Okay, is it cool to like 80's Metal again? With the hugely triumphant return of David Lee Roth-era Van Halen to the old hair metal guys even having their very own 4-day Bonnaroo-like camping festival, Rocklahoma, in July, it seems like the scene is set for the 80's Metal Gods to rise again. So you'll definitely see a hasty repackaging of catalogs and best-ofs from bands like Ratt and Poison and Motley Crue and Dokken, and even new albums from some of these guys. Some will be be great and make us wonder why we ever stopped listening to them and some will be quite the opposite... as with any genre of music.
Then if you're really searching, you'll find a brilliant compilation of songs from a band whose music informed that whole genre; a band who actually had little to no success in the 80s, but whose sound you could find all over the popular hard rock music of the decade. The band is UFO and the new compilation is Chrysalis Records' The Best of UFO (1974-1983).
Now, as the band was coming to the end of their powers in 1983, I was turning 11-years old and beginning to be turned on to hard rock and metal. So I had definitely heard the name Michael Schenker since the Scorpions were just starting to see huge success in the States, as I was eating up their Animal Magnetism, Blackout and Love At First Sting albums, and knew that Scorps guitarist Rudy Schenker had a brother who was once in the Scorpions in the 70s and currently had his own creatively-named Michael Schenker Group. But I had not properly been introduced to the work of Michael Schenker in UFO until the last couple years. That's pretty damn late for a band that formed in 1969 and who started hitting their creative stride in 1974, when I was 2-years old!
Article comments
1 - franklyn
tasty!