[hand] [face]
The Original Deep Purple Web Pages
The Highway Star


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.

Read more »

Derek Lawrence R.I.P.

Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash wrote on his band’s facebook today, May 14, 2020: With great sadness, I have just received news from friend and journalist Dave Ling, that our old friend and the architect of our first 3 albums, including the wonderful Argus album, Derek Lawrence, has passed away. Derek left us yesterday at […]

Read more »

The halcyon years

A fairly comprehensive documentary of the history of Deep Purple Marks 1 and 2 has been put together by the Music Legends Magazine. It is a step above the slew of similar talking head documentaries from a few years back as this one actually interviews Nick Simper (and he tells the story of him being […]

Read more »

Battle of Deep Purple and Jimi Hendrix

Our Japanese correspondent sent in this interesting piece of Mk1 memorabilia. It is one of those compilations that can now be considered as bizarre, but at the time probably made quite a lot of sense to the record company. I bought this at a second-hand record shop in the 1970’s. Entitled “Battle of Deep Purple […]

Read more »

Review: The Road of Golden Dust

The world is not exactly inundated with books detailing the story of Deep Purple. Chris Charlesworth’s Illustrated Biography had been pretty much the only source for decades, but it’s been out of print for a very long time, and nowadays is not considered terribly accurate. The text has been updated by Simon Robinson into the […]

Read more »

Jon’s old Mellotron?

While surfing around on Facebook today, I ran across a picture of a wonderful old Mellotron Mk.II. According to the poster, Streetly Electronics, a British firm specializing in Mellotrons, this instrument was used by Jon on the Book of Taliesyn album. One comment on the photo mentions that you can hear the Mellotron at about […]

Read more »

||||Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
© 1993-2024 The Highway Star and contributors
Posts, Calendar and Comments RSS feeds for The Highway Star