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F*** off rock’n’roll
Here is what (from the memory that is hazy) looks like the Abandon EPK, with Ian Gillan and Jon Lord touting the latest at the time offering from the band.
Thanks to Igor’s Rock Universe for posting this and to Uwe for bringing it to your attention.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
I would say this with great relctance that during the 9/11 awful attack there is a scene that resonated with people of a man jumping out of the tall world trade centre building and every time I look at this album cover I remember this scene.
October 13th, 2025 at 04:42I like the album because as Ian Gillan says it’s adventures and out of there comfort zone.
In fact I love all DP albums because they offer something different every time.
Peace ✌️
I just wanted Karin to see her Ian in a more wholesome – some would say: slightly chubby – version.
I ask for no reward. 🤗
More seriously and this has been bugging me for a long time: In many of his later interviews, Jon Lord showed a charming, but distinct stammer. Nothing drastic (like Bernie Tormé for instance), but he would get tangled up in words and their first syllables quite often. That’s not evident on the Abandon interview snippets above and it wasn’t there either when he was still a spokesman of the band in Mk I and II days. But on post-millennium interview appearances by him for the Machine Head and Phoenix Rising DVDs, it is quite apparent. Anybody else notice this or is my hearing playing tricks on me? I’ve never read anything that he had stammer issues as a child.
Hearing him stammer-free on the Abandon promo interviews somehow reminded of that change in his speech pattern.
October 13th, 2025 at 05:21Nice to see Jon Lord as always. Ian Gillan on that ‘longboat’, who is steering that, they are all over the shop. How can you invade a country like that? Maybe they need a lesson or two off some Vikings. Cheers.
October 13th, 2025 at 07:15I love this album, at the top of my list with Morse. I don’t understand why they’ve never performed these songs on stage.
October 13th, 2025 at 07:45@2
“I just wanted Karin to see her Ian in a more wholesome – some would say: slightly chubby – version.
I ask for no reward. 🤗”
– 😂😂😂
Awww Uwe, here is a reward for you: 🤗🏆
I do have to tell you though that I already had seen that! Because it appeared at Ian’s fb Saturday the 11th of October:
But I’m immensely happy you always look out for me and my well-being…😄
And now I will tell you this big secret: I don’t care what Ian looks like! As long as he sings like he does, I’m a happy girlie!
On a serious note alright:
“Jon Lord showed a charming, but distinct stammer“
– I’ve heard the same. Often when a person is under pressure health-wise, old phenomenons like stammering, can reappear. But it could also be a sign of Jon Lord being in severe distress had he not being a stammer beforehand.
He died of cancer in the pancreas, as far as I remember, and that awful disease starts years before it’s detected, and because there are no symptoms, it’s only found out by chance.
Ohh man how I miss Jon Lord!
October 13th, 2025 at 12:43Not that I’m not happy with his replacement, Don Airey, because he is certainly very nice, but Jon Lord was a ‘founding father’ of Purple, and he had that statesmanlike appearance, like you also mentioned once Uwe.
@3
“Ian Gillan on that ‘longboat’, who is steering that, they are all over the shop. How can you invade a country like that? Maybe they need a lesson or two off some Vikings.”
October 13th, 2025 at 12:44– 😅😅 MacGregor I would happily have volunteered to be steering that!
Otoh: they might all have ended up in the water! 😄
On the tour immediately after the album’s release, they played quite a bit of it, AndreA. I remember Any Fule Know That, Bludsucker, Seventh Heaven, Watching The Sky, Fingers To The Bone, Don’t Make Me Happy and ‘69. There might have been even more.
It was a darker, more brooding album than Purpendicular, not as versatile either, but it was a good one, a lot of the songs had real depth. Quite proggy too.
I rate the sleeve art as the best one of the Morse era. Never had the 9/11 association, to me it looked like a Rush cover and for the most part Rush always had great covers.
October 13th, 2025 at 12:45Time for a revisit- haven’t listened to this one in awhile.
October 13th, 2025 at 13:55I know I like -Fingers to the Bone!
@ 7 Uwe Hornung
It’s normal that they played that songs: it was the promotional tour…
October 13th, 2025 at 14:16and it’s normal that the album cover had nothing to do with 9/11 because the album simply came out much earlier..
@ 4 & 7 Almost Human too, as can be seen and heard on Total Abandon. I think I remember hearing a bootleg of Evil Louie as well… So quite a big share of the Abandon-Songs were played live. Would certainly be great to see some of them getting dusted off and put it the set again, like Anya got revirtualized on the past tours.
October 13th, 2025 at 15:20@ 2 Uwe Hornung
I noticed that J.L. had a stutter many years ago in his interviews. It doesn’t seem new to hear it nowadays. But maybe he was just emotional. I miss J.L. so much: he did a great job also in Abandon. ♡
October 13th, 2025 at 16:00Well, Gillan is not your ordinary rock star. If you know what I mean. But Jon Lord is a different breed intellectually. Sorely missed.
October 13th, 2025 at 16:27They did play Evil Louie indeed. I was there and own the bootleg to prove it as well.
DP never played more songs from a new album than they did from Abandon.
October 13th, 2025 at 20:03Such a great record! If they would only re-release this on vinyl! And Bananas too! Can’t even get that on Spotify!
October 13th, 2025 at 21:05I keep hoping some day this one will be release on vinyl, along with Bananas. I know Bananas is out there, for 3 or 400 € if you are willing to pay (which of course I can’t). But I have never in live seen the Abandon on vinyl. Don’t think there’s any. And I don’t have a clue why there is not.
October 13th, 2025 at 21:38I do remember the set lists that contained a very good amount of new material, pre 2000’s when Jon Lord was still in the band. Should we blame poor ole Don Airey. He likes to improvise and with Steve Morse also, the remaining members probably thought, hmmmmmmmmmmmm, too much chance of too much improv, let’s get back to the MKII material and keep it all in nutshell. Mind you, it would never get right back to that era, now there was plenty of off the cuff playing going on. Trying to find a balance of sorts no doubt. Not as confident in the songs of the new material perhaps, who can tell. Cheers.
October 14th, 2025 at 01:53Big Ian had an epiphany (he said as much in an interview) when DP toured that double package with Lynyrd Skynyrd around Bananas. LS essentially only played a greatest hits set, i.e. a reworking of their legendary double live album One For/From The Road, and on some nights DP found it hard going with their new Bananas material following the well-known set of LS. It was around then that Karin’s honey-bunch pushed for a change in set policy.
Not a choice I would have personally made, I prefer to hear as much as possible from the newest album, but Purple want to cater to their more casual fans, knowing that the fervent believers will be at their gigs in any case.
October 14th, 2025 at 12:28I missed this interview, but there are some really interesting insights:
Gillan and Lord really liked Abandon, they were really enthusiastic about it, and this is a litmus test of the quality of this album.
In Abandon, Purple with Morse reached their compositional peak, a more mature and linear album than Purplendicular, without a single bad song (like the following ones), and as Gillan says there is some fucking hard rock (modern thanks to Steve) but also a lot of groove, and funky and prog (but different from the self-indulgent stuff of the following albums).
Abandon was creative, uniform, powerful, experimental, melodic, they all played masterfully, Morse and Lord gave 1000%, but also Paice was monstrous, and Gillan found the right vocal lines, and as he said “he recorded Bloodsucker to prove he could still scream”
and BigIan also demonstrated it on stage on the many songs from Abandon that the band performed on tour, proving that it was an album that the band really liked, and they were songs that captured the audience.
Bananas was in some ways a further evolution from Abandon, but it inaugurated the series of albums with Steve, where together with great songs there were also weak/anonymous/repetitive songs of other songs from Mark VII and VIII.
Ultimately Abandon is Deep Purple’s last masterpiece, and the only masterpiece written with Steve Morse, an album that has been too underrated as the years have gone by.
October 16th, 2025 at 21:18for me Purpendicular is the “only masterpiece written with Steve Morse” , a true milestone and the best with Morse ever
October 17th, 2025 at 10:10Always funny how opinions / taste differ …
I just read the Fire in the Basement thread where so many people expressed their contrary opinions on this album.
Now, Gerd claims that Abandon is a masterpiece.
Well, for me S&M is BY FAR the worst album DP ever recorded, followed by Abandon.
Hardly a song on Abandon really touches me. What I especially dislike is the senseless aggression which shines through on quite a few songs as if Purple wanted to copy a bit of the metal trends of the time. As well, Abandon to me is the start of the shuffle boredom (Almost Human …) which became nearly a trademark of later Morse era albums.
Fine that there are so many different tastes :-).
The Abandon tour was a rather long one with quite a few legs so I saw quite a few shows over the months. In the beginning they still played enthusiastically but you could feel in the later shows how step by step ennui crept in. In the end they were just going through the motions ; Steve’s solos were regularly turning into noise.
October 17th, 2025 at 16:19Luckily, this improved later on, so it may be assumed that Don really gave them some energy back as much as I miss Jon Lord …
Abandon wasn’t as fresh and daring as Purpendicular, but I never thought it a bad album. It was a very focused album, a lot of hard work was put into it (in a good way, not labored) and I like especially the more complex numbers in it. And Fingers To The Bone was a real Ohrwurm, you don’t have that all that often with DP.
Slaves & Masters is to me not so much a DP album as one on which four Mk II members plus JLT are featured – it doesn’t really compare to anything else they have done, but it has its own merits.
October 17th, 2025 at 18:27Ablandone, sorry, surely that has been used well before today. Not a good album to my ears is the second Morse era release. The fact that they attempted to reprise Bloodsucker say it all. I will never listen to that, 28 years after the fact, comical. Gillan’s screams were well and truly gone before the late 90’s. Not to worry. Indeed it was an attempt to be heavier for whatever reason. It is a fine line isn’t it? Cheers.
October 17th, 2025 at 21:30#20 Christof:
My God, if Abandon is “mindless aggression,” then what would Metallica, Slayer, Testament, Carcass, Cradle of Filth, Mesuggah, Napalm Death, Sepultura, Impaled Nazarene, Cannibal Corpse, and hundreds of other bands ranging from Thrash to Black to Death metal be?
One thing you can be sure of, from 1993 to 2022 Deep Purple have not copied anyone (except themselves)
October 17th, 2025 at 23:19#22 MacGregor:
Mac, it’s nice to have different ears, I personally consider the quality of the songs on Abandon totally unrepeatable compared to everything Purple have done that is too poor, without choruses and winning melodies, and flaccid from Rapture onwards.
it was the attempt, or rather the desire to make an album of real melodic and technical hard rock that hits you in the middle of your forehead, the same desire that Purple had with =1 after years of soft-pseudo-prog.
If Abandon is too heavy for you, then what were the masterpieces of MK II and MK III?
is Abandon perhaps too little prog for your ears compared to Infinite or Whoosh?
but I’ve never understood how anyone can say that Purple with Morse were prog, for me prog is something completely different…perhaps I would define them as hard-fusion, or hard-boredom
better to take Blooksucher again than copying their own songs like in the following albums.
as always, greetings.
October 18th, 2025 at 13:35#20 Christof:
if you think that Almost Human is a boring shuffle, let’s remember that Purple had already started making “boring” shuffles in Purplendicular (Ted the mecanic, Hey Cisco, Rosas Cantina)….then yes, after that they made a ton of them….
#21 Uwe:
October 18th, 2025 at 13:53Fingers To The Bone is very refined, but in reality 3/4 of the album is very complex, as much as Purplendicular and I think more than any other album that Purple have written since…. I think it is also due to the fact that after that they took their foot off the accelerator…
This album didn’t catch on at all in the uk. For me it was a boring thud of an album totally different than purpendicular . I saw them in Manchester and the arena was barely 1/2 full. Good show though, I was near the front and the power of Roger’s bass was tremendous. Ian Gillan sang part of perfect strangers to me as i was singing along. Happy days.
October 18th, 2025 at 14:05You can‘t bin the album because of just one reworked oldie (for me Bludsucker was never more than a glorified bonus track), you terrible Tasmanian, tracks like Seventh Heaven and Watching the Sky are among some of the most sophisticated music presented by Purple ever.
Abandon has quiet determination to it (more than aggression to my ears), almost Porcupine Tree‘ish in places, I like that.
October 18th, 2025 at 15:27The follow up album to a successful one is often perceived to be difficult in many aspects. I just don’t hear the song quality on Abandon after the joyous Purpendicular. However as we know the first album is full of a nice and easy care free attitude, plenty of new fresh ideas and everyone enjoying themselves no doubt. The second album, well none of us were there, but were they trying too hard to be heavier and more in the market place at the time? Possibly I don’t know, it definitely isn’t too heavy for me, it is the songs, I just don’t hear that exuberance of melody etc. I have tried and tried and tried over the years to listen to it. Maybe one day some songs will finally hit me, that can often happen after many years and then we think, ‘why didn’t I enjoy this before’. That would be a good thing. Horses for courses as Russ often says. Who knows, if we keep putting money on the same horse, we may eventually get a winner, hopefully. I will have another listen to Abandon as we speak. Cheers.
