Bad Boys – The McAuley Schenker Group Story 1987-1992, 4CD Box Set
McAuley Schenker Group – Bad Boys – The McAuley Schenker Group Story 1987-1992, 4CD Box Set
HNE Recordings
Release Date: 30/01/2026
Words: Jon Deaux
7/10
(These are four albums that are technically proficient and commercially calculated, yet historically irrelevant, and haunted by people who did everything right yet still lost.)
Take four albums nobody asked to be reminded about, stuff them with seventeen bonus tracks which, for some valid reasons, got left off; package the whole thing up with that sort of desperate archival completeness usually reserved for dead people, and there you have it: commerce masquerading as nostalgia, wrapped up with that particular kind of optimism which believes that somewhere someone is keeping a spreadsheet of every radio edit Michael Schenker ever approved.
When you were seventeen and trying to decide which Ramones album to shoplift, he was already playing with technical precision on the Scorpions’ “Lonesome Crow” album. Five years with UFO merely cemented him as a proper legend, the mad axeman who could make arena crowds weep and professional peers quit. MSG released four albums and two live records with Gary Barden on vocals; by 1987 the whole enterprise apparently needed a reboot.
Which is where Robin McAuley, of Grand Prix and Far Corporation, two bands you definitely don’t remember, comes in. The rechristening to McAuley Schenker Group – still MSG, because acronyms are forever and guitar heroes are allergic to clarity – represents Schenker’s most nakedly commercial phase. Not a sellout – that word implies shame – this is pure mercenary pragmatism. America had radio money, hair Metal was printing cash, and somewhere in Schenker’s brain the equation became simple. Keep the guitar pyrotechnics and add a singer who looks good in a music video.
“Perfect Timing” dropped in 1987, full to the hilt of all the production sheen and keyboard flourishes the era demanded. This was a time when Hard Rock decided it wanted to be both dangerous and dateable and settled for neither. ‘Gimme Your Love’ actually cracked the Hot 100, which is either a triumph or an indictment depending on whether you believe commercial success validates artistic choices. This album is unapologetically AOR, which makes ‘Love Is Not A Game’ and ‘Follow The Night’ both competent and then immediately forgettable, in the best possible way: It’s music designed to soundtrack montages, to fill spaces between Van Halen and Bon Jovi on the dial, and make people feel something but not challenge them to feel anything specific. If there is one drawback, it is that the two bonus edits – nominally shorter versions of songs already crafted for radio – add absolutely nothing except the ability to say “comprehensive”. If you need both the album version and the single edit of the same track, seek help.
By the time of 1989’s “Save Yourself”, the formula had calcified into ritual. Same expensive production, same professional competence, same Robin McAuley singing with the conviction of a man who genuinely believes the lyrics about destiny and shadows and bad boys and saving yourself from something he never quite specifies. “Anytime” tried for single status. “Bad Boys” swaggered appropriately. “This Is My Heart” did whatever adult contemporary anthems do. The album works because everybody involved was too talented to fail completely, but you can hear the exhaustion creeping in around the edges, the sound of people who’ve figured out the game but haven’t figured out how to stop playing.
The bonus tracks herein are, depending on one’s generosity, either diligent archival preservation or label desperation: an instrumental take on ‘There Has To Be Another Way’ (a title which begs the question of what, exactly, the way with vocals sounded equivalent to, anyway); several edits of ‘Save Yourself’, ‘This Is My Heart’, and ‘Anytime’, because apparently the market demanded both single edits AND radio edits, slight variations on the same calculated accessibility; and finally an acoustic ‘Bad Boys’, which nobody requested but everybody got anyway, because if something works plugged in, why not unplug it and see if nostalgia does the heavy lifting?
Released in 1991, “MSG” sounds nervous. Grunge is actively bulldozing Hair Metal into cultural irrelevance; Nirvana is three months away from rendering every polished Rock act obsolete. You can hear Schenker attempting to course-correct in real time without abandoning what got him here. ‘Never Ending Nightmare’ is about as dark as it sounds, a real reaching for heavier, more modern menace from guys who’d just spent four years honing their MTV-ready smiles. It works better than it probably should mainly because Schenker never forgot how to shred and McAuley could actually sing when given material with teeth. There’s desperation to the pivot, though – the sound of musicians reading the cultural room and realizing their moment has passed while they’re still standing in it.
At the time MTV’s Unplugged series had briefly made going acoustic both culturally acceptable and potentially profitable there was “Unplugged Live” from 1992. Every band with electrical instruments suddenly discovered the virtues of wooden ones, the purity of a stripped-down performance, and the marketing potential of reinvention. MSG recorded theirs in Los Angeles, meaning there’s still budget, still label support, and still some industry belief this could work.
Pulling from the McAuley Schenker catalog, the setlist features “Anytime,” “We Believe In Love,” “What Happens To Me,” the expected deep cuts performed with the gravity of greatest hits. But tellingly, crucially, the album includes three UFO classics: “Natural Thing,” “Doctor Doctor,” “Lights Out.” This is Schenker admitting what everyone in the room already knew-people were there for the old material, the stuff that mattered before the commercial pivot, the songs that built the legend before the legend tried to build a demographic.
