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No Netflix, no TV
Classic Rock has online a new interview with Ian Gillan. It was done on the occasion of his guest appearance on the new UROCK album, and there are some bits and pieces we have heard before. There are also some that we haven’t.
Is the idea that rock’n’roll is a young man’s game a myth these days, given that so many musicians are getting older?
It’s interesting you say that. Throughout your entire life, you’ve had to deal with this thing – you get older every day. It’s a slow process, but it happens. When you’re a kid, you write about fast cars and loose women and that sort of thing, or at least we did in those days. And it’s very rock’n’roll and had a lot of attack and youthful energy.
But I started thinking in my thirties: “This is ridiculous, this feels uncomfortable.” So you have to find other things to write about – stuff that’s interesting and off-the-wall. You have to adapt, otherwise you look like a fool. But you can write a song about anything, at least in my experience.
I think if I lose my energy I’m going to stop. I don’t want to be an embarrassment to anyone. We’re not far off that. It creeps up on you – you don’t really notice.
But then this isn’t like a normal job. It’s all in your mind. The writing certainly is, and the ability. And these guys who I work with [in Deep Purple] just seem to keep improving. The hard thing is to keep them down.
What else have you got on the go? Is there a new Purple album in the pipeline?
There’s not much to talk about yet. It’s a quiet year. We’re just gathering together bits and pieces for songs. Next year is going to be a mega tour. I pack my suitcase in April and finish in November. After that, we’ll see.
Read more in Louder Sound.
Thanks to BraveWords for the heads-up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
No cursed streaming sites or tv, good on you Ian. Cheers.
December 24th, 2025 at 01:28Hope with all my ❤️ that his energy will keep up!
He surely deserves it, and we – his faithful listeners – deserve it too!
Can’t wait to see them, twice (2) next year ☺️😊
December 24th, 2025 at 08:24the problem with Gillan is he seems to have a bad memory about his yesterdays.. if you listen to some of his songs from when he was way over 30, 40 and 50 years old he kept singing about so called “loose women” and strange kind of sex whether it be singing about Mitzi Dupree or knocking on somebodys “back door” and on the Gillan albums theres plenty of songs about loose women.. and on Born again we have a song about fast cars in the song “Trashed”..Im not putting these songs down Im just saying it doesnt hold what he´s saying that in his 30:s he began thinking “this feels uncomfortable” singing about loose women and fast cars.
Hope I didnt hurt your feelings Karin that would be the last thing on my mind.
Happy Christmas everybody!!
December 24th, 2025 at 11:28@3
Dear Wiktor!
Nooo fellings hurt! I have actually thought the same 😄
December 24th, 2025 at 17:21But hey, it is Ian, and in my book he is allowed to do and say whatever he wants 😊 – you know because it is Ian!
#3. I don’t think you should take his interviews literally. If you do, then you will think the halls were only half full on TBRO tour etc etc 🙂
December 24th, 2025 at 17:50@ 3 Exactly, the memory is not quite precise..
December 24th, 2025 at 18:19“It creeps up on you”.. says a man in his eigthy’s.. ha ha ha!
December 24th, 2025 at 18:22@5 Weren’t they? 😀
December 24th, 2025 at 23:40The problem I have with Big Ian is that throughout the last two or three decades he has become a nihilistic person, in terms of other people’s music and other bands. And in general.
December 25th, 2025 at 15:47@9: Old Man Syndrome
December 25th, 2025 at 16:02@ 9 – I wouldn’t go that far AL. Ian, like many people, myself included, just doesn’t follow the herd, for want of a better expression. Avoiding all the rubbish in this world as much as one can is a good thing, positive in it’s outcome. Yes, no matter how hard we try to avoid all the negative crap out there, we still have to be involved in a certain extent. But to minimise it as much as possible is one good way of approaching it. Cheers.
December 25th, 2025 at 21:08I’d say the change of interest re lyric themes came maybe a tad bit later – he was in his late thirties when Born Again was released – but it did come eventually and while Ian still revisits “Sex & Drugs & Rock’n’Roll”subjects on occasion even today, he generally draws from a very wide palette of lyrical inspiration. He’s a raconteur of life in all its sometimes even banal or tedious minutiae. On another forum a guy once wrote that with GILlAN you sometimes get the impression that he thinks about something while taking a dump in the morning, and by the afternoon has turned his toilet seat streams of consciousness into a lyric for a song. I actually love exactly that aspect in his lyrics, Big Ian writes about the small things in life, yet often transports a big or at least deeper message with it.
