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More Simper in Classic Rock

Another teaspoonful of the Nick Simper interview in Classic Rock. He talks about his dismissal from Deep Purple and still sounds more than a bit bitter about the whole affair: It was definitely a body blow. It was a turnaround, when you consider I’d recommended Ian [Gillan] in the first place. He had the chance […]

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Caveat emptor: Hard Road and In Concert’72

The part of Deep Purple’s back catalogue that ended up in Warner’s hands appears to be being repackaged and re-released once again. Hard Road: The Mark 1 Studio Recordings box set will be released on July 25 in Gemany and 28th in the UK. It contains 5 CDs: the three Mk1 albums in original stereo, […]

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Revolution 1971

The official Youtube channel has posted a video produced by Swiss TV in 1971 looking at how people “consumed” music and if it’s any different from consumption of, say, Coca-Cola. The event they chose to investigate was April 1971 Deep Purple concert in Montreux.

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How Coverdale “got packaged” with Page

An industry insider Mitch Weissman recently shared on Lefsetz Letter this tidbit of history on how the Coverdale/Page collaboration was put together: I almost had [Jimmy Page] and Billy Squier unite for a record in the 80’s. Jimmy and I were chatting in NY’s China Club under the Beacon Theater in ’89. We had become […]

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Not wearing spandex

In his September 2013 interview with Songfacts Graham Bonnet talked about the guitar player luminaries he had worked with during his career: Ritchie Blackmore, Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, Michael Schenker. He took time explaining how he got into Rainbow and how he got out of it: Songfacts: If you think back to 1985/1986, it seemed […]

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Essener Pop und Blues revisited

Longer clips from the Internationales Essener Pop und Blues Festival in October 1969 have surfaced on YouTube. We posted the first instalment before, but those are no longer available. The new clips have about 10 minutes of Mandrake Root and 7 minutes of Wring That Neck with better sound. Thanks to Igor Gillan-fan for posting […]

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Everything louder than everything else

Darker Than Blue has very amusing recollections from Ken Flegg, a former Marshall engineer, who accompanied the band on the trip to Japan in August 1972: The third gig at the Budokan in Tokyo on the 17th August went well with no significant problems, other than the acoustics of the hall could have been better. […]

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Blackmore’s tech shares anecdotage

Clif ‘Cooky’ Crawford was Blackmore’s guitar tech between 1981 and 1988. A couple of months ago his reminiscences started being posted on Facebook and elsewhere. They are, for the most part, an amusing read. Quotes below are unedited for extra flavour 😉 Making of Bent Out of Shape: by the end of 1982 it was […]

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Heaven on their minds

Heaven on Their Minds: The Creation of Jesus Christ Superstar is a documentary about the original London cast of the album (they call it the Brown Album), which has been in on-and-off production for a couple of years now. The last update (March 27) from the producer Megan Park says: Next, we are meeting Shannon […]

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Chasing Shadows

An author going simply by the name Pozzo has published an account of his personal quest to find Rod Evans. And while it contains many digressions (or maybe because of them), it’s quite an amusing read. Joanna’s call for arms here gets a name check, along with DPAS and Simon. … I handed over my […]

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