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Aged just 17, the star joined the madcap rock band. Now, he opens up about their hell-raising years – and whether they’d tour again
Michael Schenker’s decision to join UFO in 1973 was a marriage of convenience. The Sarstedt-born musician was just 17 at the time. As a member of the German rock group the Scorpions – for whom he played lead guitar in the company of his older brother and rhythm guitarist Rudolph Schenker – he had spoken of his plans to fly the coop should an English band want to make use of his services. It didn’t matter who that band might be, or what kind of music they played; he didn’t even care if their line-up was composed partly of lunatics. He just wanted in.
“It had to be England,” Schenker tells me. “Because, in Germany, what I was doing on my guitar, nobody understood. But in England… Every guitarist had their own style, which was fascinating. So England is where I wanted to be because I wanted to be an artist.”
[I wanted] to self-express and do this recreationally; not to compete or any of those things, but just to enjoy it. That’s what my foundation is: the enjoyment of actually putting notes together. That’s what I was fascinated with, and England was the place to be.”
So fruitful was this union that Michael Schenker has done something he’s normally loathe to do – he’s looked backwards. Released last week, the album My Years With UFO sees the now 69-year-old revisiting material from LPs such as Phenomenon, Lights Out and Obsession with a bevy of guest vocalists. These include Axl Rose, from Guns N’ Roses, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, former Rainbow man Joe Lynne Turner, and Joey Tempest, the frontman with Europe.
“I don’t look back into the past,” Schenker says. “But I’ve noticed that my life has just been a series of developments, as an artist, focussing on my mission which has always been pure self-expression, as pure as I can get. I stuck true to myself all the way.”
Michael Schenker is not always an easy interviewee. He’s speaking on Zoom from America, he says, on a recreational road trip, but declines to identify the name of the city in which he finds himself. He tells me that he doesn’t listen to music, or read the music press, or look at the internet – such frippery, he explains, would only dilute his tireless quest for artistic individualism. Were I to take a shot of whisky every time he mentioned the words “personal development” and “self-expression”, I’d be asking him questions while having my stomach pumped.
In this state of perfect insularity, Schenker claims to have long failed to notice, even, the vast shadow cast by his playing style. By turns melodic and excoriating, in terms of raw influence on subsequent generations of lead guitarists, only Eddie Van Halen is spoken of with greater reverence by those in the know. Musicians such as Mike McCready (Pearl Jam), Kirk Hammett (Metallica), Dimebag Darrell (Pantera) and George Lynch (Dokken) – to name only a few – bow at the feet of a man who seems barely to know they even exist.
“I never focus on that,” he tells me. “I never knew until the mid-90s when I was told how many people I had influenced. I don’t know why it took that long for me to be told, or me to even listen to people. I don’t know. I don’t mix much with people. I was in a different world. I left the orbit. I was in a different place.”
In all likelihood, he always was. Moving to London at the start of the 1970s, Schenker’s limited grasp of the English language meant he was unable to comprehend the blokey insults lobbed his way by bandmates. In later years, good-natured drummer Andy Parker – himself the butt of many jokes – told him, “Michael, if you knew what they were [saying] about you, you would not like it.”
Or perhaps he wouldn’t have cared. As the group gained traction in Europe and the United States, Schenker’s pursuit of perfection became a demon that never slept. While others kept themselves awake with the help of refreshment in powdered form, the German retired to his hotel room to listen to sound-desk recordings of gigs that had ended barely an hour earlier. He didn’t much care what happened in front of the stage. He seemed oblivious, even, that the venues in which the band were playing were increasing in size.
“I never looked at success,” he says. “I never looked at who was in the band, really. I didn’t look much at anything. I was just in the music.” Once again, that darned “personal development” was the dividing line between him and the rest of the group. “I noticed that Phil said, for instance, after the No Heavy Petting, the album [from 1976], ‘If this album doesn’t make it then I’m going to quit’. I thought, ‘Phil, what are you after?’… I was after my personal vision, which was to be an artist and to develop as a lead guitarist as far as I can.”
