Louder Sound lists Roger’s seven favourite Deep Purple tracks

Hard Lovin’ Man (Deep Purple In Rock, 1970)

“Unlike concert halls, studios are very dead spaces. But the live sound we got on stage changed the band; it made us animated and aggressive. We started making violent music. With Hard Lovin’ Man there was no toning down, it was full-on. Even in the studio, Jon was still rocking his Hammond back and forth. That song was a breakthrough for us because it defined what we did on stage.”

Continue reading in Louder Sound.

That awesome Italian tribute band Strange Kind of Women didn’t lose any time learning and rehearsing the freshly released single and performed it at their gig on May 4 in Graz, Austria. Continue Reading »

A new book about Rainbow has been published in Spanish. Titled Bajo el Arco Iris (Under the Rainbow), it covers all Rainbow lineups, discography, 20 pages of photos, list of live performances, as well as the early years of Ritchie Blackmore, his tenure in Deep Purple, summary of Blackmore’s Night, and reviews various guitars he has played in his career, all updated up to 2024.

The back cover blurb, translated into English, reads:

Ritchie Blackmore, unpredictable, temperamental, blessed with a mischievous, sometimes perverse — and occasionally destructive — sense of humor, has been a man of complex personality, a nonconformist always in search of perfection, unable to tolerate so much of the fool as of the recording studios. Due to all this, in 1975 he decided to leave Deep Purple and make both his dreams and his obsessions come true, whether musical or personal, and founded the musical entity known as Rainbow.

The group, and its famous logo, would become iconic, and over the years it would be the protagonist of fabulous performances, give rise to a good number of juicy anecdotes and produce several seminal albums such as Long Live Rock’n’Roll, Down To Earth , On Stage or the legendary Rainbow Rising. It would also be the school where two dozen great musicians were molded who, on their own merits, would leave their mark on the history of music. Among them, Cozy Powell, Don Airey, Graham Bonnet, David Rosenthal, Joe Lynn Turner, Roger Glover and the always missed Ronnie James Dio stand out. Fifty years later, this is the story of a legendary group that continues to surprise with the quality of its compositions and the intensity of its live performances.

Bajo el Arco Iris is written and published in Spanish, has 320 pages in 21 x 15 cm format, and can be ordered through Lenoir Libros for €20 + postage.

Thanks to the proud author Jose Galván for the info.

Andy Wood talks about meeting Steve Morse and jamming with him at the Dixie Dregs gig in Nashville, TN, on April 18, 2024. Continue Reading »

A rare interview with Mickey Lee Soule. This was done in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and covers most of Mickey’s career — from starting to learn the piano at the age of 6, to his current at the time projects, and everything in between.

The first album with Elf was produced by Deep Purple’s Roger Glover. How did Roger get involved with the band?

Elf had a manager who live in Connecticut and he’d book us a few gigs. He got a position with a major talent agency in New York. When he went there it turned out that this agency was booking Deep Purple. Meanwhile our manager had got us an audition with Clive Davis of Columbia Records and it just turned out that Roger and Ian Paice just happened to be in the office so our manager asked if they’d like to go along and see our band. So, they came along. We had no idea this was going to happen until we got to the audition place and Clive Davis came out with a few people and sat down in front of us. We did a few songs. I’m not sure what Clive Davis made of us but they did know who Deep Purple were and Roger and Ian really liked us. They joked about it because when we first walked out, everybody was so short, that they asked if we were a circus act. After we played, they thought it was great. From that audition we got the record deal and both Roger and Ian wanted to produce it. Within a couple of weeks we were in Atlanta, Georgia in the studio recording the album. We recorded the album in a couple of days.

Read more in Metal Express Radio.

Thanks to Uwe Hornung for the heads-up.

According to the German online retailer JPC, the next Deep Purple single from =1 will arrive on June 28, and it will be in physical form. The track to be released is Pictures of You, and the formats will include CD and vinyl. Continue Reading »

A short, but quite substantial interview with Glenn Hughes Continue Reading »

Guitar.com has a very short interview with Steve Morse, where he weights in on the digital vs analogue amp debate:

With any digital amp, I’m not able to get the interaction between reducing the level of the guitar in the input and having the tone change from distorted to slightly distorted to smoother and to clean, like I can with the ENGL. That and maybe the clinical tiny little artefacts of digital distortion that I still can hear when I interact with it and do a lot of changes.

However, if you were to do a set part where you’re just chugging along, hardly anybody would be able to tell if you were playing through a digital amp or not. However, if I were to be soloing and playing a super-saturated sound and then switch pickups and bring down the volume to about three out of ten, you would hear that it’s not the same roundness, or full. It’s an elusive quality that hasn’t really been captured by modelling amps.

When I play gigs, it’s always me using my ENGL tube amp. And I do carry it myself sometimes, but on tour the road crew carries it. But mostly, they just lift it into a case, and it just wheels onto a truck in a case. On these dates, I’m going to be bringing the ENGL.

Thanks to Guitar.com for the quotes.

Black Country Communion have released an official video for the single Enlighten from their upcoming new album V. We’ve been able to witness an unofficial one back in March, when the song was premiered live. Continue Reading »

Bristol 24/7 has a review of a new book The West’s Greatest Rock Shows 1963-1978, complete with the cover photo of Deep Purple Mark 3 on stage in all their bell-bottomed and platform-shoed glory, and excerpts covering reviews of several local gigs, including said Mark 3 at the Colston Hall in Bristol, on May 20, 1974.

The Burn album was another commercial and artistic triumph for Deep Purple, but it was all change in the ranks for what’s become known as Mark III of the band. Out went Ian Gillan and Roger Glover; in came the phenomenal Glenn Hughes and the unknown David Coverdale (whose previous career highpoint, lest we forget, had been working in a boutique in Redcar). But behind the scenes, Ritchie Blackmore was expressing increasing disgruntlement. He was not happy with the soul and funk influences brought in primarily by Hughes, which he described dismissively as “shoeshine music”. And on this tour he was paying particularly close attention to aptly named American support band Elf – the most diminutive act to play the Colston Hall since the Small Faces. After his departure from Purple the following year, he would recruit most of them, including vocalist Ronnie James Dio, for his new band Rainbow.

Ian Gregory was at the back of the stalls. “There was no obvious sign then of the tensions,” he recalls. “Purple were on fire. The first half of the set was almost all of Side A (in old money) of the Burn album: Burn, Might Just Take Your Life, Lay Down, Stay Down. Ritchie teased Lazy before they played Mistreated and then went on the Mark II stuff. The interplay between Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale was electric. The people around me were in awe.”

The coalescing Mark 3’s stay at the nearby Clearwell castle gets some coverage as well:

At the time, the Grade II listed castle boasted a recording studio in its basement, which became especially popular with rockers, including Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Peter Frampton and Queen. Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath claimed to have seen a ghost there while recording Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Eventually, the band managed to spook themselves so much that they refused to stay overnight. “I thought, fucking hell: we got this place in the middle of nowhere so we could start writing, and everybody has terrified themselves that much that they’re driving home at night!” writes Iommi in his autobiography, Iron Man.

Purple were made of sterner stuff, though that didn’t stop notorious prankster Ritchie Blackmore attempting to terrify fellow members of the band – especially the new recruits. “Ritchie got there first,” writes Glenn Hughes in his autobiography. “I arrived second and got a good choice of bedroom, unaware that he had wired my room up and put speakers in the closet, and of course at three o’clock in the morning there were these ghostly wails. Blackmore had waited up to do it. When you’re in a 700-year-old castle and you hear that, it’s pretty spooky.”

Read more in Bristol 24/7.