Paul Raymond (73) – UFO – was born November 16, 1945 in Hertfordshire, England. At the young age of 17 he was determined to make career in the music business by putting an ad in the music papers and going to all the pubs that had live jazz on. He began sitting in on a few numbers with the older, more experienced musicians.
Raymond began his musical career in January 1964 as a jazz musician. His first professional group was also in 1964, as a member of Tony Jackson and The Vibrations, a group formed by Tony Jackson of The Searchers when he left in mid 1964.
He later joined Plastic Penny in 1967 as their keyboardist/vocalist. Plastic Penny was formed with Brian Keith on vocals, Nigel Olson on drums, Mick Graham on guitar and Tony Murray on bass. They released two albums, ‘Two Sides Of A Penny’and ‘Currency’ and had a top-ten hit with a cover of the ‘Box-Tops’ song ‘Everything I Am’ before splitting up in late 1968 after appearing at the Isle of Wright Festival in August of that year.
Then, after he heard that Christine Perfect was leaving Chicken Shack to marry John McVie and later join Fleetwood Mac, Paul answered their ad in Melody Maker, and auditioned for her place. Nigel Olson was kind enough to help manhandle the Hammond organ to the audition and Paul was subsequently offered the job.
After recording the album ‘100 Ton Chicken’ it was decided that the band should take a new direction, but the resulting album ‘Accept’ was not successful and the band was dropped by their record company Blue Horizon. Paul left Chicken Shack and both Andy Silvester and Dave Bidwell followed on shortly afterwards to join him in blues band Savoy Brown. They were filling the gap that was left by former members Dave Peverett, Tony Stevens and Roger Earl who had deserted guitarist Kim Simmonds to form the band Foghat. His tenor with Savoy Brown lasted from 1971-1976 encompassing 6 albums, including ‘Street Corner Talking’Â &Â ‘Hellbound Train’. During this period of relentless tour schedules and various line-up changes the band enjoyed major success in the USA, breaking into the Billboard Top 100 and playing prestigious venues such as Madison Square Garden.
He also recorded with the former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Danny Kirwan, appearing on his first album, Second Chapter, released in 1975.
Raymond was recruited by UFO in 1976 to replace their first keyboardist, Danny Peyronel.
“Then, one magical night in Saginaw, Michigan, during a tour of the States, I met Pete Way!” “We were playing on the same bill with UFO, who were opening the show. Nazareth were headlining and Savoy Brown were somewhere in the middle. Danny Peyronel was playing the keyboards for UFO back then, and after the show, Pete and I got talking. He said that they were looking to make a change in the line-up because Danny didn’t play guitar and they needed someone to play rhythm guitar as well as keyboards to enhance their live sound, so he asked me if I would be interested in joining the band.”
Raymond played on the classic albums Lights Out, Obsession, and No Place to Run, and on the live album Strangers In The Night. He wrote songs for UFO, but because of a previous publishing deal, was not credited for these songs until years later. When Michael Schenker left UFO, Raymond joined Schenker’s new band, MSG, in 1981 and 2 years later later joined UFO bassist Pete Way‘s band, Waysted, in 1983.
But two years later, following a non music-related altercation with Michael Schenker, Paul found himself ‘surplus to requirements’ and set out to look for other suitable musical collaborations. He spent a year working on a project with vocalist Terry Reid, using his own finances to help getting the project off the ground. But unfortunately there was no interest from any of the record companies.
Coincidentally during that same time frame, Pete Way who had also parted ways with U.F.O. had secured a record deal with Chrysalis for his solo project, Waysted. He approached Paul to see if he was interested in joining him.
“It was a really tough decision for me to make; whether to keep going with Terry because at that time he still didn’t have a record deal, or go back and play with Pete again. Well the gut feeling at the time was that I should go with Pete. So I joined Waysted in 1983, but I’m not sure if I made the right decision.“
Sometime in 1984, after the demise of Waysted, Paul was approached by Phil Mogg to see if he was interested in re-joining U.F.O. as he wanted to put the band back on the road. With the backing of staging company Light and Sound Design, who provided the PA system and an impressively large lighting rig, the band hit the road with new material and a video recording was released of the show in Oxford, UK entitled ‘Misdemeanor’. This sparked renewed interest from U.F.O.’s original record company, Chrysalis and the resulting album also called ‘Misdemeanor’ was released in 1985. It was a complete departure from U.F.O.’s signature guitar-oriented sound, as midi keyboards and sequencers were the order of the day in the mid ’80s. The band toured for a couple of years but all was not well. The ongoing, well documented problems of over-indulgence in the band and lack of communication was causing relationships to get strained. Mid-way through a particularly gruelling US tour, Paul couldn’t take it anymore, he just snapped, and bailed out.
After moving to Japan with his Japanese girlfriend and starting a new life out there, he put together his own band the Paul Raymond Project initially comprised of ex-Angel vocalist Frank DiMino, bassist Masayoshi Yamashita (ex-Loudness) and guitarist Reibun Ohtani (ex-Marino). They recorded the 6-track mini-album ‘Under The Rising Sun’ in 1989 for Teichi Ku Records.
The obvious geographical distance between Frank DiMino and Paul unfortunately meant that this line-up was not suitable in the long-term and eventually Paul established a touring band in 1991 with singer Aki Fukasawa and went on to record some more songs which eventually became the album ‘Raw Material’.
In 1993 Paul once again got the call to come back to U.F.O., this time for a reunion of the classic line-up. Michael Schenker had come back and wanted to reform the band. Japanese record company Zero Corporation offered them a recording contract and the result was the album ‘Walk On Water’, produced again by Ron Nevison in California. Initially the album was only released in Japan in 1995, but was subsequently repackaged and re-released worldwide in 1997. Paul did not contribute to the song writing on this album due to the death of his father in London at the time the album was being written. And by the time he returned the recording had already started.
Unfortunately, things again unravelled, this time at the Nakano Sun Plaza in Tokyo as Michael stormed off stage in the middle of a show in front of 3,000 people. The concert was cancelled and the promoter was livid. Paul decided it was the end of the road for him too.
“It was a real low point.” “I’ve never been able to find out the reason why he did what he did. It was so embarrassing, Pete & I had to go out on stage and apologise to the audience. The promoter had to refund all the ticket money and that was the end of it for me, I just didn’t want to do it anymore, it was unforgivable and unprofessional and it did the band’s reputation such a damage.”
All in all Raymond worked with Phil Mogg, Andy Parker, and on occasion with Schenker and Way, in UFO from 1976–1980, 1984–1986, 1993–1998 and 2003–2019. In in-between time Raymond frequently toured with his own group, Paul Raymond Project.
After three successful US-tours between 2016 and 2017, numerous tours in Europe and the release of their covers album “The Salentino Cuts” U.F.O. remained inactive during all of 2018. This was the perfect time for Paul to work on his very own covers album “HIGH DEFINITION”. During the working process for “The Salentino Cuts” Paul became really inspired to put a new spin on some songs that he always liked or thought it would be interesting to record them in a rock’n’roll way. Of course he had more ideas or even different visions than his U.F.O. band mates so with the help of his PRP partners in crime, Andy Simmons and Dave Burn, he decided to make his own covers album named “High Definition”, which he was so very proud of. It was released on February 15th, 2019.
Paul Raymond unexpectedly died of a heart attack at 73 on April 13, 2019. At the time of his death, UFO had just completed the first leg of what they referred to as their final world tour, dubbed “Last Orders: 50th Anniversary”. For the remainder of the tour, Raymond was replaced by Neil Carter, who had also replaced him from 1980 to 1983.
