By placing Michael Schenker 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. Obsession, UFO's seventh studio album and their fifth with Schenker, was produced superbly by Ron Nevison, as was its startling predecessor Lights Out.
Released in 1978, Obsession cemented UFO in the American market, but its tour (recordings from some of the shows were immortalised on the double live album Strangers In The Night) 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 Obsession was for him.
Its longest-lasting songs remain Only You Can Rock Me and Cherry, but Hot 'N' Ready, Pack It Up (And Go), Ain't No Baby and One More For The Rodeo are all 24-carat UFO. Elsewhere the band pushed the envelope by having a string section on Looking Out For No. 1 and Born To Lose. And while Nevison and engineer Mike Clink made Andy Parker's drums sound like John Bonham's, there was also Arbory Hill, Schenker's exquisite flute-and-acoustic guitar instrumental... Lights Out is more direct, but Obsession has more class.
Studio bonus material (not available on vinyl) on this reissue includes an alternative Cherry and the two Force It tracks re-recorded "as live" for slotting into Strangers. The bigger bonus - unless you already own the eight-CD 2020 Strangers 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 Strangers 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 Natural Thing, singer Phil Mogg admits: "We're getting a little confused up here... It's your licensing laws." Then ahead of I'm A Loser, 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 Obsession didn't suffer. In those days at least, like the Faces before them, UFO were high-functioning.
