The following announcement has been posted to the band’s official facebook page:

Do you live near Cardiff, Wales? Are you a Deep Purple fan?
Would you like to take part in some Deep Purple-related filming that will take place in the city on Friday 28th April 2017 at 10:00am?
If interested, please email info@coolheadproductions.com and we’ll get back to you with more details.
Please note that no member of Deep Purple will be present.
Still… it promises to be great fun.

Coolhead Productions is, of course, the company behind the recent From Here to Infinity documentary. And no, we have absolutely no idea what this is about, the title of this post is inspired by our way too vivid imagination.

Thanks to Nigel Young for the info.

Next spring will mark 50th anniversary of the band we come here to celebrate. An international group of fans have started a grassroots campaign to honour the band in style and are organizing an art and history exhibition to be held in Cologne, Germany. They have booked an exhibition hall from April 14 to May 12, 2018, and are soliciting both exhibits and monetary donations. This event is a project of Kulturförderkreis K-8 e. V., the same outfit responsible for organizing Evi Ivan’s paintings exhibition in 2006 and Roger Glover’s art exposition in 2010.

The website is deeppurple-artandhistory.com.

Thanks to Yvonne and Ralf Schmidt for the info.

Producer of the Bananas and Rapture of the Deep Michael Bradford seemingly disappered from the Purple horizons, but not from the music scene in general. After his collaboration with the band, he produced and played bass with Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics fame) and then became musical director and bass player for Ringo Starr’s touring band. He also shared bass duties on Ringo’s 2010 solo album with Paul McCartney.

An interview recorded in 2016 for the NAMM Oral History Library

Fine example of his very dry sense of humour (which may explain how he got along so well with an essentially British hard rock band despite vastly different musical backgrounds).

In 2014 he released a solo album The Long Night. A track from the album — No One But Myself To Blame featuring singer Liz Primo:

Michael can be reached via his production company Chunky Style Music.

Don Airey is reissuing his 1988 solo album K2 – Tales of Triumph and Tragedy, funded through Pledge Music. Album options include

• signed CD with original album and 7 bonus tracks for £30
• signed CD (as above) + DVD with “new performances”, interview footage, and original EPK for £35
• limited edition deluxe box set for £75

The box set will include both CD and DVD, signed and numbered certificate (the box is said to be limited to 100 copies), reproduction of the press pack, promo photo, and an A2-size map of K2.
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Roger Glover was a guest of Francophone TV channel TV5Monde, and his appearance turned into a mini retrospective of his incredible career.
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While being in Paris earlier this month, Ian Paice and Don Airey sat down to chat with La Grosse Radio. It resulted in this very relaxed conversation where they go through several tracks of the album, explaining how these ideas were born and developed. Plus, their thoughts on the latest incarnation of Rainbow and on the inevitable retirement.
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Three weeks after the new DEEP PURPLE album “inFinite” hit the stores, Edel will continue the series of Jon Lord re-releases with “Windows”, an album featuring a cooperation between Jon Lord and conductor and composer Eberhard Schoener. Schoener, who was also involved in progressive rock masterpieces like “The Turn of a Friendly Card” by The Alan Parsons Project may be best known for being the creator of the main theme for the TV series “Derrick“.

“Windows” was recorded live at the Herkulessaal in Munich on June 1st 1974 as closing performance of the “Prix Jeunesse International” festival under the “Rock meets Classic” banner and was broadcasted by German TV station Bayerischer Rundfunk to a potential audience of 300 million people.

The album consists of two parts, the 18 minute piece “Continuo on B.A.C.H.” and the name-giving 32 minute “Window” (without “s”), both composed by Jon Lord and Eberhard Schoener.

“Continuo on B.A.C.H.” plays with the idea of continuing on “The Unfinished Fugue”, the last part of “The Art of Fugue” by Johann Sebastian Bach and features way more Jazz influences than focussing on Jon Lords hard rock background (as the two predecessors “Concerto for Group and Orchestra” and “Gemini Suite” did) using the orchestra more as soloists than using them in a more conventional rock meets classic way.

The first part of “Window”, called “1st Movement – Renga”, was composed by Eberhard Schoener and starts with a more blues-like feeling featuring the voice of David Converdale, later contrasted by two sproaons, who make this part hard to enjoy in its entirety.

As the name hints, the second part “2nd Movement – Gemini” recycles the vocal section from “Gemini Suite”, likely some sort of compromise because Jon Lord and Eberhard Schoener were running out of time. “Windows” was a contract work for the Bayerische Rundfunk to close the Prix Jeunesse International festival and had to be finished in time.

The closing “3rd Movement – Alla Marcia: Allegro”, composed by Jon Lord reminds of “Gemini Suite” but also includes moments which would later become parts of “Sarabande”, Jon Lords next solo work.

The band consited of Jon Lord on piano, organ and keyboards, his DEEP PURPLE bandmates David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes, both on vocals and Glenn also on bass, Tony Ashton on vocals and keyboard and last but not least SPENCER DAVIS GROUP members Ray Fenwick on guitar and Pete York on drums. The classical section included the Munich Chamber Opera Orchestra conducted by Eberhard Schoener, featuring sopranos Erminia Santi and Sigune von Osten, Günther Salber on violin, and finally well known actor Klaus Löwitsch as narrator.

Sadly the audio recording doesn’t include the whole performance, but leaves out the “Einleitungsfanfare zu Also Sprach Zaratusthra” by Richard Strauss and all narration parts by Klaus Löwitsch without explaination. This might have been because the narration was completely in German and its content hard to guess even for native German speakers. Thanks to Youtube, there is at least a low resolution video of the whole event available for everyone to watch.

While being published on LP in 1974, the first straight-to-CD-transfer of “Windows” was released 1987 by Line Records, followed by a 25th Remastered Anniversary Edition on Purple Records in 1999 and a reissue in 2010. Adding a restored version of the video recording would have been a great bonus to render the 2017 release from a nice to have album to a must-buy.

North American syndicated radio program In The Studio with Redbeard: The Stories Behind History’s Greatest Rock Bands is celebrating the 45th anniversary of Machine Head with an hour long program featuring interviews with Ian Gillan and Roger Glover about the album. The interviews are not new, so you may have heard them before. The show had repackaged 1987 interviews for the 40th anniversary before.

You can listen to the interview portion of the show at inthestudio.net.

Thanks to Mark Fischer for the info.

Ian Gillan is on the cover of issue 4 (May 2017) of the Sweden Rock Magazine. Inside the magazine there is an 8 pages long feature on Deep Purple and their new album with interview and pictures, 5 pages of illustrated interview with David Coverdale, and a page worth of interview with Bob Ezrin.

More magazine covers have been featured in this clip posted by the record company:
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Updated: The record company has posted second and third installments of inFinite EPK with Airey, Paice, Gillan and Glover discussing the new album and tour, fragments of which that you may or may not have already heard elsewhere:
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