This deserves promotion to a separate post. Some historical TV footage have appeared on YouTube.

Montreux, April 1971, live and interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctG-EpxzYOQ

More Montreux ’71 and some Mk1 live in Bern, 1968:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0jOFp6ck0I

Thanks to TRambo55 for the upload and to ormandy for pointing it out.

I want to share my experience at Deep Purple gig last night at Via Funchal, São Paulo.

This is the 4th live Purple concert I attend. The first was at Ginasio do Ibirapuera 1992 (if I’m not wrong) Joe Lynn Turner era and the last three at The Rapture At The Deep Tour. Tom Brasil (november 2006), Credicard Hall (february 2008) and yesterday at Via Funchal.

Photos by Carolina M.A.

This is the first time I can take my 14 old daughter to see the Purple live. There are a lot of families with teenagers and even children as well. And the kids reactions after the show usually are: “Uow!!! This guys are really great!”

The setlist is like expected, very similar to the ones at Argentina and last three years. I really would like to hear some more Morse era songs, but we can’t blame the band. Every time they started a old classic the crowd went nuts.

The Battle Rages On get a new arrangement with very heavy keyboards by Airey. Gillans voice was in great shape, but we cant say the same about his lungs. He cough a lot and even missed some phrases here and there, but give his blood on the stage and the band share the usually fun to play with public.

Since the gig at rain in Cosquin, Argentina, Gillan is suffering with a cough and I think the extreme heat here – were the hottest days in many years, even we natives are suffering – don’t help too much.

Anyway a really great show like only Deep Purple can do!

Setlist

Highway Star
Things I Never Said
Into The Fire
Strange Kind Of Woman
Rapture Of The Deep
Mary Long
Contact Lost
Well Dressed Guitar
Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming
The Battle Rages On
Wring That Neck
Airey Solo
Perfect Strangers
Space Truckin’
Smoke On The Water

Encore:
Hush
Black Night

Photos by Carlos Coca.

Steve Morse was a special guest at the 35th anniversary gala for Kansas that took place on February 7 in Topeka, KS. Classic Rock Revisited has a full account of the evening:

Former Kansas guitarist, and current Deep Purple axe-slinger, Steve Morse, joined his former group onstage performing the blazing “Musicatto” from 1986’s Power album. Morse stuck around for the emotional rendition of two songs, performed intertwined with each other, from the band’s underappreciated In the Spirit of Things album. “Ghosts” and “Rainmaker,” both penned by vocalist/keyboardist Steve Walsh, Steve Morse and legendary producer Bob Ezrin, were one of the highlights of the evening. Walsh sang his heart out on the song and the emotional refrain of ‘Rainmaker’ filled the arena with energy.

At the end of the song, Morse waved to the crowd and left the stage…

And later in the show:

Williams and Livgren played the intro to “Dust in the Wind.” The surprise of the evening came during the violin solo. Tonight, the Kansas faithful were treated to a duet on the violin between David Ragsdale and Steve Morse. Morse, looking much less confident with a small piece of wood and a bow than he does with an electric guitar, played standing next to the accomplished Ragsdale.

Thanks to Lukasz Slowinski for the info.

Over The Rainbow have finished their trek across the Eastern Europe and I must admit that although the band still has a long way to go in terms of mutual understanding on stage, the progress from the first shows is nothing short of staggering.
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Back in early February, Ian Paice flew to Moscow to do a drum clinic. A TV crew was present at the event and the footage have appeared on Russian national TV. Recording of this was recently uploaded to YouTube:
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DEEP PURPLE – ‘HISTORY, HITS & HIGHLIGHTS’ 2DVD

Containing a wealth of historical 1960s and 1970s footage, Eagle Rock Entertainment will release the new Deep Purple 2DVD set “History, Hits & Highlights 1968-76” on June 1, 2009 [Cat No EREDV726].

According to YourWayToMusic.com, the new DVD set will combine full performances and a small number of archive interviews featuring much rare and previously unreleased live, studio and TV footage. As such, this DVD-set promises to be the definitive collection of the early years of Deep Purple.

The double DVD will include many never-before-seen (but often rumoured) live clips from the first four line-ups of Deep Purple – including “Wring That Neck” from Bilzen August 1969 (some of the earliest Mark 2 live footage), “Mandrake Root” and “Wring That Neck” from Paris 1970 (where you can watch Jon Lord conduct ‘surgery’ with a drum stick on the innards of his Hammonds!), the Fireball writing session film from 1971, and the excellent Leeds Polytechnic Project featuring Mark 3 filmed live in London in 1974 (by a Leeds Polytechnic student, hence the title) and much more [see below for the full tracklisting].

