Steve Morse did this interview during the recent visit to Georgia. He talks about his career, playing with G3, Above and Beyond, why the Y2D has a 5-position switch, Bach as metal, and many other things:

Bonus points to everybody who can figure out what Paicey is saying in the background 😉

Thanks to Yvonne Osthausen for the info.

Pete Makowski has published on his Facebook page an interview he did last year with self proclaimed Deep Purple fan Lars Ulrich:

How did you end up getting to see Deep Purple when you were only nine years old?

Lars: There was a tennis tournament at KB Halle that started on a Monday morning and Deep Purple played there the night before and for some reason they invited all the tennis players to come down to the concert. My dad (Torben Ulrich, former professional tennis player) invited me along. It was the spring ’73 and Purple were promoting Who Do We Think We Are and I believe Gillan had handed in his letter of resignation. But what the fuck do I know? I was nine years old. I remember Ritchie Blackmore throwing up his guitar in the lighting rig, rubbing it against the speaker cabinets and playing it with his ass, Jon Lord was waving the beast around, Ian Gillan was hidden behind a curtain of hair, playing the bongos, Roger Glover was holding the beat down while ‘little’ Ian Paice was sitting back there with his specs on doing his thing. I had never seen anything like it and was completely blown away. It was the biggest, loudest, coolest thing I’d ever seen.

Why do you think Purple were so popular in Europe?

Lars: Zeppelin never registered on the same level when I was growing up, they were more of an American thing. There was also a perceived image of them. Blackmore was very visual but he wasn’t posing in a way like Plant with his open shirt, sweaty chest and ‘I’m a God come back to the hotel room and blow me’ attitude. I think the working class fans had a tighter connection to Purple. I don’t mean to be disrespectful I’m just trying to analyze it. I have the deepest admiration for Led Zeppelin Official but it was a different thing. When I was growing up in Copenhagen, it didn’t sound as hard and I didn’t connect to it like I did with Purple and Black Sabbath.

Read the whole thing on Facebook.

Thanks to BraveWords for the info.

Guitar World magazine has an interview with Steve Morse:

GUITAR WORLD: Now What?! is Deep Purple’s first studio effort in eight years. Why did you decide to make the album now?

Actually, I was one of the guys asking the same thing! My vision was every tour we’d do another song and just release it on the web site. I’d say, “Don’t even try to sell it, because things are different these days as far as how people listen to music.” But the rest of the guys were like, “Well, this is what we do, this is what we’ve always done. So let’s do the best studio album we can.” And Bob [Ezrin] agreed. So I got into it wholeheartedly.

You cover a lot of stylistic ground on the album. There are plenty of straightforward rockers, like “Hell to Pay” and “Weirdistan” but also mellow, jazzy cuts, like “All the Time in the World,” and more epic tunes, like “Above and Beyond.”

I think we just naturally do that, because Ian Paice is one of those drummers that can play swing-type stuff as smoothly as rock. So it leaves room for a lot of different feels. “All the Time in the World”: the verse in that is kind of slinky and relaxed but still has a little bit of swing to it. And “Above and Beyond” was me sort of pushing the band musically in a certain direction. I was imagining an orchestral background mix with sort of a Zeppelin-y heaviness. And chord-wise I guess it’s a little more proggy, more like the kind of thing I might have brought into a Kansas writing session. Lot of different triads over the tonic, which sort of stays the same. So there were a lot of different ideas.

One of the great guitar spots on the album is the intro to “Uncommon Man,” which begins with an extended, unaccompanied solo from you. How did that come about?

That was Bob, pure and simple. I don’t think I would have thought to do anything like that. But he came to one of our shows, and afterward at the studio he said, “I want you to do something like you did at the concert.” And I said, “That was improv.” So he said, “Well, then do an improv. You’re rolling.” We were all in a circle looking at each other, and I just started playing like I would live. And Don [Airey] has super-incredible ears, so he heard what I was doing and just followed along. Then when Don started leading with the chords, I had to listen and try to follow him. And if you listen to the song, there’s one chord where I didn’t quite get it. There are a couple notes in one of the runs that don’t completely match. I meant to do that! [laughs] But it was just one of those moments where it was the entire band doing the take and there was no way to fix it. It was literally a moment in time. And I love when we keep takes, especially when it’s the first take. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s really cool to have those spontaneous moments.

That was just a preview. The complete interview will appear in Guitar World August 2013 issue (the one with Jeff Hanneman on the cover).

