An interview with Roger Glover, originally published in the issue of New Musical Express dated June 19, 1971. Roger very prophetically talks about retiring from the incessant touring in a couple of years to focus on the production work. As we all know, this is pretty much what actually happened, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

Quote of the day:

We have been criticised for not changing the stage act but people don’t want us to change. It’s a bit frustrating because you get very stale playing the same numbers. Another frustrating thing is you don’t get time to rehearse, we haven’t rehearsed since January — you come back from a tour and the last thing you want to do is rehearse.

Sounds like not much has changed in the intervening fifty-three years 😉

Read the whole thing in My Things – Music history for those who are able to read.

Many thanks to Geir Myklebust for putting this up.

Ian Paice spoke to an outfit called MyGlobalMind that resulted in a lengthy, interesting interview, aided and abetted by an insightful and knowledgeable, albeit anonymous interviewer.

MGM: You got your first drum kit at the age of 15, which would probably be considered to be quite late, but you went from getting your first drum kit, to going into being a professional player very quickly. What are your memories of hearing music for the first time, getting into music and realising that drumming was something that you wanted to do?

Ian: I suppose it all started when I was about 11, maybe 12 years old, and I just got hooked on looking at drummers. I used to see these old black and white Hollywood bio pics where there’d be a big band playing from the ’30s and ’40s, or they’d be there as a featured five-minute section of the movie. There was one guy, Gene Krupa, and he just looked mesmeric. So, before I wanted to be a drummer, I wanted to look like him. I got a pair of old knitting needles and I started trying to copy what I saw his hands doing on the TV screen. TVs were about nine inches in those days. I would sit on the armchair of the sofa and play with the knit needles on the furniture. Then I realised that I understood why the notation was doing what it was, why one hand was doing this and why the other hand was doing that. So, it automatically made sense to me.

I’ve spoken to some other players, not just drummers, but musicians who have, let’s say, had that advantage from nature, where they understood the instrument almost immediately. I carried on like that building drums out of our biscuit tins and big bits of Sellotape stretched across the top and with plasticine underneath to make a snare drum sound. It didn’t sound like it, but it was good to me anyway. My dad saw that this wasn’t going away, and so on my 15th birthday, he bought me my first drum kit. A piece of rubbish, but it was a start. And my first gigs were with him. He was a really good piano player, and he had a little trio, sometimes a quartet, and he’d do dinner dances on Saturday nights. Over the Christmas period, he’d make a fortune. So that’s how it started. I played the odd gig with him with waltzes and quick steps and foxtrots and military two-steps and stuff like that. But like any kid, I was 15 and a half by then, a little local band got up together and I took it on from there.

When you are in a band that’s working, even the lowest possible level, you see other people playing. They could be absolutely crap, but they might have one thing, and you go, I like that, and you bring that into your repertoire. If you’re playing two or three gigs a week, which we were, as semi-pros those days, you saw lots of guys playing. So, you got this little bit from there and that little bit from there. And all of a sudden, you found you’ve got a bunch of things you can do, which are now your own, and it goes on from there.

Continue reading in MyGlobalMind.

Louder Sound reprints a Classic Rock magazine interview with a card-carrying Purple fanatic Lars Ulrich. He reminisces about Jon Lord, his first time seeing Deep Purple, goes through Machine Head track-by-track, and recalls meeting various members of the band. The interview was apparently conducted around the time of the Re-Machined tribute album, and that was in 2012.

Why do you think Deep Purple were so popular in Europe?

Led Zeppelin never registered on the same level when I was growing up [in Denmark]. Zeppelin somehow seemed to be more of an American thing. There was also a perceived image of them. Ritchie Blackmore was very visual, but he wasn’t posing in a way like Robert Plant with his open shirt, sweaty chest and ‘I’m a God, come back to the hotel room and blow me’ attitude.

Why did you pick When A Blind Man Cries? Is it true that you originally wanted to cover it for 1987’s Garage Days Re-Revisited EP?

No. Back then it was about the riffs and the energy of the music. I think increasingly as we’ve gone along, the covers have become more about what James could kill vocally. I always believed that James could sing a beautiful version of When A Blind Man Cries. So when we were asked to do this project it was a no-brainer.

Read more in Louder Sound.

Ian Paice’s drum kit auction from early March was a resounding success, raising £11,600 for charity. Following up on that, Ian is putting up some memorabilia from the Turning to Crime sessions: a set of drum heads (sold individually) and a couple of sticks used to record the album, and the inmate plaque used in the mugshot for the album artwork.

Ebay links:

• 10″ Tom Drum Head
• 12″ Tom Drum Head
• 13″ Tom Drum Head
• 16″ F Tom Head 1
• 16″ F Tom Head 2
• 14″ Snare Head
• Drum Sticks
• Plaque

The auctions close on Thursday, April 18, 2024, around 8pm British time.

Steve Morse appeared on the Sea of Tranquility podcast talking about the upcoming Dixie Dregs / Steve Morse Band tour, history of Dixie Dregs, prospects for making new music, leaving Deep Purple, Jerry Goodman, possibilities of collaboration with John McLaughlin, and cool new guitar gadgets. Continue Reading »

The 2024 reissue of remixed Machine Head has entered German Official Top 100 Albums chart for the week of April 5 at a respectable #7. Chart history for the album indicates that the 40th anniversary reissue has reached only #56, on October 26, 2012.

Let us know how the reissue did in your country. Continue Reading »

North American tour dates for Deep Purple have been announced. The summer tour will start on August 14, 2024, in Florida, and work its way up the East Coast, with a couple of detours into the heartland, and a couple of token Canadian dates tucked in. This tour is also billed as =1 More Time Tour. Apart from the Durant, OK, gig on August 18, Yes will be supporting for the rest of the shows. The Oklahoma gig is apparently Deep Purple only.

Ticket presales start today, April 9, at 12pm local time. Presale password is SMOKE. On sale to general public on April 12 at 10am local time.

Full details in our calendar.

The record company might insist it’s still Machine Head’s 50th anniversary, while David Coverdale reminds us that it is indeed one of the California Jam. Continue Reading »

It’s official: the upcoming Deep Purple tour of Australia has been cancelled.

It is with great disappointment that Deep Purple will not be performing at the Pandemonium Festival shows (or Newcastle side-show) in Australia this month.

Deep Purple never wants to disappoint, and so this is a difficult piece of news for us to share with our fans.

News reports have already confirmed that Deep Purple will not be part of the revised line up.

Deep Purple hopes to return to Australia very soon.

Further news is due to be announced by the organisers here: https://www.pandemonium.rocks

The band were supposed to appear as the part of a travelling festival / package tour Pandemonium 2024, along with Alice Cooper, Blondie, Placebo, Dead Kennedys, Wolfmother, and several other acts. A couple of weeks ago, tour organizers got themselves into a splash of hot water, when reports started circulating that the events have been cancelled due to poor ticket sales (cheapest general admission tickets for a single day festival are AUS$260, i.e. approx US$170). These reports were vehemently denied by the promoters, yet at the same time the Australian dates were quietly dropped from the official Deep Purple websites without any explanation. That’s when we decided to remove the ‘confirmed’ status from our calendar, but not to mark them as cancelled yet.

On April 5, 2024, Blondie have released a statement citing “…we — Alice Cooper and Blondie…” as still appearing at the festival, followed by the list of featured bands. Deep Purple are conspicuously absent from that list. The message from Deep Purple’s management (as seen above) has followed the next day. The festival website and ticket vending outlets are expected to be updated after the weekend.

Another single — Red Sun — from the upcoming Black Country Communion album V has been posted for your listening pleasure. Continue Reading »