"They took cocaine in the studio while making it, but Obsession didn't suffer" The deluxe edition of UFO's final studio album with Michael Schenker still functions highly

By placing front and centre on the front cover, the only member of the band wearing his hair long and with features free of ball bearings, sleeve designers Hipgnosis highlighted the guitarist but also made him look troubled and isolated. How apt. , 's seventh studio album and their fifth with Schenker, was produced superbly by Ron Nevison, as was its startling predecessor .

Released in 1978, cemented UFO in the American market, but its tour (recordings from some of the shows were immortalised on the double live album ) proved too much for Schenker's mental state. Plagued by stagefright, a quest for perfection and his bandmates' banter, he quit. But what a swansong was for him.



Its longest-lasting songs remain and , but and are all 24-carat UFO. Elsewhere the band pushed the envelope by having a string section on and . And while Nevison and engineer Mike Clink made Andy Parker's drums sound like 's, there was also , Schenker's exquisite flute-and-acoustic guitar instrumental.

.. is more direct, but has more class.

Studio bonus material (not available on vinyl) on this reissue includes an alternative and the two tracks re-recorded "as live" for slotting into . The bigger bonus - unless you already own the eight-CD 2020 box set - is a 2024 remix of the whole set recorded at the Agora Ballroom in Columbus, Ohio (presented as a double album here in the vinyl version). The Agora was one of six shows brilliantly cut-and-shunted together as by Nevison.

The setlist is marginally better than the live album and, even without the producer's painstaking input, sounds 95 per cent as good. It was the fifth of six consecutive shows taped. Think about that: not a single night off.

And a lot of partying. Before , singer Phil Mogg admits: "We're getting a little confused up here..

. It's your licensing laws." Then ahead of , having been handed a beverage, he says: "Okay, the bar's open.

So we've done away with the professional outlook...

we're gonna drink in front of you!" UFO were no amateurs. They took cocaine in the studio while making it, but didn't suffer. In those days at least, like the Faces before them, UFO were high-functioning.

Freelance contributor to and several of its offshoots since 2006. In the 1980s he began a 15-year spell working for intially as a cub reviewer and later as Geoff Barton’s deputy and then pouring precious metal into test tubes as editor of its Special Projects division. Has spent quality time with Robert Plant, Keith Richards, Ritchie Blackmore, Rory Gallagher and Gary Moore – and also spent time in a maximum security prison alongside Love/Hate.

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