Edel is preparing to release a remixed version of Rapture of the Deep for the 20th anniversary of the album. The new mix was done under Roger Glover’s supervision, and mastered at Hamburg’s renowned Chameleon Studios.
Bonus tracks include previously unreleased studio jams and instrumental takes, recorded during the writing sessions for the album. Among them is Closing Note — an instrumental piece by Steve Morse. The bonus tracks are said to be exclusive to the physical formats, and will not be available for streaming or download. The liner notes include insights from Roger Glover and Classic Rock’s Geoff Barton. Artwork has also been revised with the new colour scheme and embossed print.
We are still awaiting any additional information from the label, but the release already started popping up on online retailer listings, where one can encounter 2CD, and 3LP in either solid black or translucent blue vinyl.
Rapture of the Deep 2025 track list:
Money Talks
Things I Never Said
Rapture of the Deep
Clearly Quite Absurd
MTV
Back to Back
Wrong Man
Girls like that
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
Don’t Let Go
Junkyard Blues
Before Time Began
MTV (Studio Rehearsal)
Money Talks (Studio Rehearsal)
Back to Back (Studio Rehearsal)
Before Time Began (Studio Rehearsal)
Closing Note (Studio Rehearsal)
According to Amazon UK, release date is set in for August 29, 2025.
[Update June 9]: The press release was circulated today, and it doesn’t add much to what we’ve reported above. The remixed version of Junkyard Blues was released as a single to go with the announcement:
Thanks to Trond Strøm, Tim Summers, Doug MacBeath, Amit Roy, AndreA, Uwe Hornung, steve4422, Tobias Janaschke, and everybody else (whom we forgot to mention explicitly) for the info.
Smoke on the Water was featured and dissected on the recent episode of BBC Radio 4 show Add to playlist that was on the air on May 30, 2025. The premise of the show is to introduce several pieces of music and find links between them.
Composer Gavin Higgins and soprano Claire Booth take us from a massive Wembley chant to a ground-breaking early rap by a famous white rock group as they join Jeffrey Boakye and Anna Phoebe to add five more tracks to the playlist.
Producer: Jerome Weatherald
Presented with musical direction by Jeffrey Boakye and Anna Phoebe
The five tracks in this week’s playlist:
Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond
The Alien by Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow
Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple
In a Foolish Dream by Stravinsky
Rapture by Blondie
The episode can be heard on BBC Sounds in the UK and BBC Audio outside. For the impatient, the Smoke bit starts at around 20’40” into the show.
There’s a new book on Deep Purple being published, and this time it is a scholarly tome in the Studies in Popular Music series, published by Equinox Publishing. It is called after the last classic Mark II album Who Do We Think They Are? and was edited by Dr. Andy R. Brown (which implies that it’s not a monograph, but a collection of contributions by different authors). The covered scholarly topics, among others, are said to include Ian Gillan’s influence on the operatic voice in heavy metal and the voice/guitar duels in Made in Japan.
Who Do We Think We Are (1973) was the fourth and final studio album of the Mk2 Deep Purple line-up of Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Jon Lord and Ian Paice. At the time of release, Purple were the most successful, top-grossing, stadium-touring heavy rock band on the planet; a position confirmed by the virtuoso performances captured on the double live album, Made in Japan (1972), and the Billboard chart success of the double A-side Live/Studio single “Smoke on the Water.” The idea for the title of the album came from drummer Paice, who told Melody Maker that the band received “piles of passionate letters either violently against or pro-the group”, with the angry one’s typically beginning: “Who do Deep Purple think they are?” This quote appears as part of the album artwork, a collage of press-clippings that dramatically contrast the success of the band with the controversy that surrounded it, particularly negative reviews of the band smashing up their equipment as the finale to their live performances.
Like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, Purple were derided as proponents of “heavy metal” rock. But, as this volume’s innovative and internationally recognised Metal Music scholars argue, it was their success in communicating – over the course of a series of ground-breaking studio albums and especially in live performance – with a new, younger rock audience that helped to define the genre template we now recognise as “classic” heavy metal. Without this success, heavy metal would not have developed in the way that it did nor forged a lasting bond with its audience amidst the controversy which surrounded its rise; a controversy which centred on the way it choose to communicate with this audience, through extremes of volume and dramatic musicianship, particularly live.
What:Who Do We Think They Are?, edited by Andy R. Brown When: September 1, 2025 Where:Equinox Publishing ISBN-13: 9781800506367 (hardback) | 9781800506374 (paperback) | 9781800506381 (e-book) Price: £75.00 / $100.00 (hardback or institutional e-book) | £26.95 / $34.00 (paperback or personal e-book) Format: 234 × 156 mm, 320 pages
Glenn Hughes’ new album Chosen is set for release on September 5, 2025, via Frontiers Records.
Songwriting is deeply personal to me, and I generally write and record when I have something to say. It’s been nine years since I recorded my last solo album, “Resonate”.
While there have been recordings and collaborations with other artists, since 2016, when writing “CHOSEN”, I went back to my life drawing board, writing about the human condition, love, hope, faith and acceptance. I write about how I feel on the inside and not externally. My life is lived from within, in the present moment. It’s an album of soul food, and I’ve never been so grateful, right here, on planet earth. Music is the healer!
A video single for the title track has been released today to accompany the announcement:
BraveWords have published the second part of their interview with Glenn Hughes. For whatever reason, there’s considerable overlap of content with the first part, so if you get a sense of déjà vu reading it, you’re not alone.
BraveWords: Okay. So picture you applying for a new job, just fictitiously, and you have a resume. What would you put as like your top three moments on your resumé?”
Hughes: “Well, you want the music where just the band Trapeze, before you were born, in 1972.”
BraveWords: ’67. I was five.
Hughes: “Well, what you’re asking me, what are my top five? That album for me was the moment Glenn Hughes found his voice, the voice we all know now. As the moment before Burn, it was the album before Burn when you could hear there’s some difference here with Ian Gillan. So for me, you want the music where just the band was the big ‘Here comes Glenn! Here comes Glenn Hughes’, you know. And I think, I think Burn, of course, the first big album with Purple. Hughes/Thrall in 1982, a big musical album for me. Soul Mover, 2005.”
Guitar Player magazine publishes an online tutorial from Steve Morse My 5 go-to ideas for playing and writing.
In this exclusive video lesson, Steve showcases five conceptual and technical approaches that he employs when improvising or arranging guitar parts. These include melodic arpeggios, 16th-note patterns, sextuplet-based picking, melody with ostinato bass and rhythmic variations. To close, he brings all these together for a final long cohesive etude that is both technically challenging and musically fulfilling.
German site metal1.info has a new interview with Glenn Hughes. He talks about various aspects of his career — joining Purple, working with Iommi, frustration with the scarce touring schedule of Black Country Communion, etc. Here’s his take on leaving Dead Daisies:
Let’s move on. Dead Daisies. You left the band in 2023 after having recorded two albums together. How did that split happen? Why did you leave?
I left because, number one, they asked me not to do anything else but DEAD DAISIES. And I get offers to do things all the time, and I’d have to decline. But I met with Joe about doing “V”, and it was either continue with the Dead Daisies or do “V”, so I decided to do “V”. We’re all good, we’re friends with everybody. I left very kindly, it was all cool, no problems. It was very, “Thank you, it was great. Now it’s time for me to go.”
We’ve reported last month that Glenn Hughes contributed vocals for the new track I Wanna Play My Guitar by the new band started by Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, appropriately called the SatchVai Band. Well, it has occurred to someone that both Black Country Communion and the SatchVai Band are booked to play at the Hellfest in France on the same day this year — Saturday, June 21. This question was posed to Satriani in a recent interview:
Finally, the SatchVai Band dates take in Hellfest, and I couldn’t help but notice that Glenn Hughes who sings on ‘I Wanna Play My Guitar’ is on the bill with Black Country Communion the same day; might you coax him on stage to join you?
Yes! Yeah, we’ve already talked about it, and I was just texting Jason [Bonham]. It’ll be a great coming together of a lot of good musician friends, our circle. And yeah, Glenn already, boy, I think a month ago we already started talking about it, so yeah, hopefully it works out, timing-wise. I haven’t seen our schedule yet that day, but we will be playing that song, and Glenn has been officially invited to come out and start the set with that, so hopefully it all works. Festivals are crazy, and we have to play a short set that day. As I’ve said before, you’ve got to get on, you’ve got to get off, so we’ll see what happens. Fingers crossed on that one.
The members of the latter days Whitesnake Joel Hoekstra, Marco Mendoza, Tommy Aldridge, Michele Luppi, and Dino Jelusić will perform under the Whitesnake Experience moniker at the 58th Zaječar Guitar Festival in Serbia. The festival runs August 28-30, 2025, and the band will be performing on the 29th. And yes, they apparently have Coverdale’s blessing to do so.
This performance is said to be the only concert, exclusive to the festival, but… Y’know, we’ve already had Rainbow without Ritchie Blackmore touring, so nothing would surprise us cynics. 😉