NJ.com has an interview with Candice Night and Ritchie Blackmore, full of family anecdotage and the story behind Carry on… Jon.
Candice:
We were in CVS and I said, ‘Autumn, what Easter card should we get for Daddy?’ And all of a sudden, she became Belle from ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ She said, ‘Don’t talk about my father that way! He’s a genius!’
But don’t tell Ritchie, or his head will get bigger. He’ll say, ‘See? I’ve been telling you that for years.’
Ritchie:
We were snowed in, in that blizzard (on Feb. 8). The engineer and myself, the producer, we had nothing to do. I said, ‘I have an instrumental that I’ve vaguely finished. Do you want to try it?’
I wrote it on the spur of the moment. I had a very melancholy kind of tune. Then I started thinking about Jon. I thought maybe we should do an organ part at the end, as a tip of the hat to Jon. Pat Regan is an accomplished organist. We put the organ sound on, and off he went. I guided him on a few things, like riffs and how Jon played syncopation with his right hand.
So it was a throwaway idea that turned into something. It was something to Jon, a way of saying thanks for the years. It’s hard to talk about, when someone says, ‘What did you think of Jon?’ I’d rather play a tune. We wouldn’t have put it on if we hadn’t been snowed in. Maybe Jon caused the blizzard.
A second Jon Lord memorial concert will take place in Warsaw, Poland, on July 20, at the Club Proxima. The band Made in Warsaw, comprised of members of Panteon, Night Mistress and few other Warsaw rock bands, will play over 3 hours of Purple music, including obligatory hits and some rarities that has not been played by the real band for a long time. Guest musicians will include singer Grzegorz Kupczyk and guitar player Piotr ‘plays Blackmore better than Blackmore himself’ Brzychcy.
The event will be in honour of Jon’s memory and is being organized by Łukasz Jakubowicz (Hammond player for Panteon) and vocalists Adam Panasiuk.
Tickets 12 zł in advance, 15 zł at the day of the show, available through online vendors.
Deep Purple opened the next min-leg of tour and they have included three new songs in the setlist: Vincent Price, All the Time in the World and Body Line. These were performed in Rabat and Kavarna, with the next night in Plovdiv reportedly Above and Beyond taking the place of Body Line.
It appears that the whole show in Rabat was filmed professionally with clips starting to appear on Youtube:
Bob Ezrin was interviewed by Los Angeles radio KLOS, with a good half of the conversation revolving around Deep Purple and Now what?!. Ah, and he also tells an anecdote how way back then he turned down an offer to produce none other but Made in Japan:
In a recent interview to Russian newspaper Kommersant Ian Gillan mentioned, among the usual, that the band is contemplating a special tribute to Claude Nobs during their visit to Montreux (they perform at the Jazz Festival on July 19). One idea being touted is to skip Smoke on the Water from the setlist on the main festival stage at the Stravinsky Hall and perform it separately, on an open air stage on the Lake Geneva shoreline, with fireworks and other bells and whistles.
Thanks to CV3591 from deep-purple.ru forum for the info.
Uncut magazine had a short mention about Deep Purple and fashion in the late sixties in their December 2010 issue with quote from Jon Lord:
That leather coat cost more than I’d earned in my entire life. It was all bought one mad afternoon at Mr. Fish. Working-class lads being dressed by a top designer, we weren’t going to say no. We wanted to be a progressive band but we didn’t know how. I remember thinking it was the most wonderful time, with total freedom
On May 23 Whitesnake show in Manchester Bernie Marsden joined the “new new” band on stage for performances of Fool for Your Loving and Here I Go Again:
The latest episode of In The Studio with Redbeard is completely dedicated to Now what?! A good chunk of the album was played during the one hour show, interspersed with what sounds like a prerecorded elsewhere interview with Roger Glover. This episode appears only online despite the fact that the show is syndicated on many, ahem, classic rock radio stations across North America.
![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/glover7.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/gillan.jpg)
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing