Rocks In The Attic #517: U.F.O. – ‘Strangers In The Night’ (1979)

“Hello Chicago!…”

I felt like a blast of heavy metal, given that I’ve just watched Heavy Metal Parking Lot – the documentary love-letter to being young, dumb, full of booze and standing around waiting for your favourite band to play in your hometown.

The premise of the film is very simple – two documentary filmmakers, Jeff Krulik and John Heyn, took a movie camera and a microphone to the parking lot of the Capitol Centre arena in Landover, Maryland on May 31^st 1986 to film heavy metal fans who had congregated there to see Judas Priest on their Fuel For Life tour.

As you might expect, the short film is full of idiots – boozed-up, shirtless and, for the most part, willing participants for the filmmakers who are obviously there to poke fun at their subjects. Krulik and Heyn don’t get too involved in fact, and the only ridiculing evident is self-inflicted, with some gentle prompting by way of questions to the interviewees.

The film did make me think about how I was at that age – in my mid-teens and with a love of heavy metal. I know my behaviour wasn’t quite as extreme as the teens in this film, but I definitely saw a lot of people acting like this as soon as they had a couple of beers inside them. Only a couple of years ago I was standing in the crowd at  Black Sabbath concert, and the young, overweight girl next to me was asleep on her feet, drunk out of her head, and smelling of vomit as she bounced against each of the people stood around her, like an intoxicated ball in a pinball machine.

I’ve always been staunchly against anything coming close to ‘laddish’ behaviour, but this film is full of it. The young teens are emboldened not just by their drunkenness, but by being safely amongst their own kind. It’s a kind of pack mentality; an innocent kind, without any negative consequences.

Even more interesting than the 1986 film, is Krulik and Heyn’s follow-up documentary which traces a handful of Heavy Metal Parking Lot’s original interviewees. Most of the subjects are happy to have been tracked down and can view the film with good-natured nostalgia for the days of their youth, but the final segment is slightly different. In their search for ‘Zebraman’ – a youth dressed in a zebra patterned two-piece outfit, Krulik and Heyn knock on a door of a suburban house to be greeted by the man himself. Only he has his arms crossed and doesn’t look to happy that they’ve found him. He seems to be the only one to regret his involvement in the film, but still manages to crack a smile or two.

U.F.O.’s Strangers In The Night is a double live album from 1979, featuring songs recorded during the band’s North American tour promoting the Obsession album. It’s the last album to feature guitarist Michael Schenker, who almost went on to replace the recently departed Joe Perry in Aerosmith.

I know hardly anything about U.F.O. Their music, like a lot of classic heavy metal, bores me to tears. I think I first heard about the album in a special edition of Q or Mojo espousing essential rock albums. I never think a live album is a good way to first hear a band (although AC/DC Live worked wonders for me) and so this record just washes over me. As my wife once famously said to me at a Steely Dan concert, ‘I can’t tell when one song finishes and the next one starts’.

Hit: Doctor Doctor

Hidden Gem: Only You Can Rock Me

Rocks In The Attic #208: Saxon – ‘Strong Arm Of The Law’ (1980)

I’m not sure why I have this record in my collection. I think it may have been part of a batch of records I was handed by somebody in the early 2000s. That’s one of the good things about collecting records – if enough people know that you’re a vinyl junkie, you’re more likely to get handed a pile of unwanted records. One of the bad things about people knowing that you collect records is that you’re more likely to get handed a record like this.

Saxon are one of those bands that belongs in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and doesn’t really have a place in the 21st century. They’re a poor man’s Judas Priest, and that already sounds like a pretty destitute guy. Similar bands like Iron Maiden have better songs, which means their original fanbase was bigger, and there’s a bigger need for them to continue into this century. Saxon really only exist for me to see what Spinal Tap found so amusing about them.

Although Rob Reiner’s film is drawn from a very large canvas – practically every rock band of the time is lampooned in one way or another – it is Saxon that you always hear as being the key influence on Tap, especially in looks and sound.

Listening to this for the first time, I can hear all of the bad bits of the bands I actually like from around the same time, but none of the good bits. To a normal person, it would be hard to hear the difference between Saxon and a band like Thin Lizzy or Maiden, and I can appreciate the similarities, but I guess history just leaves some bands behind from time to time.

Hit: Strong Arm Of The Law

Hidden Gem: Dallas 1pm