Thanks to Andrey Gusenkov for the info.

I was working for Swedish Radio at this year’s Sweden Rock Festival and someone in our team brought up the topic of member changes in classic rock bands. Deep Purple was of course accused of being worst, as they always are, even by fans of the band. To prove DP aren’t worst, and as research for a segment in a radio show we broadcast from the festival, me and a friend came up with this list of how many mbers each band has had (and THS editor Nick added a couple of entries):

Yngwie Malmsteen: 37
Whitesnake: 26
Steppenwolf: 26
Lynyrd Skynyrd: 25
Jethro Tull: 24
Uriah Heep: 24
Black Sabbath: 23
Guns ‘n’ Roses: 23
Rainbow: 22
Blue Öyster Cult: 22
Ufo: 22
Allman Brothers: 21
Anthrax: 20
King Crimson: 19
Yes: 18
Accept: 18
Scorpions: 17
Fleetwood Mac: 16
Opeth: 15
Deep Purple: 14
Kiss: 10
Rush: 4

Yes, Yngwie is a solo artist and should perhaps not be on the list but this was for a somewhat funny show on Swedish Radio so we put him in there for fun. We also included a couple of Swedish “dance bands” which beat Yngwie by far. 🙂 Some of you will also argue that Whitesnake, Rainbow and King Crimson are some sort of solo venture but our criteria was that if you have chosen a band name, you are a band.

Ian Gillan recently gave an interview to QMI Agency that was published in Toronto Sun:

As the ideas come from the jam sessions every day… you get them some kind of working generic title and this one sounded like the soundtrack to a horror movie so we called it Vincent Price.

And when I got to doing the lyrics, I said to Roger, ‘Listen, what would a producer of the ’60s or a director want as the ingredients for a horror movie starring Vincent Price?’ And I started writing down the lyrics: Clanking chains, creaking doors, bloodsucking vampires, howling dogs, sacrificial virgins, zombies. I said, ‘There you go. We’re finished. We’ve done the lyrics.’

Read more in the Toronto Sun.

Thanks to Blabbermouth for the info.

In an interview to the Russian newspaper Kultura Ritchie Blackmore mentioned that he would be open to the idea of staging one-off shows shows playing his old material (in reverse translation from Russian, so take it with liberal serving of grains of salt):

Yes, indeed, I’m proud of what I have written in the past, and even thinking of maybe 3-4 shows playing exclusively Deep Purple and Rainbow stuff. Just to appease nostalgic feeling of Blackmore’s Noght fans who still enjoy 70-80s recordings. I will never quit what I am doing today, but such concerts could be enjoyable and a sort of a reward to my devoted fans.

There was no mention as to what personalities could be involved in such a project.

Thanks to Vladimir Drybushchak for the info.

Ritchie Blackmore and Candice Night were interviewed by the Russian English language broadcaster Russia Today:

Thanks to Yvonne Osthausen for the info.

A guitar and (presumably, several) drum heads signed by Glenn Hughes, among many other people, are up for a charity auction to raise money for the Rock Against Multiple Sclerosis foundation.

Guitar auction will close in the evening of Jun 23 (Pacific Time), while drum head auction will run until the supplies last. They also have (unsigned) t-shirts from the Rock Against MS benefit show held in Los Angeles on March 27.

Thanks to BraveWords for the info.

Sunflower Jam has announced that the date for their special event to celebrate late Jon Lord has been set at April 4, 2014. It will take place at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Artists confirmed so far include Ian Paice, Roger Glover, Don Airey and Steve Morse. Iron Maiden frontman and long-time supporter of The Sunflower Jam, Bruce Dickinson, will also be performing along with Rick Wakeman, Joe Brown and Alfie Boe. The evening will be compered by Bob Harris.

They are also preparing for release The Best of The Sunflower Jam SUPERJAMS Live at The Royal Albert Hall DVD with highlights of the 2011 and 2012 events, which is “in the final stages of production”.

Apparently the music we all love will still be around in the 31st century. Highway Star (the original album version) was featured in a new episode of Futurama — 2-D Blacktop — that had its premiere yesterday, June 19. In the episode, Professor Farnsworth takes to street racing and beats another two crews to the immortal tune in a race that culminates going through a tunnel, against traffic, with Hammond arpeggios as a sonic backdrop.

Watch episode highlights, including the racing scene, on ComedyCentral.com