particular, Martin (whose only other notable sojourn into the world of hard rock was Cheap Trick's All Shook Up, also released in 1980) told an interviewer: "I once had a flirtation with heavy metal, and I regretted it very much. It [the genre] didn't seem to have any sense."
"George was probably talking about us," Way admitted. "He wasn't used to hearing 'la-la-la' as lyrics [until the very last minute]. But the thing about UFO is that we always came through with the goods. What he hadn't expected was that we were like a stone you just couldn't move - the way we worked was so long-established. George coped with the situation, but it puzzled him."
"I didn't view the process as some type of experiment for George in the way that Pete did," Mogg says now. "But he must have wondered what he was doing there. I don't think he was that into us, it was probably just another job, though it was obvious he enjoyed [the process of] recording."
"George was so easy to get along with," Parker agrees. "Geoff Emerick served as his ears, as even by that point George's hearing was going. Geoff was the guy that got the sounds."
"Were we in awe of them? I would say no, not at all," Mogg insists. "George was just a regular guy, a very nice chap. He had no airs or graces."
Track by track the album came together. Early on during the making of the album, Young Blood, an anthemic hard rocker written by Mogg and Way, was earmarked as a potential single. Sure enough, Young Blood - pressed on blood-red vinyl -took UFO into the UK Top 40. A YouTube clip shows the band performing the song on Top Of The Pops on January 10, 1980, all of them looking very serious and worryingly sober.
With hindsight, Mogg isn't especially fond of Young Blood. "I can see what we were trying to do with it, but I'm not especially keen," he admits.
On the album, the Chapman-written instrumental Alpha Centauri (used as an intro for the band's live show) led into the wonderful, fiery hard rock track Lettin' Go, while This Fire Burns Tonight would prove to be an inspired example of the UFO power ballad. It had been Chapman's idea to cover Mystery Train, a 1955 hit for Elvis Presley, although the plan almost collapsed due to confusion over the lyrics. In the end, somebody from Chrysalis in London played it to the band down the phone at the studio more than 4,000 miles away.
"That's right. Nobody knew the words," Mogg says with a smirk, setting up his own punchline: "And we still don't."
His own contribution to the album completed, Andy Parker prepared to head home to England, leaving his bandmates at AIR to finish laying down the backing tracks. Fine-tuning was later undertaken at AIR's sister studio close to London's Oxford Street.
"For me and my wife, getting off the island was difficult because a hurricane was coming," he recalls. "We had a ten-seater plane, and the pilot kept looking at the sky and wondering whether or not it was safe [to take off]. In the end we were able to fly back to Puerto Rico, but it was a bit of a white-knuckle experience."
UFO were left flummoxed by the quietness of Martin's studio playbacks. "They sounded like a transistor radio," commented Pete Way. "After George had left on an evening, Paul Chapman and I would rachet up the volume to the point where I'm surprised the place still had a roof."
To this day, frustration simmers on over the final mix of No Place To Run. "I felt like the album sounded a little too...," Mogg ruminates while searching for the right word. "I don't know. I like things to sound 'live'. Sometimes it does come across as a little polite, though overall I believe we made a very good album. And to be fair, I haven't heard the brand new remix."
"No Place To Run isn't a bad album, but personally I found George's mix a bit low-key," Way remembered. "All the same, it has some really good songs and is nicely put together."
Mogg's sole disappointment is that UFO didn't benefit from Martin's skill as an arranger. They would have to wait until next time around when the renowned Paul Buckmaster (David Bowie, Elton John, the Rolling Stones...) provided orchestral elements for The Wild, The Willing And The Innocent (which follows in the UFO remaster series).
"We had wanted to do an album with some strings," the vocalist explains. "Not 'flowery' strings, but something a little more macabre. That didn't happen. I suspect George had been briefed by Chrysalis - no, this is a rock album."
"Perhaps we missed an opportunity there," agreed Way.
Back in London, Aubrey Powell, better known as 'Po', of the celebrated sleeve design company Hypgnosis, brought the members of UFO together for a front-cover photoshoot at, of all places, a taxi rank outside King's Cross Station in London.
"We'd only just returned to the UK and it was freezing cold, so Parker wore a fur coat to keep himself warm," Mogg explains. "He's got a bottle of brandy hidden behind that petrol pump and he's sucking away on it, in between bouts of moaning at the temperature. If you look at the photo, Pete has reached across to tap me on the ankle with his foot, and out of the corner of his mouth he's saying: 'Fucking 'ell. Can you hear him moaning?'"
"Mogg has got it wrong again, the poor old fucker," Parker responds, with a fondness not apparent in his words. "I wasn't complaining about the cold, I really needed a pee and Po wouldn't let me go. That's what I was moaning about. I don't remember the bottle of brandy. But hey, what a great rock'n'roll photograph."
Released on January 11, 1980, No Place To Run was given a lukewarm reception by Geoff Barton, writing about it in Sounds. He praised its title track, but described the album as "curiously empty and unfulfilling". Nevertheless, Chrysalis threw their weight behind the release, making it available in several differently tinted covers. So the label would have been disappointed that it barely made the UK Top 100, scraping in at No.91.
However, doom-mongers would have been disappointed that the band's lengthy British tour sold so rapidly that a further two shows at London's prestigious Hammersmith Odeon were added to the existing pair, with androgynous UK glamsters Girl as special guests.
UFO went on to co-headline that year's Reading Festival. Then by the time they played a packed-to-the-rafters three-night run at London's Marquee club in November, Paul Raymond had left to join Michael Schenker and was succeeded by former Wild Horses man Neil Carter.
For a newly remastered and expanded version of No Place To Run, the vaults were raided for one of the performances from the Marquee (the final night of the three, November 16), which captures UFO at their blistering best.
"I've heard a bit of the recording and it sounds very lively - extremely energetic," Mogg states. "Returning to that place and its sticky carpets was like stepping back in time. The Marquee was part of our ride."
"I was blown away by the Marquee recording," Parker enthuses. "Neil [Carter] is still new but he sounds great. In one song - it might be Lights Out - we go into this unusual breakdown that sounds like [Led Zeppelin's] Trampled Underfoot."
Despite the reservations of some contemporary reviewers, the passing of time has treated No Place To Run extremely kindly, although, shockingly, it remains the only UFO studio album to be certified Silver in the UK for sales of more than 50,000 copies.
"Michael had gone, but the rollover of Strangers In The Night [which brought UFO another Silver certification] carried it along," Mogg reflects. "I'd say I like three-quarters of that album. Tonka played brilliantly on it."
Andy Parker attributes UFO's failure to scale the next level to two key factors: record company neglect and meddling, and not having credible management.
"Had we found someone like Iron Maiden's Rod Smallwood, things would have turned out differently," he states. "And yes, Chrysalis did try to mould us in a slightly different direction. They had Blondie and Spandau Ballet who had been very successful, but it didn't really happen for us the same way. Gradually they lost a little interest in us, I think."
In the pub in Brighton, Mogg has just about finished his glass of lemonade, but before we bid farewell one final important question remains. Given that the debut from Moggs Motel was very well received, has he submitted planning permission for another?
"It's funny you should ask that, because there will certainly be a new wing of the Motel," he reveals proudly. "Yes, the workers are in and construction has started, so there will be some tasty new material. It'll take a while to complete, but things have elevated slightly from the last opening of the Motel.
"The best thing is that I'm having a bit of fun with it all," he adds in conclusion. "If possible, I'd even like to do a gig or two - a summer festival [in 2026], maybe."