At the age of 16, guitarist Michael Schenker ended up playing on the Scorpions‘ 1972 debut album Lonesome Crow. Within two years, Schenker was recruited by the British band UFO as a replacement for Mick Bolton and ended up writing and co-writing a majority of the tracks on the band’s third album, Phenomenon, released in 1974.
Schenker composed the band’s first charting hit from the album, “Doctor Doctor, with founding UFO lead vocalist Phil Mogg.
In a 2016 interview, Schenker recalls composing the song and its iconic riff after first discovering the layered sounds of an Echoplex. “I just made up a chord progression … the loop goes round …. harmony … and so on, and I went ‘Wow, this is great,” recalled Schenker. “It sounded so good. I recorded it on this cheap tape recorder I had.”
He then played the song for Mogg while they were on an escalator in the Underground in London, and the two worked out the melody and the rest of the song around Schenker’s guitar parts.
“We have done that with quite a few songs, in general, ” said Schenker, adding that the band’s 1977 song “Try Me” was created similarly, with Mogg adding to his instrumental.
I’m not sure how well people took that song [‘Doctor Doctor’] in the beginning, and I didn’t focus on it, either,” said Schenker. “We were playing gigs. I wasn’t there for ‘Doctor Doctor.” I was there because I enjoyed playing lead guitar. … Once it made it on the live album [‘Stangers in the Night,’ 1979] that’s when it took off.”
Describing a toxic, near-deadly relationship, “Doctor Doctor” became the first Top 40 hit for UFO, peaking at No. 35 in the UK when it was released on the band’s 1979 double live album Strangers in the Night.
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