A fascinating article from the April 17, 1976, issue of Sounds. They’ve sent one of their journalists to be embedded, as we might say now, with the crew of one established band and the crew of an upcoming one. The established band happened to be Deep Purple Mark 4 playing a couple of gigs at the Wembley Empire Pool in London on March 12th and 13th that year. The upcoming ones were The Stranglers playing a pub in Islington for the princely sum of £35.

It’s a long(ish) read, but on a topic rarely covered in such depth before or since.

I ARRIVED at Wembley Friday morning. The first truck containing the PA system and most of the lights had already been unloaded, and the PA speaker-cabinets set up on the rigs, slung from the Empire Pool roof. The stage was a chaotic jumble of cords, leads, boxes, cabinets and sundry other things which are doubtless indispensible to an occasion such as this, but whose function seemed, for the moment, unclear.

Ossie Hopper, the Purple tour manager, introduced me to Baz, the road manager, who introduced me to a semi-truck loaded to the gills with equipment and the idea of hauling the stuff off the truck and stacked neatly on the ground in readiness for being fork-lifted up on stage.

The two truck-drivers are helping unload the truck — taciturn guys who swing the equipment off with the sort of easy action most people reserve from downing beers. I find it necessary to pause every few minutes — strictly in the interests of journalistic research, you understand — to survey the growing mountain of boxes and cases, or to discreetly idle off to see how things are shaping up on stage.

Continue reading in Music History for Those Who Are Able to Read.

Many thanks to Geir Myklebust for keeping the history alive.

Paicey talks how he got back in shape for recording of Turning to Crime after the somewhat forced pandemic hiatus, and shares his practice footage. Continue Reading »

Roger Glover writes:

I hope 2022 brings better times and I hang on to the chance of seeing you again and saying, “Hi, good to see you”.

Head over to RGs official website to read “Let’s Call It A Year“

Louder Sound has a new feature on Turning to Crime, and it starts without mincing the words too much:

People often think a covers album is a sign of having run out of ideas, having a contract to fulfil, or maybe both. Deep Purple’s new covers album Turning To Crime is neither

The article is well written and with plenty of quotes from all five gentlemen. Those who followed our extensive coverage of the release probably wont’ learn much new from it, still it is a welcome distraction on these long winter nights.

If the prospect of a new Purple album emerging just 15 months on from the August 2020 release of their rather excellent Whoosh! was a welcome surprise for fans, the notion of the legendary English group – rightly acclaimed as one of the most influential, and boldest, architects of the hard rock genre – returning as a covers act in the twilight of their distinguished career sat uneasily with many – not least, as it transpires, with certain members of the band.

“Oh, I was totally against it to start with,” Ian Gillan admits breezily, phoning from his property in Portugal. “I thought that Purple purists, myself among them, would see something like this as criminal, metaphorically speaking, so initially I didn’t like the idea at all. And then I started tapping my fingers on the desk at home, and thinking: ‘Hmmm, well, what are we going to do for the next year if nothing is happening?’”

Read more in Louder Sound.

Glenn Hughes and Doug Aldrich appeared on a podcast called In the Trenches with Ryan Roxie (Ryan himself is of guitar player for Alice Cooper fame). An hour long chat included an interview and Q&A with the fans. Continue Reading »

Don Airey spoke to a trade magazine Sound & Vision. While his interview is promising to be a delight to all keyboard geeks out there, there’s also something in it for the rest of us.

Mike Mettler: I’m sure you must enjoy threading the lineage between you and your predecessor, Jon Lord [Deep Purple’s founding keyboardist, who passed away in 2012]. In a way, that’s where the whole history of Deep Purple comes together.

Don Airey: Oh yeah, yeah. Well, when Purple started, they were a covers band. All bands were covers-only bands, really, except The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who. But most bands that were on the circuit—I remember Cozy Powell [a truly brilliant drummer Airey played with in Rainbow, among other projects] telling me he was in a band from Cirencester, his hometown [in Gloucestershire, England], called The Corals, and they could play for 11 hours without repeating themselves. So, covers were big part of the British band scene, you know?

Mettler: Right, British bands were pretty much all trying to put their own spins on many of those American ’50s and ’60s classics. From your own beginning times playing in bands like that, did you have favorite covers from that era that you had to do before you got to doing original material?

Airey: By the time I got into bands, people were already doing original material. But with Cozy, later on, we used to play a thing by, I think, Deodato, but I can’t remember what it was called now. . . (slight pause) “Something Strut.” [“Rio Strut,” actually.] We used to open with it, and we’d also play “Trouble” by Elvis [from 1958’s Kid Creole]. And we’d do “Going Down,” of course, because Cozy had done it with Jeff [Beck, on May 1972’s self-titled Jeff Beck Group].

