It was a great thrill to talk to the legendary Michael Schenker – ace guitar player with his own band as well as a body of work with UFO and Scorpions.
We primarily talked about his then new album Don’t Sell Your Soul – which is the second part of his trilogy for Earmusic.
Don’t Sell Your Soul is for me the most consistent album Michael has made since maybe the 80s. The album has lead vocals from Robin McAuley and engineer/ producer Michael Voss but there’s a stellar partnership with Eric Gronwall that runs through the album. When we offered Eric to sing those six songs’, says Michael, ‘he was happy and said, ‘this is my kind of music!’’
While he appreciates my comments on the album, Michael doesn’t like to think of any of his work as ‘best or not best’. ‘For me, he says, ‘making an album is like writing a book, an adventure book, that has all the right parts in it to keep people excited.’
He has always been an extremely interesting and creative guitar player. He explains that: ‘I constantly develop and I’m not stuck in any trends. And therefore self expression, pure self-expression, which I’ve been doing for over fifty years, there is no right or wrong to it. It is just self-expression. Either people like it or they don’t. And so, obviously, what I express is what I want to express. So when I select bits and pieces of music that I want to use, they are called’ the pieces of gold’, and then they inspire me to connect and write more pieces to it.’
The album is definitely a ‘grower’ with repeated listening. Michael feels that hard-core fans will find a lot to delight in: ‘The main thing is that I’m a very detailed person, and there’s so many details that are there to be discovered. The fans are always saying, ‘Oh, there’s something else I didn’t hear before.’ And that’s the fun part. For me, it’s not like this song or that song is best. For me, it’s just like the whole thing put together in the right order to make sure that it’s not too repetitive and it’s exciting.’
It is an exciting record too, with many great songs. Janey The Fox for example impresses, especially Voss’s sly vocals, ‘Yes’, concurs Michael, ‘that’s one of his styles’.
Another killer cut is the axe-attack of the fabulous Sixstring Shotgun. ‘That’s Robbie Macaulay singing’, says Michael. ‘It’s a very, very, interesting way how he structured the whole approach of his vocals on that one.’
The Chosen is one of the best with Eric Gronwall. Michael comments: ‘I noticed that my self-expression was very much getting into this kind of (sings) ‘dum, tickety tang, dum, dum.’ I think I did something similar on two songs. I like it because it is something different. I like doing things that are regardless of what anybody else is doing.’
What about the lyrics? I reminded Michael that Phil Mogg (UFO) used to write most of the lyrics at the last minute after the music was finished. Has he found it easier to work with the assorted MSG vocalists? ‘You know what?’ he says. ‘I do everything exactly the same as I used to. On this album, I wrote two songs, and I wrote my own lyrics to them – Don’t Sell Your Soul and It’s You. Don’t Sell Your Soul is personal – it’s my life story that connects with my years of old. And It’s You is about my wife. And so I had to do those two songs and write the lyrics myself. But in general I don’t really focus much on lyrics. I’ll let people sing whatever they wanna sing. I just come into the studio and I put my stuff down.
For example Michael Voss never really knows what I’m gonna be presenting to him. So when I have the first song on my guitars on the tape, I come in the next morning and he says, ‘Here, Michael. This is what I worked on after you left last night.’ And then I say, ‘Wow, this is amazing’, or ‘It is not so good.’ And that’s what we do. Once I come into the studio and put my ideas down it becomes like step by step or brick by brick. We’re building something, and we don’t really know what’s coming out of it. But that’s the fun part.’
On stage Michael always plays with obvious enjoyment. There’s no ‘going through the motions’ about him, unlike some from his musical generation. Michael sees it like this: ‘I never did do something that I didn’t wanna do and I still don’t. If you do something that you don’t wanna do, but you do it because you get money, then you’re selling out, and then you’re gonna suffer. I don’t wanna suffer like that. You know? I prefer to self-express to have fun.’ So personal integrity, as evidenced in the lyrics to the title track, is crucial for him? ‘Yes, you have to do something that calls you to be, and you don’t sell it for stupid little bits of money or fame, or this or that. Money is important, but you don’t make it the number one priority. You make your own happiness number one priority and money number two. That is a better way round.’
The My Years With UFO album was a surprise retrospective from Michael. What was the thinking behind doing it? ‘Well, it’s the fiftieth anniversary. It is what I did and what I brought to UFO. Actually, I could have called that album, My Songs With UFO. These songs made UFO famous and when I left it went down to nothing again. Many people probably thought my music was born in the eighties, but it wasn’t. It was born in the seventies, and it influenced a whole bunch of musicians in that period.
