May 10, 2008

UFO - Agora, Cleveland 1982

A Coffee Break concert (11 AM!) from WWMS FM, Cleveland's Rock Station.
Recorded on the Mechanix promotion tour in the Cleveland Agora in June 1982 (still with Paul Chapman on guitar), a good phase in this British band's career.



Sound Quality: 9.5

Source: Pre-FM Tape

Track List:
01 We Belong To The Night
02 Let It Rain
03 Long Gone
04 The Wild, The Willing And The Innocent
05 Only You Can Rock Me
06 Terri
07 Doing It All For You
08 Too Hot to Handle
09 Lights Out

MP3
FLAC

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ahem...
I remember buying 'No Place to Run' when it came out & was very disappointed. I am less familiar with 'Mechanix'. However I went to see them at Manchester's Free Trade Hall on the 'No Place ' tour & they were excellent. Paul Chapman is a fine guitarist. I really like his stuff on the Lone Star albums especially 'Firing on All Six'. Geoff Barton of Sounds magazine (later editor of Kerrang!) said LS were going to be "the next Led Zep" & to "catch them now before they become too big" - wrong Geoff. I failed to catch them & they promptly disappered. I wonder if there are any Lone Star bootlegs?
Geoff Barton was my favourite music journalist & sounds was my fav. music rag. Sounds died a death 'cos they failed to jump on the punk bandwagon quickly enough. The NME turned punk overnight and stole a march on them. I could wax lyrical for days on this topic but I'll try not to (thank god). A defining moment in this story was when I bought a copy of sounds which had a jar of strawberry jam on the front cover. I (& many others) assumed it contained an interview with The Strawbs. When I got home I found it was an interview with 'upstarts' The Jam. The following week the letters section was full of complaints. They lost their old readership & failed to attract the generally younger punks. Sounds ceased to exist not long after. I recall Phil Mogg & Pete Way once saying (in sounds) "underpants are naff". I was not a starstruck fan but I thought they had a point. I never wore them again! Now that's what I call having an influence.
My wife says I should write a book, but that's probably just her way of saying "shut the f*ck up!".
Sounds was very funny. Three examples: A close of of Lemmy captioned: 'Lemmy - bumper crop of mushrooms'/ a pic of promotor Harvey Goldsmith cutting a celebration cake backstage at Led Zeps 79 Knebworth bash captioned 'I wonder if he carved the biggest slice for himself?' & best of all - a photo of five guitar necks protruding from a wall of dry ice, players invisible. The caption? - Blue Öyster Cult.
Regards
Titus

Anonymous said...

I can't listen to UFO post-Schenker.

They were dull before he joined and after.

He was the focus for that group.

AtticRock said...

Never heard Lone Star but there are some good references of them, in the International Encyclopedia of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal for example. In the eighties I would buy Kerrang once in a while but never liked it much, I preferred French mags like Metal Attack, Enfer, Hard Force, etc.
Never read Sounds, unfortunately judging by your cool stories:)

Anonymous said...

Yes, Kerrang was pitched at younger metal heads & I never liked it. Geoff Barton was once invited over to the US to interview Styx. It was just at the time when Styx had gone all permed & suited. He began the piece thus: 'I opened the door and thought I had burst in on Toto'. That really made me laugh. He & fellow journalist Pete Makowski (wrong spelling?) wrote the sleeve notes to Deep Purple's Made in Europe. Barton was famous for relentlessly promoting his favourite bands. This included Rush who he almost single-handedly pushed into the UK's rock conciousness & especially Kiss who were not considered cool at all in 70's Britain. His five stars out of five reviews of their albums were hilarious. When Dynasty featuring 'I Was Made for Lovin' You Baby' was released the sounds staff announced it: Kiss go disco, get out of this one Geoff. Geoff responed by giving the album five stars & stating: 'If this is a disco record then it's the greatest disco record of all time' He had previously dubbed Alive II as 'The Greatest Live Album of All Time' One Christmas sounds left the centre pages blank, asking readers to fill them however they liked & promising to print the best ones. There were many memorable submissions. One featured GB as superman mid-flight clutching a Kiss album & uttering 'They've done it again!' with the legend: 'Geoff Barton enters the sounds office somewhat elated' One guy filled it with a giant NME logo! Another in large block capitals just said 'sounds should find better things to do with it's pages'. The fact that these were printed at all spoke volumes of the sounds ethos.
All the best
Titus

Anonymous said...

p.s. check out this blog:
http://orexisofdeath.blogspot.com/2007/06/lone-star-uk-hard-rock.html
Titus

AtticRock said...

Nice blog, thanks man :)

Do you still have these Sounds with you? Ever considered scanning them and publishing to a blog?
You have a faithful reader already:)

Anonymous said...

Hi AtticRock,
I wish I had kept some but you don't think about that at the time. Sounds was a tabloid newspaper not a glossy magazine. Wiki says it finished in 1991 which is a bit longer than I remember. I guess I just lost interest. Wiki also cites it as the first to cover punk but I still maintain it lost out to the NME. When Pink Floyd released The Wall in late 79 Sounds gave it one star. I felt this was feeble & ridiculous attempt to distance themselves from the hippies & proggers with whom they were synonymous. A local record store stayed open late the day before The Wall was due for release to steal a march on the competion. They cleared out all the shelves & as soon as the delivery van arrived they filled them up with copies. Word soon went around & I was there at 8pm. The shop was full of people buying The Wall. There were no stickers on the covers & I remember thinking how strange it looked seeing row after row of that brick design. It was, at £8, the most expensive record I had ever bought. One star?
I think not.
Titus

Anonymous said...

Bet you,ve never heard this AR,

Wild Willy Barrett & Two Names
Organic Bondage 1986
mp3 (320) - vinyl rip

Willy is probably best known for his work with maverick folk/punk poet John Otway.
Here he works with wood. Bigtime.
All the 'drums' are pieces of wood banged on other pieces of wood. His guitar still had gnarled
remnants of branches sticking out of it and he had a bizarre slide guitar contraption that made twanging ruler-on-a-desk type noises when levers were pulled.
The influences of punk/new wave can be heard & he also has an interesting take on the, then current, craze for Paul Hardcastle n-n-n-n-nineteen sampling.
No samples here though - this is completely organic!
As far as I know it has never had a CD release.
I have one of the original copies which came in a hand-carved wooden sleeve - I kid you not.
Willy is a fantastic craftsman & if you google his name you will find pictures of his creations.
Other activities include taking a saw to his guitar & playing slide with an egg.
The mysterious 'Two-Names' plays bass.
Some of the songs are weaker than others but you will never hear a more original album.
Titus

Link:
http://rapidshare.com/files/114676867/WWB.rar.html

See willy doing it live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TUd6Np8nEM

AtticRock said...

Hi Titus

Going back to Kiss, I never liked them much but then again the first track I remember hearing from the guys on the radio was exactly I Was Made for Lovin' You... Anyway, Geoff Barton is a name not completely strange to me, I must have read something about him somewhere.
The Wall is a five-star piece from any angle you look at it but those times were confuse we have to excuse the journalists...
Wild Willy? Really never heard it but after seeing the video I think wild is the least we can say. I guess we can call him a wood virtuoso hehe.

Anonymous said...

Ha! Just come across this old thread here...
I still have a wood cover/vinyl copy of Organic Bondage with insert. Apparently Wild Willy hand made the covers (only 100 were ever made/released with the wood cover)Quite bonkers!

Used to read Sounds and NME, IMHO I thought NME was more in touch with what was happening, people were getting tired of upper class private school educated over blown bands that didn't really reflect what was happening in the world around. (some exceptions of course)

Sorry can't share your enthusiasm for Kiss, never been much of a fan, (nor much of a fan of the poodle-perm spandex bands) but each to their own... Whatever floats yer boat n' all that...
Much more a Coltrane, Davis, Monk, Coleman, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Roy Harper, King Crimson, VdGG, Zappa, Beefheart fan, along with early Stranglers, The Clash etc as they came along and shook things up a bit...

Good blog btw.

"Music is the best" FZ

Anonymous said...

Link for UFO Agora 1982 does not work, says file not found. Please re-up.

AtticRock said...

New link ok for UFO '82.

Anonymous said...

one of the best bands and most under rated, of all time, no matter the guitarist, IMO.

i liked them since day one but have never had a chance to see them which really bums me out.

Anonymous said...

Re-up please.

AtticRock said...

You got it!