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Not minding that you don’t get any sleep
Issue 49 of the Rock Candy magazine (the one with Black Sabbath’s Sabotage on the cover) has a page-spread interview with Don Airey. It is short, and sweet, and rather interesting. Don reveals that he is fond of travelling on tour buses, and even sometimes forgoes the Purple’s executive jet just to join the roadies on the bus. His most favourite session work is also quite unexpected — it is a series of McDonald’s ads he did in the 1990s — reinterpreting their jingle in the style of Mozart, Prokofiev, Ravel, etc. with a 50-piece orchestra.
The issue can be purchased from the publisher.
Thanks to Reinhard Lackner for the info.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
About time they dragged out the old Starship, maybe that is why Airey opts for the tour bus…………….Neil Peart used to pushbike to some gigs way back in the day with Rush on tour, didn’t he? Then as he grew older he opted for a motorbike. However that is going solo, so to speak. Not mingling with the road crew. Maybe Don misses the old days eh? All that long hair and rough and tumble. Cheers.
April 20th, 2025 at 08:42Used to love Don ….
April 22nd, 2025 at 20:11Gone right off him after his comments about Steve…no need whatsoever for him to be so spiteful
But Steve, Don isn’t one bit spiteful, the Sunderlander is simply undiplomatic and matter of fact as hell.
If you consider for a moment which type of aircraft the Limeys christened “Sunderland” in WWII
https://youtu.be/wL7r4m8H7Bs
then it becomes clear that ‘elegance’ wasn’t the first thing on their mind! 😂
Great plane though and highly unpopular with U-Boats!
April 23rd, 2025 at 12:38Ah, Herr Uwe
I thought about you the other day …have you seen this ?
https://youtu.be/957N7EAtpY4?si=cwjG09fEebMsmkqM
You see what you have done to me ? Every time I go on you tube now , I get these posing, metal band recommendations !
I guess you’re very show must have been Das Boot then ? …we used to rush home from school to watch that …of course, Sky turned the remake into a soap show .
I’m afraid, I have got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about Don …I saw an old interview with him the other day where he was lauding playing With Blackmore …and Steve …and suddenly he is anti Steve …its only cus the session guitarist was in his band and he probably got him the job until they retire in a year
I’m gonna go and put some Dixie Dregs on …
April 23rd, 2025 at 21:48If there ever was a frontman who should have never worn long hair, then it was Auntie Roberta: She looks like her sister! 😂
Always liked the number though, not that Rob is really an expert on “Rocka Rolla Women”, is he? The lyrics were likely mostly written by Glenn Tipton who was/is straight.
You’re being harsh with ole Don, Steve! I sometimes think that Steve M was perhaps too similar to Don in his musical upbringing – they’re both well-educated musicians’ musicians – to really find him inspiring. From what Don has said in interviews, I have gathered that he likes to derive inspiration from people less tutored than him and playing more from the gut, more organic players. Steve M didn’t fit that bill, but that wasn’t Don’s or Steve M’s fault. In any case it is nothing personal.
April 24th, 2025 at 21:56I forgot to answer that one:
My wife Edith is the “Das Boot” fan in the house, she loves the original series and watches it religiously again and again. I’m not that great a U-Boat fan nor do I think that sneak attacks by night on unarmed merchant ships who don’t know what’s happening is such a heroic venture. In Luftwaffe terms that would be like BF-109s and Fw-190s roaming the UK skies on the hunt for unarmed passenger and cargo planes only. Not a very pretty picture as everyone will most likely agree.
The whole wolf pack thing in the Atlantic was basically asymmetric “naval terrorism” warfare against the much superior Royal and US Navies by the Reich whose own surface Kriegsmarine was largely ineffective considering the huge resources it drew (that Germany cannot be – and never has been – a real naval power due to its geographical location added to that of course).
The Sky series remake wasn’t so much a reboot of the old series as a whole new WWII spies and resistance drama, some seasons were actually quite good. In some ways it was even more accurate than the old series as it truthfully depicted that a lot of U-Boat crews and officers were quite saturated with Nazi ideology (because of their high losses, the regime really pampered them) and not the apolitical grimey “just mechanics doing their job”crew as which the first series stylized them. In Allied POW camps, captured U-B0at crews were regularly kept separate (together with Waffen-SS members) because they were perceived as particularly glowing Nazis that would intimidate other Wehrmacht prisoners who were more distant to the regime and opening to democratic values and ideas.
To their historic defense: A lot of U-Boat crews probably saw little else than the insides of their submarine and the grey Atlantic before being either killed in action (their loss rate of 75% was the highest in any arm of the Wehrmacht) or – if they were lucky – captured. So the vilest forms of Nazi oppression and atrocities omnipresent to other Wehrmacht members might have escaped their realization, this explaining why they identified so strongly with the regime until the very end.
So, nope, not a huge “Das Boot” fan which was actually key in giving the whole U-Boat saga that romantic “tough men of the deep seas”-image, while skipping over other, less savory parts of the history of the U-Boot Waffe. It’s not a coincidence that Hitler’s successor in the last days of the Reich was “Papa” (as the U-Boat crews called him) Admiral Karl Dönitz, a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, and the man behind U-Boat strategy throughout the war.
Of course, in the depiction of everyday life in the cramped environment of a U-Boat the original series was groundbreaking and the cast was very good (nearly all of them went on to notable German movie and TV careers in the aftermath). But I find the lack of political accuracy in the very popular submarine drama a bit grating.
April 25th, 2025 at 13:52