I am looking forward to visiting Japan again after my 5 year ban comes to an end at the beginning of April. Hopefully, it will mean that UFO will at last be able to play a few shows in the Far East and I can at meet up with old friends again.

Andy Parker has written about our Russian tour on his website recently, and I totally agree with him that it was like touring nowhere else in the world! Russia is such a vast country, a tour bus would have taken far too long to get us from city to city, so we had to endure 4am alarm calls to get on a succession of 20 hour train journeys and flights that were all routed via Moscow, consequently there was very little time to rest. The promoters and the audiences were outstanding and made up for all the exhaustion, so that was the most important thing to us. Hey, who would have thought “Belladonna” from No Heavy Petting could have been so popular over there! UFO ballads have been one of our strengths over the years, but this one came right out of left-field!

Our final gig of the tour was an indoor rock festival entitled “Hard Rock Hell”. It was situated at Butlins, Minehead – not the first venue that would spring to mind for a gathering of metal heads, but it actually turned out to be a great gig! We went down really well, despite the fact that the fans had been rocking for 2 days solid by the time we hit the stage late on Saturday night, and initially seemed to have run out of steam. However a few songs into the set their spirit rallied and when we launched into “Only You Can Rock Me” the whole energy of the audience shifted up about 3 gears and rocked along with us. A journalist from Classic Rock magazine decreed that we were the best band of the weekend, which was praise indeed.

I must also back-track a bit, to a couple of shows we did at the end of June/beginning of July. We played a great little venue in Southampton called The Brook. The atmosphere was fantastic; reminding me of some of the early gigs we played back in the 70’s. It was packed to capacity, all the fans sang along to every song and the band responded directly to the energy of the place and the audience, it was a really enjoyable show to play. People of Southampton – hats off to you, you ROCK!

The next day we were headlining an open air festival in Chepstow, just over the Severn Bridge in Wales. Anyone who lives in the UK will know that the summer of 2007 was the wettest on record, and certainly I cannot remember a summer like it. Wales is, at the best of times, an area of the UK that gets more than its fair share of rain – so, it came to pass that the 2007 Chepstow Castle Rock Festival was a complete mud bath! I do not know how the fans stayed out in that weather to see us, they must have been drenched to the skin (or too drunk to notice!) but a hardy few still braved the elements and cheered us on – you guys deserve a medal! The mud was so bad in the backstage area that I couldn’t get from our dressing room to the stage without going ankle deep in it, so eventually I opted to go on in my Farmer Giles wellies and Vinnie chose to custom-build some water proofing for his shoes, (see the photos below). Messrs Mogg & Way were on top form that day, keeping the audience amused with their witty observations regarding the sartorial qualities of Pete’s zebra-print pants – a memorable day indeed!