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


Magnum opus of this millennium

Goldmine magazine reviews the latest Deep Purple album: When the album finally debuted, there was a noticeable surprise waiting inside the record for all to hear. SPLAT!, still with slight but noticeable progressive rock elements, it very much weighs heavier than their previous effort, =1, and in many ways mirrors a return to more rudimentary […]

Read more »

Sound of an insect hitting a windshield

A site called Blue News carries a feature on Splat! with quotes from Ian and Ian. It attributed to the Swiss press agency Keystone-SDA and apparently based around an interview that both gave to DPA. It is dated today, July 29, 2026, but reads like was written some time before the album release (July 3). […]

Read more »

Creativity and volatility in equal measure

Guitar World has a feature on every Deep Purple banjo player, from Ritchie Blackmore to Simon McBride. Deep Purple’s longevity is remarkable on a number of levels. Aside from a relatively brief split between 1976 and 1984, they’ve been a working band since 1968 – a striking achievement, attributable in part to their willingness to […]

Read more »

Far from being finished

Blue News reviews Deep Purple’s appearance on the 2026 edition of Montreux Jazz Festival: On Monday evening, the Stravinski Auditorium was transformed into a rock temple. That may sound like a cliché—but for someone who isn’t very familiar with this genre of music, that’s exactly how it felt. After an explosive opening act by Danko […]

Read more »

Still enough “yelling and screaming”

EuroWeekly reviews the Deep Purple appearance at the Starlite Festival in Marbella, Spain, on July 9, 2026: McBride may be no Ritchie Blackmore, the famously enigmatic founding member who will always be the guitarist most associated with Purple despite Steve Morse having spent 28 years in the band, yet it immediately becomes clear that he […]

Read more »

Broth­er­hood of cre­ation and pro­duc­tion

Leicester Mercury has a short interview with the two Ians. The bigger one states his view on the alleged upcoming AI armageddon of creativity: My feel­ing about any­thing artistic is the begin­nings of it should be organic but the devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion val­ues, that can be tech­nical. We’ve always benefited from advances in tech­no­logy, whether […]

Read more »

Feeling of power indescribable

Another British newspaper, The Telegraph profiles Ian Gillan, and while our regulars probably won’t learn much new from there, it is well put together and without glaring mistakes (which as all know, is not a given). In 1970 his voice prompted an unexpected call – would he sing the role of Jesus in the recording […]

Read more »

A lot to say, yet absolutely zilch to prove

Blues Rock Review reviews Splat! in absolutely glowing terms: As AI inexcusably blitzes a forgettable culture of monotonous mediocrity, Deep Purple auspiciously land with a balls-to-the-wall Splat! to the good old days. This is what you call ‘musicality’ kids. If a band that spacetrucked and highway starred in the 70s can still produce songs this […]

Read more »

Flair, swagger, and panache

The new album Splat! is technically still a few hours away, and it seems like everybody and their dogs are reviewing it. Ultimate Classic Rock: There’s no theme here per se, but Gillan does populate the songs with cautionary tales and characters falling from grace, some reflection on aging and tongue-in-cheek macho posturing (“I’m a […]

Read more »

To truss or not to truss

Simon McBride talks shop to the Guitar World: “I played everything on this record with a prototype from PRS,” McBride tells Guitar World ahead of SPLAT!’s release on July 3. “The idea is that there’s no truss rod,” he continues. “It goes back to the early days when guitars had no truss rods because I’m […]

Read more »

||||Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
© 1993-2026 The Highway Star and contributors
Posts, Calendar and Comments RSS feeds for The Highway Star