“I mainly do it for the glamour. I mean, I’ve just spent my afternoon in Belfast shopping for socks because I’ve run out of clean ones. It’s why we continue to do it after all these years – the glamour.”

Phil Mogg is talking about touring, of course, and despite the tone of knowing irony that colours much of his conversation, his thoughts on hitting the road with a rock band should be given due attention, because he’s done as much of it as anyone else alive.

Mogg’s band, UFO, have been gigging more or less constantly since their formation in 1969 as a proggy space rock ensemble. Their early output proved palatable only to the Japanese and a handful of European dopehead blues fans, until the addition of a quixotic German guitarist to the line-up brought a more focused, melodic hard rock sound and a passport into the ranks of bands able to fill arenas, even before the UK had arenas.

That guitarist was Michael Schenker, arguably the greatest hard rock player of his generation, and it was his alcohol-fuelled bust-ups, walkouts and Teutonic hissy fits - directed mainly at Mogg if rumours are to be believed – that created the nervous energy necessary to produce the five studio albums and unsurpassed live album that have guaranteed UFO’s place in the pantheon of classic British rock bands. From 1974 to 1979 no-one could touch them until, in a typically Byronesque move, Schenker departed at the height of the band’s fame and moment of greatest musical achievement, the live double album Strangers In The Night.

“Yeah – it all kind of ground to a halt in the mid 80s,” says Mogg. “We were doing stuff but not doing stuff if you know what I mean. That was a bit of a dull patch…”

Such are the rumours of animosity between Schenker and the founder members of the band, Mogg, drummer Andy Parker and bassist Pete Way (who is missing from the current tour through illness) that mentioning the S-word to the vocalist might have been a slightly nervy moment.

“Do you know what? There’s never been a problem with that,” he insists. “Y’know, Michael is Michael and that’s it. 80 percent of the time he’s a good lad but for the other 20 percent he’s very very bad. He’s his own man and he does what he wants, how he wants, when he wants.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “I mean, he’s a fucking great player…”

So, why did the Strangers… album cause such a rift?
“It was suggested we do a live album,” says Mogg with a slightly resigned air. “I wasn’t all that keen, to be honest and Michael was ‘I’m not sure about zis’, but everyone was telling us it’d be great. So we did two or three nights in Chicago, where we had a strong following, in a big auditorium, and one night I think in Cleveland. And we got it done but that was kinda the beginning of the end. Michael went off with the words ‘poor, poor ‘Rock Bottom’’.” Rock Bottom is the album’s crowning moment of virtuoso axe work, and a dispute over patches and overdubs between the guitarist and big-time producer Ron Nevison, (“Ron would be there saying, ‘shut the fuck up, it’s my fucking album’”) led to a schism that would only be partially healed by a reunion in the mid-90s. And the early 2000s. And…well, watch this space.

A new album, the band’s 20th studio title, has brought UFO back on the road with a line-up that includes another fantastic guitarist and long-time collaborator Vinnie Moore and Paul Raymond, the keyboardist / guitarist who joined the band during their glory years. But 20 albums? Here we are in the digital age and Mogg recorded his first vocal on a 4-track. Isn’t he even a bit jaded?

“Is it 20? God I don’t know,” and he seems quite genuine in this. “The only thing to do is ask the font of all wisdom Andrew Maynard Parker. I asked him what 5 degrees centigrade was in Fahrenheit the other day and got ‘oh you divide this by ten then subtract…’ If you ever want to know anything about mixing cement or anything, he’s your man.

“No, seriously, we’ve been at it a long time but - I don’t know if it’s down to some sort of brain dysfunction - we went into this new album very fresh and really gung-ho for it.”

All the tracks on the album, The Visitor, were written with live performance in mind. So how many are the band doing on this tour? “Actually, we’re only doing a couple of them, partly because it gets harder to know what to leave out,” says Mogg “Also because it means if we play the old favourites I don’t have to write the lyrics down on a piece of paper – I already know ‘em. Well, most of ‘em.”

Ah, those self-depreciating jokes about aging keep coming, but Mogg knows that UFO’s brand of tuneful hard riffing is more relevant to young bands today than it has been for decades. He describes UFO and other British bands of the same vintage as having emerged from “under the cloud of dust kicked up by Led Zeppelin” so which were the other bands that most impressed him as a young tyro on tour?

“Well we were – how to put it – quite big headed back then, and our attitude to other bands was ‘well, you can all fuck off, ‘cos we’re the best band in town’, which I don’t think is a bad attitude to have when you’re in your twenties.

“I loved different bands for different reasons. On our very first tour of America we mucked around with lots of bands, opening and headlining depending on which area we were in. We did a lot of shows with Rush for some reason, who are about as far opposite from us as you can get, but on that tour Cheap Trick came in, then Judas Priest came over from the UK, then they went home and we joined up with AC/DC. I think of the bands we played with then, I liked AC/DC a lot – that rough edge and attitude.

“Oh, I’ll tell you who was one of the really cool bands we worked with, though,” he adds, suddenly animated, “was the Doobie Brothers. Really, really cool band… Having said that, most of the bands playing stadiums at that time were hot anyway, so we tend to remember gigs rather than the bands we played with. When Bill Graham was running the Fillmore East and Fillmore West he used to do this thing, the Day on the Green at Oakland Stadium, and that was just a knockout gig, Frampton headlining, baking hot day…”

Listen to that: Zeppelin, Frampton, AC/DC – class A namedropping from a class A band. You won’t hear reminiscing of that quality from The Horrors, no sir, not for forty years at least. Enjoy it while you can, rock fans.

UFO play the Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 24 June 2009.
For tickets call 08444 772 000