Look at DC’s lyrics throughout his career in comparison, now there’s a guy who never grew up! 😂
December 27th, 2025 at 15:09As regards Ian’s Netflix ignorance, we’ll file that under the realization that he has never known how to really market himself except when either the DP or the Black Sabbath organizations did it for him. The man has zero commercial nous and doesn’t see a commercial avenue/opportunity when it hits him like a freight train. But then we wouldn’t want him any different.
Such curmudgeonly traits aside, Ian who discovered his life-long infatuation with Elvis via seeing him on black & white TV in post-war England should of all people be aware of the power of electronically/digitally generated moving pics. Stranger things has become a global generations-transcending phenomenon with a viewership of hundreds of millions. If your song gets played there in dramatic scenes, THAT IS commercially relevant whether IG chooses to wrap his head around it or not.
I assume he is not refusing the royalties from Netflix for Child in Time either!
December 28th, 2025 at 01:20We will NOT be ‘filing Ian’s so called ignorance under the lack of know how as to a business etiquette”. Lets just say Ian like many others, does not adhere to a waste of time and finances supporting a conglomerate that serves up 95 % rubbish when one can be much more creative and positive in attainting a more positive lifestyle. There is clearly too much emphasis in this world on ‘entertainment’, as in people worshipping a screen. Idle hands maybe, a lack of creativity indeed. Each to their own as we say, but people are and can be much more creative when not being fed utter numbness on a screen. And let’s not go there in regard to these so called streaming ‘giants’ locking up material that was once ‘in the public domain’. Talk about utter greed and contempt and we all know where that ends up. Society being ‘dumbed down’ is a major problem, but the big end of town relishes that outcome, they always have. Cheers
December 28th, 2025 at 21:55… does not adhere to a waste of time and finances supporting a conglomerate that serves up 95 % rubbish …
https://jennhasadhd.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/cn7gcsz1kwqo7cjw1b.gif?w=480
Please correct me in your razorsharp economic wisdom, Herr MacGregor, but I understand the current scenario to be that IG is earning from Netflix streamings via royalties for CIT rather than “wasting finances on it”.
And I’m not exactly sure why Netflix (which has produced bad, mediocre, good and excellent series and films) now all of the sudden stands for the end of civilisation as we know it?
https://capricho.abril.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/stranger-things.gif
Fact of the matter is, I neither heard IG protest too loudly against Stranger Things using Child In Time nor refuse the royalties (or give them to charity) – he has never really given much care to how he earns money as long as there is enough of it on his account. And when that ran out, he would shrug his shoulders, and dissolve bands, only to return to the mothership or join Black Sabbath where there are professional underlings called accountants that do this type of work for him and see to his economic welfare.
One man’s lack of greed is another man’s irresponsibility in financial matters. Ian has had his butt saved by others several times in his career, and that is not doubting his musical talent.
December 30th, 2025 at 01:35@ 15 – I am talking about what Ian said, that he doesn’t have a television and it definitely sounds like he doesn’t have a subscription to any of the streaming monsters. Therefore he does NOT financially contribute to them or waste his time sitting around glued to the tv. It sounds like Gillan isn’t even aware that the song CIT was used in a movie or whatever it was. Whether he is receiving any royalties or not, isn’t what I was talking about at all. Cheers
December 30th, 2025 at 18:34I completed watching Stranger Things yesterday and, my brethren, I must unburden my plight here:
In all eight Episodes of the Final Season 5, not a second of Child in Time is played, the song apparently only served as part of the music to the trailer for the last season a few months ago! The only thing remotely “Purple“ in the soundtrack is Prince’s Purple Rain during a lengthy romantic scene. Duh – what a bummer of a disappointment! OTOH, Kate Bush‘s perennial Running Up That Hill still plays in plenty of the scenes.
January 12th, 2026 at 21:36@17
“In all eight Episodes of the Final Season 5, not a second of Child in Time”
What a gyp…
January 13th, 2026 at 07:37