Those were my developing years from aged 16 to Strangers In The Night. That was the last album of Michael Schenker with UFO, and also there was the Scorpions’ Lovedrive too. Both albums got released in ’79 and that was the end of my developing years at that point – stage one. Then it was transition time – that wasn’t easy to figure out exactly what I needed to do. Today, very clearly, I see that I had to carry on with my own vision. And so that’s what Michael Schenker Group is. And that’s what happened. Many people think that’s when I started, but it wasn’t the case.’
Of fascination to many of us was that Michael hadn’t covered many of the songs in his live sets and there are some fresh little approaches to be heard. ‘Obviously I changed them into something more than they were’, says Michael. ‘Basically, I just wanted to celebrate those songs which are in my blood. They are not overexposed because I didn’t use them in the middle years because I was busy doing pure self-expression, not repeating myself with the most famous things.’
Steve Mann plays rhythm guitar onstage with Michael but does not play any parts on the new album. Michael explains: ‘I don’t want anyone to come in and bring a trend into my life. So I have to really be careful and the best way to do that is to do what you believe in and go into the studio, and put down the rhythm guitar yourself. For this album I wrote the songs and I knew exactly what I wanted to add to them so I did all the guitars myself. There was no need for anybody else. But I mean Steve Mann is a fantastic guitar and keyboard player. He is a very valuable musician in my life. So I have him for live performances and he can play the Slash solos or the John Norum or Adrian Vandenburg solos from My Years With UFO.
Amazingly Michael reveals that, ‘I made three albums from June 2023 until February 2024. I did My Years With UFO, Don’t Sell Your Soul and the third album was meant to be an acoustic/electric instrumental record but it turned out to be an album with vocals and everything. And that has become one of my favourites now, but it won’t be released until 2026.’
I was still stunned by there being three, but Michael calmly explains the thinking: ‘I did it for a reason. I wanted to sum it all up. I did the UFO thing to re-educate people. MSG is what I did in the 1980s onwards. Then there was the other experimental stuff. Anyway I wanted to have like a summit of the three things that I did in my life. That’s why I made a three album record deal with Earmusic.’
Another musician who seems to fit Michael’s self-expressive views and style is Glenn Hughes. Have the two ever thought of working together? ‘Yeah. I mean, Glenn and a good producer is just fantastic. A few times it was coming my way that – why not Glenn Hughes? I don’t really know why it never happened. I guess there was always something else happening for him and something else happening for me, at the same time. He has had that Deep Purple thing too. I have had UFO. But it was very close a few times.’ I think the combination of Michael and Glenn Hughes would make a really exciting pairing.
Looking ahead – is Eric Gronwall part of his future plans? ‘We are touring together in Japan early next year’, says Michael. ‘We are doing the Budokan and it’s already sold out, the whole thing. We are going to be using the musician who recorded My Years With UFO – Derek Sherinian, Barry Sparks and Brian Tichy – and Eric is going to be singing. Michael Voss is also going to be there, playing guitar and singing. So that’s when Eric is going to be back in the picture.’
‘I am hoping to release a live album of the Budokan with film too, because back when I did my first live album there, there was not that much film stuff going on.’
To me this seems very impressive forward planning but Michael feels that: ‘It’s not planned as such. Things just lead into the next thing. I only connect what makes sense. The new album is connected to My Years With UFO because of the lyrics to Don’t Sell Your Soul and my whole life philosophy. There could be lots of different things coming up next. The sensible thing for me is to release a live album of My Years With UFO at the Budokan.’
With Michael busier than ever I wonder if he can see himself ever slowing down. ‘Why?, he asks. ‘That’s all I do. I self-express. And that’s it, you know, until I die, of course. I don’t like cliches. I don’t like to to copy what other people do. It’s already done. I believe the world could be so much more colourful if more individuals would self-express and open up to something that nobody knows about because only in your head is what you know, and it won’t come out unless you open up and present it to the world. So, anyway, there’s no right and wrong. I always say to Uli Roth (also ex-Scorpions), ‘Nothing right, nothing wrong, just do your thing and stay strong’ and that’s it.’
In the final analysis the key for Michael is to keep self-expressing. He admits that in doing so, ‘You may come across with a style, like what maybe Uli Roth used to say to me: ‘Oh, you know, when I listen to Michael Schenker, it sounds like Michael Schenker music.’ That’s exactly right.’ And long may the legend that is Michael Schenker continue to make more of it!