Phil Mogg, frontman of space rockers turned metal outfit UFO
From Sounds, 1979.
Is that his hand on the other side of his lower torso, or his actual knob, or side-ball? Anatomical experts adjudicate!
This is a photo that Sounds would recycle whenever the opportunity arose.
Reference in the blurb to UFO being on Old Grey Whistle Test last week
A band whose early records I would like to have liked more than I actually did.
Bit like with Hawkwind. But with a less of a toothsome framing.
I have the first couple of albums, when they were UK space rock festival stalwarts. Cool logo.
The thematics are very Hawkwindy
As they drifted towards hard rock, UFO became a classic fourth from the top of the bill, Knebworth, Reading, sort of band.
From the later metal-tending phase this is reputedly their stone classic.
Force It / Faucet, geddit. "New Wavers' arse akimbo"? See the cover models are Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti earning a bit of dosh on the side. Sleazy Christopherson worked at Hipgnosis, you see. Yet another case of Old Wave / New Wave blurring / secret continuity.
Kept slogging away and then Mechanix was their biggest success, got to #8 in the UK albums chart.
Kept slogging on and on - original members dropping like flies - and then the farewell tour, set for 2022, was cancelled, on doctor's orders (Mogg had had a heart attack).
There had been plans for the final show to be a "rock legends cruise, a five-day event in early 2020".
I wonder what Mogg's arse looks like now.
Married to a page 3 girl!
Nephew Nigel Mogg played bass in The Quireboys, staples of The Intrepid Fox and favorites of Melody Maker's hard rockin' Carol Clerk.
Think this predilection for nudity was more akin to streaking than flashing - a big craze in the Seventies. There was barely a test match that went by without some bearded type knocking the bails off with his bollocks. Dennis Lillee going after them with his bat etc.
ReplyDeleteDear old Erica Roe....
It's an interesting phenomenon in hindsight - I put it down to sheer Boomer exuberance, but maybe there were deeper urges?
Should point out that Genesis P. was an absolute total Boomer, only two years younger than Mogg, so his presence on a UFO sleeve was actually less incongruous than his presence in Throbbing Gristle.
I feel like flashing was more an early '70s thing - like in my mental picture of flashers running onto the pitch, they always have beards and long hippie hair.
DeleteTalking of pitches, this pic reminds me of scenes in the changing room after a big match.
He was a boomer by age yes, Genesis P., but in terms of musical activity TG are "New Wave" - in fact like No Wave they are so vanguard they leave most of the actual New Wave for dust.
But in the very earliest stirrings, when COUM was turning into Throbbing Gristle, the scene they imagined infiltrating was the Hawkwind scene - then punk happened. but I think TG's earliest flyers used the phrase "post-psychedelic trash" or something like that.
When Genesis would do things like Fave Albums of All Time lists or Portrait of Artist as Consumer, the choices would be all be late Sixties 'head' records. The Doors, Velvets... I thinks Pearls Before Swine even.
I am actually technically a boomer - the cut off is 1964 and I was born in '63. I think being on the cusp of boomer and Gen X explains a lot of my confusion - and also musical loves. The Sixties stuff has an irresistible pull. Even as I was into punk /postpunk I was reading those Paladin or was it Picador paperbacks of Playpower and Bomb Culture and so forth.
Looks like ''74 was the peak year for streaking:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxUfg3uCBbg
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWBc-ir6IFM
It certainly lingered a bit beyond then, because I remember it, and my cognisance of pop culture only kicked in around 1975. As well as being hairy, streakers always seemed to be quite gangly and wiry, the quintessential hippy physique.
Erica Roe was 1982, rejuvenating the genre with a hitherto unprecedented tits/rugby intervention.
"Streaking" I meant to write of course
DeleteFlashing is something completely different but I wonder if that too has disappeared. There was this folk archetype thing (often appeared in Monty Python, maybe Benny Hill), the dirty mac - guy with seedy looking raincoat who then opens up wide to reveal he's in the nuddy underneath. This actually happened to some schoolfriends of mine, they were walking across a park and this old gent exposed himself. Nowadays they'd be put in some kind of counselling, but in those days, no one made a fuss (not that saying that's better - don't accuse me of Binmanism please). I think the flasher got fined 50 quid. Probably a good proportion of what went up before the local magistrate was this kind of thing.
Internet's marvelous isn't it, you can find data on the peak year for streaking.
My mum was briefly a cinema usherette at the local Odeon, and on Screen 3 on a certain weekday there would be a risque film for the benefit of what was known as "the dirty mac brigade".
DeleteI think this archetype is nowadays online where they can flash to willing recipients. The internet has been a huge blessing for perverts.
That Mogg photo looked *so* familiar when I saw it above - but of course you explain why. Those sort of pics were often captioned along the lines of "Calm down ladies he's spoken for."
ReplyDeleteI blame Lennon and Ono - innovators in this as in so many other things - for pioneering the use of nudity as a statement of honesty and openness. The rejection of any adornment or concealment. Back-to-naturism. Anti-Glam
ReplyDeleteI dunno, I think this is more on the level of mooning. I doubt if there is a Fluxus influence in there. Not even clear Mogg consented to be photographed
DeleteI was reading about a chronic repeat-mooner the other day. Ah yes, it was Stiv Bators from the Dead Boys. Apparently he would moon while in the driver's seat of a moving car. Somehow got his arsecheeks flat against the side window without crashing. Genitalia brushing against the steering wheel. The story is in Please Kill Me, a relentless chronicle of sleazy and debased behaviour.
Joy has a story about being mooned by a member of Dif Juz. Very much out of step with the 4AD ethereal image.
The Scorpions were pretty solid through the late '70s. Then "Rock You Like a Hurricane" is a guilty pleasure.
ReplyDelete