UFO keyboardist Paul Raymond has issued the following update:

"Firstly, I must apologize for not updating my site, www.paulraymond.info, for so long. I intended to do it after the Russian Tour, but that tour proved to be so tiring, I came home and kinda shut down for a while! Then Christmas came along and I also got wrapped up in recording my newest PRP offering (but more of that later).

Anyway, now we’ve put the festive season behind us, we can start looking ahead to the upcoming US tour in April and May. We haven’t toured in the states since 2005 as I recall, which is a real shame - I’m hoping we have not been forgotten.

Since that time we lost Jason Bonham to FOREIGNER (and LED ZEPPELIN) but we’ve got the original and inimitable Mr. Andy Parker back, and hopefully (although nothing is for definite yet) Pete will be able to join us this time. So there we are, almost a full complement of the classic line-up, raring to celebrate the milestone 30th Anniversary of the now legendary Strangers In The Night. I’m really excited about coming back, it’s been way too long.

I mentioned earlier getting involved in recording my new solo CD. It has, in all honesty, been a bit of a rocky road! Since Man On A Mission I’ve updated all my recording equipment, and let’s just say I pushed it to its limits and beyond. My old monitors were not quite up to the job and I found that they were not giving an accurate reflection of what was being recorded and so, frustratingly, after getting some new monitors and hearing what was really going on, I’ve had to painstakingly replace a lot of the original material as I was not happy with the quality of my first endeavor. It has been terribly time consuming, but in hindsight it also gave me a chance to re-evaluate some of the content, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all!  Every cloud has a silver lining huh? The multi-talented Andy Simmons has been collaborating with me on the project. Not only is he a fantastic guitarist and handy on the old keyboards he is also a brilliant artist - very much in demand, (Ronnie Wood, eat your heart out!) so much so that it’s difficult to find time to work together. We’ll get there in the end, with a bit of luck before the US tour kicks off.

I am looking forward to visiting Japan again after my five year ban comes to an end at the beginning of April. Hopefully, it will mean that UFO will at last be able to play a few shows in the Far East and I can at meet up with old friends again.??Andy Parker has written about our Russian tour on his website recently, and I totally agree with him that it was like touring nowhere else in the world! Russia is such a vast country, a tour bus would have taken far too long to get us from city to city, so we had to endure 4 AM alarm calls to get on a succession of twenty hour train journeys and flights that were all routed via Moscow, consequently there was very little time to rest. The promoters and the audiences were outstanding and made up for all the exhaustion, so that was the most important thing to us. Hey, who would have thought 'Belladonna' from No Heavy Petting could have been so popular over there! UFO ballads have been one of our strengths over the years, but this one came right out of left-field!??Our final gig of the tour was an indoor rock festival entitled Hard Rock Hell. It was situated at Butlins, Minehead - not the first venue that would spring to mind for a gathering of metalheads, but it actually turned out to be a great gig! We went down really well, despite the fact that the fans had been rocking for two days solid by the time we hit the stage late on Saturday night, and initially seemed to have run out of steam. However a few songs into the set their spirit rallied and when we launched into 'Only You Can Rock Me' the whole energy of the audience shifted up about three gears and rocked along with us. A journalist from Classic Rock magazine decreed that we were the best band of the weekend, which was praise indeed.

I must also back-track a bit, to a couple of shows we did at the end of June, beginning of July. We played a great little venue in Southampton called The Brook. The atmosphere was fantastic; reminding me of some of the early gigs we played back in the 70’s. It was packed to capacity, all the fans sang along to every song and the band responded directly to the energy of the place and the audience, it was a really enjoyable show to play. People of Southampton - hats off to you, you rock! ??The next day we were headlining an open air festival in Chepstow, just over the Severn Bridge in Wales. Anyone who lives in the UK will know that the summer of 2007 was the wettest on record, and certainly I cannot remember a summer like it. Wales is, at the best of times, an area of the UK that gets more than its fair share of rain - so, it came to pass that the 2007 Chepstow Castle Rock Festival was a complete mud bath! I do not know how the fans stayed out in that weather to see us, they must have been drenched to the skin (or too drunk to notice!) but a hardy few still braved the elements and cheered us on - you guys deserve a medal! The mud was so bad in the backstage area that I couldn’t get from our dressing room to the stage without going ankle deep in it, so eventually I opted to go on in my Farmer Giles wellies and Vinnie chose to custom-build some water proofing for his shoes, (see the photos below). Messrs. Mogg & Way were on top form that day, keeping the audience amused with their witty observations regarding the sartorial qualities of Pete’s zebra-print pants - a memorable day indeed!

Well, I think that just about brings us back up to date. All that remains for me to do now is to wish all our fans out there a (belated) Happy New Year and hope to see you on the road sometime in 2008. Keep checking the website for new dates throughout the year.

?God bless ya,

?Paul"