McAuley sounds great unplugged, and Schenker’s acoustic playing still features the technical acuity that’s made him a legend. It’s somehow depressing, though, to hear him playing acoustic versions of songs that should be electric to an audience waiting for UFO material from 1975. It’s the sound of people doing their jobs exceptionally well while knowing the job itself has become irrelevant.
Six bonus tracks raid the Japanese-only mini-album “Nightmare: The Acoustic MSG”, because nothing says comprehensive like including the regional exclusives nobody outside Tokyo knew existed. There’s “Only You Can Rock Me” from the UFO catalogue, acoustic versions of album tracks already performed acoustically on the main album. Which raises profound questions about who at the label thought contemporary hit radio was hungry for stripped-down versions of songs about nightmares. The answer, it turns out, was nobody. But they made it anyway, because that’s what professionals do. They made the thing, they finished the assignment and they fulfilled the contract even when the contract had ceased to make sense. That’s indeed what this box set is: a monument to competence in service of irrelevance.
Michael Schenker never lost his ability to make a guitar scream. Robin McAuley really could sing, not just carry a tune but perform with real power and conviction. Songs were professionally constructed, engineered to precision and performed with the kind of technical skill which separates the amateurs from the career musicians. None of that mattered.
Five years of MSG: that talented bunch trying to split the difference between artistic credibility and commercial success, finding the middle ground was quicksand. Too polished for the purists, too guitar-focused for the pop audience and too melodic for the grunge revolution which made melody itself suspect. They threaded the needle and found there was nothing on the other side of the thread. Not that any of those albums actually flopped commercially – plenty of great music dies commercially. “Perfect Timing” got radio play. “Gimme Your Love” charted. Tours happened, people came out, and the machine just kept humming along. It’s just nobody remembers. No cultural footprint was left behind – no legacy, no instance in which anyone would speak of these records as definitional to anything other than the very moment in time when hard rock couldn’t quite seem to decide whether it wanted to be dangerous or dateable and it wound up being neither.
If you were around in 1987, if you remember hearing ‘Gimme Your Love’ on the radio during Reagan’s second term, if you are the sort of person who thinks guitar solos are the highest attainment of humanity and MTV’s brief flirtation with actual music videos was the apex of civilisation, then this will feel important. You’ll hear these songs and remember where you were, who you were, what you thought the future would sound like. You will appreciate completeness, archival diligence, and the fact that someone cared enough to preserve it all. Which is to say, to anyone else, this is archaeology – a painstaking record of a very specific type of forgotten aspiration, preserved in that sort of detail usually reserved for things which mattered. Sad, in its own way: the difference between effort at preservation and the cultural indifference which made the preservation necessary.
Michael Schenker still plays and is still technically brilliant and Robin McAuley still performs. The music business keeps churning out products for a public which may or may not exist. Out there in the ether sit four albums from 1987 to 1992, collected in a box set with bonus tracks, remastered and on sale, waiting for the seventeen people who remember to justify the expense of remembering. That’s the business: make the thing, do it well, watch it disappear and hope somebody out there cares enough to dig it up later.
McAuley Schenker Group have done their work. They made professional, competent, sometimes inspired hard rock at a time when hard rock was learning to die. They deserved better than getting forgotten, but deserving better and getting better are two completely different industries.
TRACKLISTING:
DISC ONE
PERFECT TIMING (1987)
1 Gimme’ Your Love
2 Here Today – Gone Tomorrow
3 Don’t Stop Me Now
4 No Time For Losers
5 Follow The Night
6 Get Out
7 Love Is Not A Game
8 Time
9 I Don’t Wanna Lose
10 Rock ’Til You’re Crazy
BONUS TRACKS
11 Gimme’ Your Love (Edit)
12 Follow the Night (Edit)
DISC TWO
SAVE YOURSELF (1989)
1 Save Yourself
2 Bad Boys
3 Anytime
4 Get Down to Bizness
5 Shadow of The Night
6 What We Need
7 I Am Your Radio
8 This Is My Heart
9 Destiny
10 Take Me Back
BONUS TRACKS
11 There Has To Be Another Way (Instrumental)
12 Save Yourself (Single Edit)
13 Vicious (B-Side)
14 This Is My Heart (Edit)
15 Anytime (Single Edit)
16 Anytime (Radio-Edit)
17 Bad Boys (Acoustic Version)
DISC THREE
MSG (1991)
1 Eve
2 Paradise
3 When I’m Gone
4 This Broken Heart
5 We Believe In Love
6 Crazy
7 Invincible
8 What Happens To Me
9 Lonely Nights
10 This Night Is Gonna Last Forever
11 Nightmare
BONUS TRACKS
12 When I’m Gone (Single Edit)
13 Nightmare (Single Edit)
14 When I’m Gone (Acoustic Version)
15 When I’m Gone (Alternative CHR Version)
16 Nightmare (AOR Version)
DISC FOUR
UNPLUGGED LIVE (1992)
1 Anytime
2 We Believe In Love
3 What Happens to Me
4 Bad Boys
5 Gimme Your Love
6 Natural Thing
7 Perrier
8 When I’m Gone
9 Nightmare
10 Doctor Doctor
11 Lights Out
BONUS TRACKS
12 Only You Can Rock Me
13 Anytime (Acoustic Version)
14 What Happens To Me (Acoustic Version)
15 We Believe In Love (Acoustic Version)
16 Never Ending Nightmare (Acoustic CHR Version)
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Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Jon Deaux and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.