Suffice it to say, this singularity distinguished himself from the rest of the band. According to Way’s memoir – A Fast Ride Out Of Here: Confessions Of Rock’s Most Dangerous Man – on one US tour, after discovering they could write off illegal drugs as “medical expenses”, UFO almost gave their accountant an embolism when he learned $20,000 had been spent on the stuff. For his part, Way was perhaps the archetypal rock and roll animal. As no less of a hell-raiser than Ozzy Osbourne once put it, “They call me a madman, but compared to Pete Way I’m out of my league. He’s f–cking mental.”
“Coke could be found everywhere [sic] in America and I got particularly adept at identifying drug dealers who would want to go out on the road with us,” Way wrote. “Upon arrival in a new town, the first thing I would do was establish who the guy was who could bring coke straight to our hotel. It would be a great tragedy if no one was about, but [it was] a rare occurrence.”
While such behaviour was hardly atypical for young rock bands out in the wild in the 1970s, UFO’s determination to push the envelope unsettled their young lead guitarist.
“The fact was that Phil Mogg, he used to fight people,” Schenker tells me. “Constantly. I have seen people bleeding, I have seen Phil beating [someone] left and right, left and right, like a carrion, and that’s scary. Very scary. One day I said to him, during the Obsession time [in 1978], ‘Phil, if you ever hit me, I leave the band’. And he hit me – I guess just for fun because he wanted to find out – so I left the band.”
For his part, Mogg, who admits to having been a bit of a bruiser, described that altercation as “handbags at dawn”. But, the guitarist continues, “I also felt it was the right time to leave because my development as a guitarist basically came to an end.”
Were young musicians properly cared for in the music industry of the 1970s? Schnecker answers without hesitation: “No, absolutely not. Basically, you end up making money for greedy money-making people. And they will walk over dead bodies, I have noticed. It doesn’t matter to them. The fact is, musicians are very vulnerable. There are a bunch of people on this planet who are looking [to exploit] these vulnerable people and they misuse them and they finish them.”
As the group entered middle age, UFO seemed determined to continue racking up mistakes. After re-joining the group in the 1990s, Michael Schenker’s increasingly unstable relationship with the English contingent broke apart following a gig at the Manchester Apollo the details of which remain sketchy. In his book, Pete Way insists the German kept shouting the words “you’re a c–nt” in Phil Mogg’s face.
Although not quite denying this account – “who knows? I don’t dwell on stories,” he says – Schenker claims he left the band because Way kept standing on his feet and deadening his notes so “[he] couldn’t play”. Either way, it was hardly edifying stuff.
Perhaps inevitably, then, the notable absence from the long list of vocalists who appear on My Years With UFO is that of Phil Mogg himself. Schenker says he approached his old bandmate – who, as well as being 76-years-old, suffered a heart attack last year – but suspects the possibility that the request was blocked by the singer’s management team.
“I heard someone had asked Phil if he had been approached and he said no,” he says. Asked if he’d consider touring the album with Mogg as the frontman, he replies, “Why not? If he was up to it, why not?”
But maybe it’s best to simply leave things where they lie. Although beloved of their hardcore audience, the messy misdirection of the often unreliable UFO means the group’s legacy does not quite reside in the company of rock titans such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath.
Yet, despite his reputation for eccentricity, it seems that only their errant German guitarist has managed to keep his eye on the prize. Motivated not by success or money or standing, let alone drugs and sex, his reward was strikingly simple: to do whatever the hell he wants, whenever the hell he wants to. The rest is just gravy.
“If you do something that is a long way from the stereotype, the journey is a long journey,” Michael Schenker says. “I have managed 50 years staying true to myself… I was, and still am, on that mission of pure self-expression.”
He concludes: “I became famous and successful and had all of those things without doing anything other than being myself. And that’s been a very comfortable achievement for me.”
My Years With UFO by Michael Schenker is available now
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