October 18th, 2025 at 21:09Ian Gillan rapping first thing in the morning, my coffee’s shaking, I hope it doesn’t go the wrong way and curd.
October 18th, 2025 at 21:13Just for good messure I have to say that Watching the Sky and Seventh Heaven are the two songs that kept Abandon.from being a real good un… I think they’re boring attempts to pull off some prog rock…the choruses on both of them barely standable for me.
October 18th, 2025 at 21:16Thought “Abandon” was quite good. Easily my fave Morse-era record, and the one on which his sound really started to gel with the rest of the band.
Not every song is great, but thankfully the record is front-loaded with the good songs at the start. The first half-dozen songs add up to a half hour of enjoyable music…
After a strong start like that, it’s easy to ignore some of the weaker songs that come later in the running order.
(Especially the remake of “Bloodsucker”. Rather lame, inviting adverse comparisons to the original in every respect.)
Never been keen on most DP songs in which Gillan speak-sings / raps, but “Any Fule Kno That” is an exception.
Tunes which others have already mentioned such as “Fingers to the Bone”, “Watching the Sky” and “Seventh Heaven” also strike me as being among the band’s strongest reunion-era material.
October 18th, 2025 at 21:29#28 MacGregor:
“exuberance of melody”
exuberance of melody totally absent in Infinte and Whoosh where BigIan does nothing but talk, LittleIan really sounds like a pensioner and Steve doesn’t write a single hard rock riff even with binoculars.
The biggest work in Abandon was done by Lord, and if you don’t understand the songs on Abandon, you don’t understand that Abandon was the Maestro’s hard rock testament, unfortunately light years away from the impeccable work done by the great Don
October 19th, 2025 at 12:52Naysayer at #30: Trust Max to dislike any semblance of Prog rock! 🤣
https://youtu.be/I2XS7pj8lAE
https://youtu.be/yf_h_j1wZXU
October 19th, 2025 at 19:57@ 32- I agree Fla76, if it wasn’t for Jon Lord, well enough said there. I do listen to him on that album and yes he is ever present and it isn’t that I don’t understand the songs, it is the melodies that I crave and they seem to be more sparse on Abandon. Purpendicular is loaded with them. I will keep on trying as the saying goes. There is nothing wrong with all the musicians playing and the sound of the record itself is good. I just need those melodies to hit me.
October 19th, 2025 at 22:29@ 33- that band Gentle Giant, if ever a band needed a melodic crafty lead vocalist it is that band. He just doesn’t sing tuneful melodies to my ears. All the other musicians are grand. The other progressive rock bands from that era all had excellent poetic singers, except Gentle Giant. Cheers.
Nah, Uwe, I don’t rule that out altogether. And I got my Pink Floyd albums to prove it. But Morse era Purple didn’t do very well in that realm for my liking. Now What?! (Or was it the other way round!?) suffered from it and those two tracks from Abandon were pretentious – as if they tried to come up with something meaningful and ended up with pretty boring stuff. Stick to your guns I’d say.
And this is the man speaking that bought all three copies of Butterfly Ball that have been sold back in the day. Two I gave away and in the meantime I got it on CD as well.
October 20th, 2025 at 11:47Abandon is neither as catchy nor immediately accessible as Purpendicular, but it is a rewarding listen if you take the time.
So MacProgster doesn’t like Gentle Giant, I finally found one weird band where even he draws a line! 🤣
I actually dug them in their unadulterated weirdness, kinda like Split Enz or Max Webster.
October 20th, 2025 at 15:19There is no sense that Abandon and Bananas are not on Sale on shops brand new . All other albums are new on shops , we want full purple – collection. Universal / EMI record company can sell production rights Back to purples new Record company. Nobody wins this sizuation , Record companies get no money , purple not get money , and we fans not get Records. If making CD or LP is too expensive, get those albums MP3 loading sell to companies sizes?
November 1st, 2025 at 12:45