Jon Lord and Ian Paice - La Vanguardia, April 6, 1998
IAN PAICE: We were always touring or in the studio, and didn't have much spare time. It was really a hard job, not like now (everything is much more civilizised).
JON LORD: Life is so strange... it usually happens the opposite to what
should be. People should have spare time in their youth, not when they are old. It's depressing being a rock star and not having time to enjoy it. People
should retire when they are 25 (when they are at their physical and sexual
peak).
When Ritchie left the band in 1993, a door definitively was closed. Now we
have been four years with Steve Morse and he does it very good. It's a
difficult job because the main thing is not to imitate Ritchie but being able
to understand the spirit of the band. Ritchie wanted to be the leader, and if
you want to do that you have to be a good musician and a good captain too, and
it's difficult to get the combination of these two things. At the end it was
impossible to work with him.
PAICE (about Made In Japan): It was not planned to release a live album, you know, it was not cool at the time. It was an expensive thing and you were not sure about getting the money back. If your playing was bad, there was no album and the money was gone.
LORD: In some places, the U.S. is one of them, the album was not released until 1973. But then we had two versions of Smoke in the Top 10, the origina studio version from Machine Head and the live one. That summer everybody in States was singing the chorus [he sings it], all kinds of people, a rock fan and his mother too, and it seemed that it was the only thing we had done. Sometimes it was hard to stand.
PAICE: The English language was very unknown in Japan in those days. In the streets everything was written in Japanese. They only knew American military men, not men with long hair like us. I was at the hotel and asked how to go to a shop located two subway stations from there, ten minutes. I went the opposite direction and got lost. I felt really bad surrouded by people that dodn't know English and the only thing they did was smiling. It took me 5 hours to get back to the hotel. Japan was so different at that time. If you left the hotel it was like being at the moon.
LORD [about nowadys music]: I listen to Paula Cole and Alanis Morissette... coming out from my daughter's room.
PAICE [idem]: Now the main thing are extravagances of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and the Spice Girls, and it's show business. Luckily I thing there is still people who like music, good music like rock and roll, people who come to our concerts.
LORD: At the beginning of the 70's we saw an evolution from Rock Around Th
Clock to Smoke On The Water. It was a wonderful time, when musicians explo
new sounds without realising that they were writing history.
[About fans] There's a book where you can find all our concerts, songs,
photos, etc., it's amazing. The other day I saw in Internet that someone sold
for 5$ our first concert in the States, a night in L.A. 1968. I ordered a copy.
This interview is taken from the Barcelona newspaper La
Vanguardia (April the 6th, 1998). It's written in Spanish, so these are no
exact words of Lord and Paice, but I've done the best I could. The interview
took place the previous day: April the 5th.
Ferran Nogués