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The horse that wasn’t iron
Back in 2024, an outfit called Defenders of the Faith published an interview with Nick Simper on the occasion of the two Warhorse studio albums being reissued. That interview completely slipped under our radar, until now.
Warhorse’s self titled debut was significantly heavier than anything you had done with Deep Purple. In the same breath, Purple were pushing the envelope that year as well with In Rock. Did you feel a sense of rivalry with Purple or was Warhorse rather a musical reflection of the ear, hard rock subsequently morphing into heavy metal?
NS: Not really. Jon Lord had to say in an interview, somebody asked why I wasn’t in the band any longer. *laughs* He told a bit of a lie and he said, “We wanted to go in a heavier direction and he couldn’t do it.” I was really, seriously annoyed with that because not only was it a deliberate lie, but I was pushing for Purple to become heavier all the time. Of course, there was all the classical stuff going on which was kind of undermining what I wanted to do really. Everybody went with it because we didn’t have much else going on at the time *laughs*. It seemed a good idea, but after a while, it was kind of wearing a bit thin. Ritchie Blackmore and myself, we came from pretty hard musical backgrounds.
That was the only kind of thing in the back of my mind. What I did, I wanted to do it louder and noisier and heavier than anything they did. It was funny because when I was working with Marsha Hunt, we worked on 3 or 4 shows where there were quite a few acts on them. We kept coming up with Deep Purple and it was not embarrassing, but for me, they were seeing me doing something I wasn’t happy doing. After we started Warhorse, I was dreaming of the day we’d be on the same bill as Deep Purple and it never happened, ever *laughs*! There you go. That’s the way it was. A lot of people, they sort of compare it and they say, “There’s echoes of Purple there.” I think, well, it was the same sort of lineup. We were striving for the same kind of things, I guess. The Hammond organ sound and loud guitars, there’s gonna be some kind of similarities, isn’t there? You can’t help it *laughs*.
Read more in Defenders of the Faith.
Thanks to Uwe Hornung for the heads-up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Alas!, where would this site be without its devout and ever watchful Judas Priest fans … We‘re aaaall Deeeefenders oooof the Faaaaith! @02:30 …
https://youtu.be/7j9dkh6CRpU
And the requisite lovely JP liturgy graphic novel nonsense to go with it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/judaspriest/comments/1dk16oc/the_metallian/
That thing always looked to me like a garish Japanese Power Rangers toy mishap of ELP‘s iconic and much cooler „Mk I Tank-meets-Armadillo“ machine-creature.
https://media1.jpc.de/image/w1155/front/0/4050538180053.jpg
January 19th, 2026 at 03:43