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Vincent Price the other day seemingly opened a floodgate, and a generous helping of live clips from 2013 got posted today. We are talking, of course, about From The Setting Sun (Live In Wacken), which was a sibling release for To The Rising Sun (In Tokyo). Continue Reading »
In January 2024, Louder Sound reprinted a Classic Rock feature on Deep Purple Mark 4, which apparently slipped under our proverbial radar. It was penned by Geoff Barton for the issue 58 (October 2003) of the magazine.
“I must say that the last tour for me was horrendously wrong,” Glenn Hughes says today of Deep Purple’s infamously doomed Mk IV line-up world tour. “Regardless of whether Tommy was a good choice as a replacement for Ritchie, there was a total line drawn around Deep Purple.
“It was me and Tommy, it was Coverdale sort of in the middle, and it was Lordy and Paicey on the other side – the two guys who were definitely not happy with our behaviour. I don’t know, man. Something happened when Tommy joined the band.”
Tommy Bolin had been playing guitar with Deep Purple for maybe four months when I noticed the first cracks in his relationship with the rest of band beginning to appear.
It’s early afternoon on a fine Indian summer’s day in September 1975. A 20-year-old cub reporter from British music weekly Sounds – that’s me – is standing in the foyer of London’s Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn, hanging on the house telephone, trying to call Bolin’s room.
Continue reading in Louder Sound.
Thanks to Uwe Hornung for the heads-up.
Simon McBride talks about touring with Deep Purple with his guitar company PRS. Sounds like a thinly veiled commercial, don’t say you haven’t been warned. Continue Reading »
This is a 1977 vintage interview with the country gentleman Ian Gillan, taken during the IGB Japanese tour. Continue Reading »
For no apparent reason, the record company has posted a live clip of Vincent Price from To The Rising Sun (In Tokyo), released almost 10 years ago. Continue Reading »
Louder Sound has a recent (conducted in November 2024) interview with Ian Gillan about his Gillan the band years. Big Ian seems frank, not avoiding unpleasant topics, and does not mince words much.
Gillan the band’s forerunners the Ian Gillan Band had come to an end when keyboard player Colin Towns brought in a song called Fighting Man that was ridiculed by the rest of the group.
The end of the Ian Gillan Band had been coming. Things weren’t right, but it was so difficult because I was working with my heroes. I idolised Gus [bassist Johnny Gustafson, ex-The Merseybeats, Roxy Music] for being so talented. We needed to get back on track, but Ray Fenwick [guitar] and Mark Nauseef [drums] were happy with that jazzier type of rock, though I wanted to play rock’n’roll. Fighting Man was a catalyst. It was a simple song but it had a certain profundity, and when those two took the mickey out of it, that was it for me.
So you sacked yourself from your own band?
Yeah. I just left.
In forming Gillan, Colin Towns had to be there.
Colin was pivotal to it all. Rock’n’roll is good, but you also need a simple platform for virtuosity to shine. Colin kept that gravitas. He added texture and dynamics along with all of those musical elements.
Bernie Tormé was such a great guitarist.
Exactly. We had five guys that played equally well but Bernie was the one that stood out. I had spotted him some time earlier. He was amazing, and I marked him down for the future.
Shaven-headed man-mountain bassist John McCoy was almost a cartoonish character.
John was great. He made a big impact, just what we needed. He offset Bernie on the other side [of the stage].
Continue reading in Louder Sound.
Another massive (re-)release from Whitesnake — an 8-CD box set of live material, all of which has been previously released separately. Titled Access All Areas: Live, it is lavishly packaged in an imitation travel case, and is slated for release on April 25th, 2025, on Rhino. The material included was previously released in the following sets, all from this century:
The Music Universe has complete track listings, in case you wanna peruse further details.
Thanks to Blabbermouth for the info and to Uwe for the heads-up.
We were wrong, and the classic Gillan video bonanza continues unabashedly. In this instalment: frenetic miming to New Orleans at the Top of the Pops, dated March 26th, 1981. Continue Reading »
Don Airey appeared on the Sonic Perspectives podcast, promoting his upcoming solo album. The is also a fair bit of talk about his day job and the whole career. Continue Reading »
Elizabeth the opera singer is getting her Dio fix by listening to Man on the Silver Mountain, and rather surprisingly, it is the album version. Continue Reading »
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing