![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/gillan2.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/mcbride6.jpg)
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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 […]
Read more »Classic Rock has a promo piece for the Hard Road box set with several quotes from the rarely interviewed Nick Simper: It was a very exciting time – the band was brand-new and we were thrust together to make the first album in 18 hours. I think we did a pretty good job. It’s quite […]
Read more »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, […]
Read more »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 […]
Read more »American photographer Tom Franklin has published online several snaps he took at a Mark 1 show at Exhibit Hall at the Teen Fair in Phoenix in November 1968. Check them out. Thanks to Yvonne Osthausen for the info.
Read more »
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing