OFF: early UFO: groovy groovy spacerock!

[C Mumford]

Having only heard later UFO I've always dismissed them as 3rd rate
cheez-metal, but I've been eyeballing a few compilations of early material
for a long while, and I picked up 'The Early Years' CD (the cheaper of the
two :-). Anyway, some of the stuff there blew me away, and I suspect
members of Monster Magnet and Kyuss are into this stuff! There's some cool
cover versions of Who Do You Love and C'mon Everybody, but the meat here
are rockin' space-metal-boogie songs like 'Timothy' (a pretty
strightforward ultraheavy piece of boogie - possibly about Leary?), 'The
Coming of Prince Kajuku' (a cool little buildup to...:), 'Prince Kajuku'
(sounds like Monster Magnet boogie at their hardest! ROCKS!) and 'Silver
Bird' (this song is a longer spacey jam that builds up to an amazingly
heavy riff - mindblowingly groovy headbang action!!) and 'Unidentified
Flying Object', a cool little spacerock piece with neat little electronic
sounds.... I'm not kidding, this is good stuff! The material collected is
from '70 -72, off their first 3 albums: 'U.F.O.', 'Flying (One Hour
Spacerock)' and 'Lands In Tokyo'. (a live album)

There's also a roundabout HW-connection here, Larry Wallis joined the band
briefly after their spacerock period and left for Pink Fairies and briefly
Motorhead. In fact this stuff is almost a weird synthesis of HW and
BOC.....

I'm curious about their first 2-3 albums, I don't think they are availible
on CD, but this stuff is a far cry from the later (+more successful :-)
Michael Schenker era stuff......



Christian