A second single from the upcoming remix of Blackmore’s Night third album Fires at Midnight. Has been released. Listen to the remixed Sake of the Song on your favourite streaming service or right here. Continue Reading »

It’s been the same story many times before — the band releases a new album, starts touring, puts several new tracks into the setlist, but after some time the new material starts to dwindle. By the time they reach North America, few, if any, are left in the set.

Not this time around.

If you believe setlist.fm, setlist for the opening gig of the current NA tour on August 14, 2024, in Hollywood, FL, was as follows Continue Reading »

In anticipation of the Deep Purple North American tour on the double bill with Yes, Ian Gillan spoke to the Ultimate Classic Rock:

It’s great to see Deep Purple hitting the road with Yes. What sort of bond was there between the two groups back in the day?
There wasn’t much of a bond. [Laughs] We were doing a festival [in] Plumpton, the first rock, jazz and blues festival that became the Reading Festival, run by Jack Barrie at the Marquee [Club in London]. He’d put on some absolutely great bands. Of course, we’d worked with most of them in those days. It was fantastic. They were all good in their own way – but I think Yes were a bit miffed, because they wanted to close the show and it wasn’t in their contract. It was [in our contract] that Deep Purple would close the show, so they refused to leave the hotel room. Jack said, “Guys, would you mind going on a bit earlier? I don’t want to push you but it would help me and it would help the crowd.” “Yeah sure, okay, no worries.” Then, Ritchie [Blackmore] decided that if we weren’t going to close, nobody was. He ordered some gasoline to be brought in. He threw it all over the equipment and then had the roadie light a broom, which had a petrol-soaked rag on the end of it to ignite the lot. Of course, it did ignite – because the fumes just exploded. Within a half-hour, there were blue lights flashing. The police, the fire brigade and ambulances were all coming in and there was complete chaos. Everything was on the front page of the Sunday papers the next morning and it was all quite rock ‘n’ roll. [Laughs]

Continue reading in Ultimate Classic Rock.

Thanks to Blabbermouth for the heads-up.

Analog Planet has an extensive interview with Roger Glover, accompanied by a brief review of =1. Roger talks about the new album, the bad old days, various Machine Head remixes, including the latest, working with Bob Ezrin, and many other things.

Mettler: None of us are perfect strangers to any of that, to borrow an album title of yours. And it’s, what, 40 years old now, since it was released in [October] 1984 [on Polydor], so I think we need another box set from you guys. Is Purple gonna continue with historical box sets like the Machine Head one?
Glover: I’d love to see a remix of Perfect Strangers, and a remix of The House of Blue Light [released in January 1987, also on Polydor]. I would love to see that. There are a few technical problems, though. We can’t find the tapes for Perfect Strangers. We can’t find anything for that.

Mettler: Oh, man, that’s a bummer.
Glover: (shakes head) Yeah, I know. I know. We do have about 40 multitrack reels for The House of Blue Light, which we did on 48 tracks, believe it or not — but to go through all that and find the one that we used would take a lot of time and money.

Read more in Analog Planet.

Couple more =1 reviews from different corners of the world.

Malaysia’s newspaper The Sun:

As a unit, Deep Purple swing with a panache expected of seasoned pros who have perfected their craft through the decades. Tracks such as Portable Door and Sharp Shooter groove along with a care-free attitude of a band fully enjoying the privilege of still being able to rock out at its collective age.

Observer-Reporter out of Pennsylvania, USA:

There’s nothing like a new Deep Purple album to make me feel like a teenager once again. Having just celebrated my 60th birthday, I was happily transported back in time after hearing “=1” from the British icons. As with most Deep Purple releases, the new album was made loud to be played loud.

Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger has a fairly rare beast — an interview with Bob Ezrin. It is published in German, so all the usual caveats about reverse translation fully apply here.

Today, studio technology is very different from when you started out with Alice Cooper. In the 21st century, you no longer capture performances live in the studio; you create them on the screen.

For the new Deep Purple album «=1» I actually put together a collage of the best performances from different versions of the song, without losing the spontaneity of the first versions. But my work on the computer is not that different from that with analogue tapes. In 1973 I edited the piece «I Love The Dead» for Alice Cooper from song snippets that were all only four bars long. So please don’t say anything against digital recording technology. I love the tools that are available to me today.

Read the interview on tagesanzeiger.ch in German, or via Google Translate in other languages.

Thanks to Tobias Janaschke for the heads-up.

US Navy veteran and novelist Ward Carroll sits down to talk to Steve Morse about their common love for music and airplanes. Continue Reading »

Norway Rock Magazine reviews Deep Purple’s performance at the Notodden Blues Festival this past Friday, August 2:

Deep Purple received the kind of reception you would expect – Hovigs Hangar, the giant popup inflatable tent in the corner of Torvet, was full. They are touring their new record “=1”, from which we would hear four tracks. However, it was the classic material that people had mostly come to hear – it was the old stuff which got the best reception. The fact that they have a new album after such a long career is tribute, for the undersigned, to two things, both of which were obvious during the show. First, the band are still enjoying what they do – they are not eking out their long careers. Second, and perhaps making a contribution to that enjoyment, is their lineup. Keyboardist Don Airey joined in 2002, replacing Jon Lord, and in 2022 Simon McBride replaced Steve Morse as a full member of the band after 28 years. The energy of these two musicians made the show and they have undoubtedly kept the band fresh and sharp.

Read more in norwayrock.net.

The two Tony Iommi/Glenn Hughes albums — The Dep Sessions and Fused, will be reissued October 4, 2024, via BMG. The Dep Sessions will be issued as-is, while Fused will add 3 bonus tracks not on the original album: Slip Away, Let It Down Easy, and The Innocence. Both will be available on CD and, for the first time, on vinyl. Pre-orders available here.

Thanks to BraveWords for the info.

Someone calling themself The Elitist Metalhead reviews =1 for Metal-Rules.com:

Obviously I knew Don Airey’s capabilities but I am extremely unfamiliar with Simon McBride but when the teaser single, “Portable Door” came out I was floored! Not only is he skilled soloist but he knows how to write riffs that sound like classic Purple. This track gave me a Perfect Strangers vibe which made me instantly need to hear the full release. Once I got my hands on that bad boy, “Show Me” jumped out at me and I knew that the teaser was a rather accurate reflection of what will be going on here. Ian Gillan sounds pretty much the same but stays in his lower register mostly, no epic screams here. You may hear his age in certain spots on certain tracks but for the most part, his skills are still intact. There’s some keyboard/guitar battles going on here showing both Don Airey’s skills as well as McBride’s. “A Bit on the Side” follows and has some more cool riffs and a lot of great melodies. Some cool keyboard and guitar solos on this track as with most of the tracks on here. McBride brings a little old school style but mostly he’s a seriously skilled shredder.

Read more on Metal-Rules.com. And once you’re at it, might want to check out their review of McCoy The Sound Of Thunder box set, recently released by Cherry Red Records.