Mettler: And that’s interesting, because Max Middleton plays on the original Jeff Beck Group recording of that one, but I feel the way you do it in the “Caught in the Act” medley at the very end of Crime was more like your nod to Nicky Hopkins [the late, great British pianist who played with the likes of The Rolling Stones and Jeff Beck in the ’60s and ’70s].

Airey: Oh, Nicky’s a big hero of mine.

Continue reading in Sound & Vision.

Thanks to Vladimir Drybushchak for the heads up and to Jos Lemmers for the video.

In a recent interview with Ultimate Classic Rock Joe Satriani reminisces about his stint as a Deep Purple guitar player.

Thinking about your brief time in Deep Purple in the ‘90s, how much, if at all, did that prepare you to be in a band like Chickenfoot?

Well, there are a couple of things that I learned while doing that. It was so much fun, [but it] was completely nerve-racking to try to even come close to replacing the iconic Ritchie Blackmore. Because Ritchie is so Ritchie. He’s the total opposite of a generic guitar player. Nobody sounds like him. He’s completely unpredictable, and his sound completely matches Jon Lord’s sound in that band.

There is a synergy between those two that when you don’t hear it, you go, “Well, something’s wrong.” This is me talking back in the day, in the mid-’90s. I can go on and on about what I learned technically about it. If I played a Strat into a Marshall with a souped-up pre-amp, I probably would have sounded more together with Jon’s amazing keyboard playing.

But there was no time for that. I had literally less than seven days to prepare for the first Japanese tour. I had to learn a show on two cassette tapes, half of which Ritchie had walked out on, so there was no guitar. [Laughs] All I had was the setup I was currently using, which was my Ibanez guitar into a DS1 into my Marshall 6100s turned up really loud.

They loved it. They were so done with Ritchie that they were like, “No, we want what you sound like.” But in my head, I remember thinking, “I don’t sound like Ritchie.” [Laughs] It was really hard on stage every night. Because I grew up listening to that band. I loved the band. They were such a great group of musicians. Just their immense talent and then the heart and soul was so great and they were so gracious.

Continue reading in the Ultimate Classic Rock.

The video is from Saarbrücken, Germany, June 16, 1994; courtesy of stargazer2080.

Tired of consuming whatever unhealthy foods you consume this time of the year and mindless small talk? Here’s another form of mindless entertainment for you — two dudes (one of whom you might have heard of) discuss Purple’s latest album (spoiler: both are not satisfied with track selection) and imagine how they’d like this to be done. Continue Reading »

Greek site Rockpages has interviewed Bernie Marsden on the occasion of his recent release Chess. The extended and rather interesting conversation invariably turned onto his days with PAL and Whitesnake:

Rockpages.gr: I was reading the Classic Rock magazine lately with an interview of yours where you said that the best album you’ve ever made was “Malice In Wonderland” with Paice Ashton Lord. Can you bring back some memories from making this album with those great guys?

Bernie Marsden: Yeah, I think there is a lot of people that is fond of that record, not just in the music circles, because I think there is a lot of nostalgia. It was a big step for me, working with those guys, with Jon and Ian especially. Tony was different, he was crazy funny guy. A very good musician, but he wasn’t a rock musician, he was a jazz musician really. But, working with Jon and Ian really upped my game as they say, you know? I realized how good they were. I knew how good they were and making that record was such a joy working with those people with a horn section and creating that kind of music, which was so original and of course Deep Purple fans didn’t like it Hahaha (laughs). But I think that’s why that record holds a very important place in my heart, really. Because, it is this kind of the baby that didn’t really grow very much. Whitesnake was enormous and everything else Ι did went really well. That’s the one that I thought would be really big, but that never really made it into the first team. I have a long time for it.

Rockpages.gr: Also, you were around with the Deep Purple guys in Whitesnake. And then you had the very famous “Deep Purple” t-shirt. Who came up with that idea?

Bernie Marsden: Oh, that was me, I would say it was nothing serious. Some people, magazines some guys from the Deep Purple fan club -I think- they kind of thought that we were all really angry. I had nothing to do with that. Anywhere we would go in the early days -we were saying we were going to Greece and there would be two guys from Deep Purple, or three Guys from Deep Purple and three were three other guys, every time journalists, or people would say, “excuse me, are you from Deep Purple?” So, I though I had to stop this, I’d better get some T-shirts made. So that’s what I did. In fact, Jon Lord used to wear one all the time. It was a bit of fun.

Rockpages.gr: I am not sure if David liked that though…

Bernie Marsden: Oh, yeah, he was okay… I think that he was not one of those guys that he will instigate something and then when it went against him he would say “oh, no. I never did that”. He was the victim of all our jokes sometimes, but he pretended not to be.

Read more in Rockpages.gr.

We’ll leave you with a Merry Xmas message from the victim of all the jokes:

Thanks to Yiannis Dolas for the info.

Continuing with blast from the past, another band down the list of ‘heavy hopefuls’ circa 1976 is actually more progressive and fusion than heavy… Continue Reading »