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The tall skinny kid
More of the Derek Lawrence recollections of the days gone by. Some of it overlaps with what you may have seen on these pages previously, but it never hurts to do it again.
Read more »Next thing you know, there’s Mark 1
Derek Lawrence recalls his association with Joe Meek, meeting Ritchie Blackmore, and a new band coalescing around them.
Read more »From Chris Curtis to Hush
A pretty well put together 20-minute documentary about the formation of Deep Purple. For whatever reason, the channel that published it does not allow us to post it here, so you’ll have to head to YouTube to watch it.
Read more »The Bombshell
Nick Simper continues working on his autobiography, which has now reached the summer of 1969 and his dismissal from Deep Purple. June ended with a show at London’s prestigious Revolution Club, followed by a BBC recording session for the David Symonds radio show. On July 1st I again met Rod Freeman, who was now manager […]
Read more »Get away with and get paid for it
Louder Sound reprints an old Classic Rock feature on the formation of Mark 2, from Chris Curtis to Fireball. This was originally penned by late Pete Makowski for the Re-Machined: A Tribute To Deep Purple special issue. It all began when Chris Curtis, the former drummer/singer with Merseybeat band The Searchers, approached London businessman Tony […]
Read more »From The Renegades to Nasty Habits
It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine has a long(ish) interview with Nick Simper, published back in June 2022. It covers pretty much all of his career, from the early 1960s to this day. Your career is really profound and it would be simply impossible to touch on everything, but let’s start at the beginning. How do you […]
Read more »Such a strange vibration
Yahoo! Entertainment (of all places) has a short piece about Deep Purple’s appearance at the legendary Fillmore club in San Francisco in November 1968. The nascent British rock outfit had made their American album chart debut in September of that year with their first LP, Shades Of Deep Purple. The record had reached its peak […]
Read more »Decent bass players are hard to find
A rare beast in this universe — an interview with Nick Simper, courtesy of Karen Beishuizen for the the RingSide Report. KB: You played bass on the first 3 Deep Purple albums and then left: what happened? To say exactly what went wrong could be a book in itself! The whole episode is a very […]
Read more »Spotting a bargain
British tabloid Daily Mail has published a curious document — it is a price list, dated January 1969, from a London-based booking agent to hire various bands to play a function at The Queen’s College in Oxford. The most expensive band on the list is Fleetwood Mac at £500 a night, which the paper claims […]
Read more »Bob and Ray, and a Danish kennel
Paicey continues his Tales from the bar with a new batch of tall tales of one nascent band that eventually became known as Deep Purple.
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Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing