Too wild even for Ozzy Osbourne, UFO’s Pete Way, who has died aged 69, set the bar for rock excess – but also for what the bass guitarist could bring to a hard rock band
Pete Way was made for the 1970s, when to be a rock musician was as much a chance to live exactly as one wanted, as a means to make
music. As Ozzy Osbourne put it, unnervingly: “They call me a madman, but compared to Pete Way I’m outta my league; he’s fucking mental!”
That attitude made Way, who has died aged 69 following a serious accident, something of a hero to a younger generation of musicians, too, the ones who wanted to replicate the excesses of their forefathers. “Nikki Sixx [of Mötley Crüe] told me that I was his hero and how he used to watch me do this and that, and would copy me,” Way wrote in his autobiography, A Fast Ride Out of Here: Confessions of Rock’s Most Dangerous Man. “It was an odd feeling for me, being viewed as a kind of elder statesman and also to see Nikki get up to pretty much all of the things that I had done what seemed almost a lifetime earlier with
UFO. I really am talking about as much excess,
Women, booze and drugs as one can possibly imagine.”