Clocking in at nearly five hours and with many full length performances, “History, Hits & Highlights 1968-76” promises to be essential for Deep Purple fans. It is packaged as a double amaray case inside a slipcase with lavishly illustrated booklet of memorabilia.

The DVD covers the initial phase of the band’s existence through four different line-ups from 1968 to 1976. This era produced the classic Deep Purple albums “In Rock”, “Fireball”, “Burn” and “Machine Head” that created their legend and still provide the backbone of their live sets today – despite the ongoing commercial success of the band post their 1984 reunion.

TRACKLISTING – HISTORY, HITS & HIGHLIGHTS 1968-76

Disc One
– 2hrs 24mins

HISTORY – 20 minute history of Deep Purple from 1968 to 1976.

HITS – full performances:

Mark One: (Evans, Blackmore, Lord, Simper, Paice)
1. Help
2. Hush
3. Wring That Neck

Mark Two: (Gillan, Blackmore, Lord, Glover, Paice)
4. Hallelujah
5. Mandrake Root
6. Speed King
7. Black Night
8. Child In Time
9. Lazy
10. Strange Kind Of Woman
11. Fireball Writing Session
12. Fireball
13. Demon’s Eye
14. No No No
15. Into The Fire
16. Never Before
17. Highway Star
18. Smoke On The Water

Mark Three: (Coverdale, Blackmore, Lord, Hughes, Paice)
19. Burn
20. Mistreated

Mark Four: (Coverdale, Bolin, Lord, Hughes, Paice)
21. Love Child
22. You Keep On Moving

Disc Two
– 2hrs 23mins

HIGHLIGHTS
– bonus performances and interviews

Mark One
1. And The Address (Playboy TV)

Mark Two
2. Wring That Neck (Bilzen Jazz Festival 1969)
3. Mandrake Root (“Pop Deux” Paris Concert 1970)
4. Wring That Neck (“Pop Deux” Paris Concert 1970)
5. Black Night (Promo Clip)
6. No No No (Take 1) (Rockpalast Rehearsal Session)
7. No No No (Take 2) (Rockpalast Rehearsal Session)

Mark Three
8. “Jt Nuit” – French TV 1974
9. Burn (Leeds Polytechnic Project 1974)
10. Interview (Leeds Polytechnic Project 1974)
11. Space Truckin’/Interview (Leeds Polytechnic Project 1974)

Mark Four
12. New Zealand TV Documentary (Nov 1975)
13. Smoke On The Water (New Zealand TV)

14. Tony Edwards (Deep Purple’s manager) French TV Interview 1976

The Highway Star will try to confirm the origin of the tracks not identified in the above track list from Eagle Rock.

António Freitas, host of long-running daily show “Alta Tensao” on Portuguese radio station Antena 3 and a contributor to the magazine LOUD!, has posted an interview he conducted with Gillan. Big Ian talks about One Eye To Morocco. The interview is in English and you can view the it at antoniofreitas.com (clip is right on the front page so far, look under “Hypertensão: entrevistas (interviews)”; and no, I have no idea how to turn off the annoying background broadcast). Stop the “Alta Tensão/RTP Antena 3 : Emissões” player on the right to turn off the background music (thanks to 69).

The interview is actually quite entertaining and at the end Ian gets talking about the state of the new Purple recording and into some hilarious anecdotage.

Thanks to Mike Garrett for the info.

A week after it’s release, the remastered Stormbringer didn’t make it all the way into the BBC Top 40, but landed at a quite respectable #2 on Top 40 Rock Albums UK chart, displacing Chinese Democracy by Guns n’ Roses.

Glenn Hughes apparently did some promo legwork for this release. His interview to the GTFM Rock Show on March 1 can be heard online (MP3, approx 8 minutes) at the Rock Of Ages.

Thanks to Bill Leslie and Mike Garrett for the info.

Recently we at The Highway Star were contacted by a person who was concerned that one of the comments on our site contains an untrue statement and asked if the comment in question could be removed. We refused to remove it, for a variety of good reasons, and offered our help in getting in touch with the author of the comment to sort things out.

Which got me thinking…

After our Bullets flying editorial was published, some of you started complaining that “if you have nothing good to say, say nothing” contradicts freedom of speech. No, it does not.

With freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility for your own words, for what you say. It doesn’t matter where you say it. It’s all the same Internet. It doesn’t matter if you’re hiding behind a nickname (putting a real name to a nickname is often a lot easier than many of you might think).

And everything that you say on the Internet stays there forever. One can remove something from a web site, but no one can “unpublish” something from the Internet as a whole. Even if we decide tomorrow to close the shop and destroy all the data on The Highway Star, it will make little difference. Everything you can see on our site has already been crawled, archived and indexed by Google, Yahoo, dozens of other search engines, by the Wayback Machine, and probably by thousands, if not millions, other less obvious places on the ‘net. Repeatedly.

Bruce Schneier (a computer the computer security guru) writes about this phenomena:

Welcome to the future, where everything about you is saved. A future where your actions are recorded, your movements are tracked, and your conversations are no longer ephemeral. A future brought to you not by some 1984-like dystopia, but by the natural tendencies of computers to produce data.

Increasingly, you leave a trail of digital footprints throughout your day. Once you walked into a bookstore and bought a book with cash. Now you visit Amazon, and all of your browsing and purchases are recorded. You used to buy a train ticket with coins; now your electronic fare card is tied to your bank account. Your store affinity cards give you discounts; merchants use the data on them to reveal detailed purchasing patterns.

Computers are mediating conversation as well. Face-to-face conversations are ephemeral. Years ago, telephone companies might have known who you called and how long you talked, but not what you said. Today you chat in e-mail, by text message, and on social networking sites. You blog and you Twitter. These conversations – with family, friends, and colleagues – can be recorded and stored.

Note: they are being recorded and stored. Bruce wrote that piece for the BBC and probably didn’t want to scare the wide audience too much.

It used to be too expensive to save this data, but computer memory is now cheaper. Computer processing power is cheaper, too; more data is cross-indexed and correlated, and then used for secondary purposes. What was once ephemeral is now permanent.

Your future has no privacy, not because of some police-state governmental tendencies or corporate malfeasance, but because computers naturally produce data.

To which I must add that police-state governmental tendencies and corporate malfeasance don’t exactly help matters either.

Cardinal Richelieu famously said: “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply.

(Go and read the whole thing, if you never paused and thought about it, it’s very illuminating. And yes, there are people who try to put a positive spin on these developments.)

Now, imagine 10 years from now your prospective employer judging you by the comments you have written on some music blog back in 2009.

We all here at The Highway Star value your privacy like our own. But the day will come when someone knocks on the door and we will no longer be able to protect you. And let’s be honest, we’re all human beings, with all the usual weaknesses. If we think your behaviour in the comments was less than commendable, we might be less motivated to fight for you.

With the lawmakers and judiciary increasingly meddling with the things they apparently do not understand, this day will come sooner rather than later. You’ll know that the day of reckoning has come when the innocent warning below our comment box changes to “You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law.” And the brave new world shall begin.

Behave yourselves, it’s in your own best interest.

Ian Gillan’s new solo album One Eye To Morocco will be released in Europe on March 6 and in the UK on March 23.

“It all started in Cracow, Poland, late December 2005.

In a café in where Oscar Schindler had been active during dark times in the mid-20th century, I sat across the table from my friend Tommy Djiubinski who was telling me all about it. He was deep into this amazing story when a woman caught my eye as she walked behind Tommy. Quite naturally I followed her graceful movement; I was drawn by her magnetism.

‘Sorry, what were you saying?’
‘Ah, Ian you have one eye to Morocco.’

This meant I was not concentrating on the matter in hand; I apologised and we carried on.
Later I was curious about the expression so Tommy gave me the full version…You have one eye to Morocco and the other to The Caucasus.

We could only guess the origins but agreed the epigram meant being distracted from the party line by the lure of something exotic. So I filed it away in Incomplete Proverbs, Vague Maxims or more likely Interesting Phrases.

Three years later, due to a family illness, there was an unexpected break in the Deep Purple tour schedule. I made some calls and we discussed making a new album. When we finished counting there were 38 songs in various stages of completion. Roughly half of these were discounted because they need too much work in the allotted time span, and the rest were put on the ‘Short List’.

There was one particular song, untitled and without lyrics, that I felt should be the nucleus of the project. The song was the criterion by which all the rest would be judged and so the process was made easier by having a yardstick or even an interesting phrase – Aha! ‘One Eye to Morocco’ became the title of that song, and the song became the title track of the album.”

Photo by © 2009 Tommaso Mei

Tracklisting:

Normal CD:

1. One Eye To Morocco
2. No Lotion For That
3. Don’t Stop
4. Change My Ways
5. Girl Goes To Show
6. Better Days
7. Deal With It
8. Ultimate Groove
9. The Sky Is Falling Down
10. Texas State Of Mind
11. It Would Be Nice
12. Always The Traveller

Ltd. Edition CD:
Limited digi-pack with CD with exclusive track: “Lonely Days”

12″ Vinyl Gatefold

7″ vinyl single (signed) & CD album