Mansion Global reports that a stately country house in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, once owned by Jon Lord is up for sale. The Burntwood Hall has an eponymous track dedicated to it on Jon’s ’82 Before I Forget album.

Today, Kate and Ian Gethin are the owners of the home. They paid a little over £5 million for the property in 2009, records show.

“The link with Jon Lord often provides an interesting talking point and we have seen photographs of him sitting at a piano in the drawing room,” Ms. Gethin said in a statement. “The piece of music he named after the house is instrumental and I think it really captures the spirit of the property and surrounding countryside. It was obviously an inspirational and relaxing place for him to live—as it has been for us and I’m sure will be for others.”

The house is listed at 15,551 sq ft (1,444.73 m²), located on a 9.81 acres (3.97 Ha) property, and comes with 8 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, and 4 living rooms. The amenities include a bowling alley, a cinema, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a cricket pitch, and an outdoor kitchen. “Guide price” for the estate is £8,500,000.

Thanks to Mansion Global and Savills UK for the info, and to Jim Collins for the heads up.

Tidal magazine is celebrating 50th anniversary of Machine Head with a special:

At the summit of heavy-rock greatness there are three entities: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. The trio is united in bombast but vastly different in style and legacy. Sabbath is immutable, untiring and dark. Led Zeppelin is mythical and flashy and lost in time. And Deep Purple is the band of gentlemen gunslingers, the professionals who streamlined the power of muscle cars into a sonic call to start your engines.

This week marks 50 years of Deep Purple’s crowning commercial achievement, Machine Head, and a revival of affection for its formidable power is overdue. This was Purple’s sixth album in four years — not including a live classical outing! — and the third long-player to feature the fabled second-generation “MkII” lineup with scream virtuoso Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover alongside the founders: guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, organist Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice. Any one of these players alone would have been star material in any other band. Together, they comprised a proper juggernaut.

Continue reading in Tidal.

Sleaze Roxx continues the theme:

In early spring of 1972, Deep Purple unleashed their sixth (and most popular album) on the rock and roll masses en route to their part in a hard rock triumvirate influencing metal to come, along with fellow Brits Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. In comparison, the shelf life of most rock bands expire well before six records but somehow not only were Deep Purple able to hit their prime six releases in, they’ve managed to weather a break up and countless line-up changes to release a whopping 22 studio album including last year’s impressive Turning To Crime. This is astonishing when considering that since the band’s inception in 1968, only drummer Ian Paice remains, having rocked his way through over five decades alongside three different bass players, six vocalists, a couple of keyboard players and a group of highly acclaimed guitarists by the names of Blackmore, Bolin, Satriani and Morse.

Continue reading in Sleaze Roxx.

And so does Music Radar:

London 1969. There’s something in the air. Flower power has wilted. The rock scene is sprouting chest-hair and testicles. Zeppelin are already out of the blocks, Sabbath are on their heels, and at a low-key club gig in June, Deep Purple’s guitar wizard and dark lord, Ritchie Blackmore, is head-hunting the final members for his near-mythical Mk II line-up.

Given the animosity that would later derail the band’s four-year run, perhaps it’s apt that bassist Roger Glover sensed a malign presence in the crowd as he and vocalist Ian Gillan performed with doomed outfit Episode Six that night. “These two shadowy figures arrived,” he recalled in Classic Rock of Blackmore and Purple organist Jon Lord. “I remember being rather scared. They were very dark, broody sort of villains. I felt they were from another world, not mine.”

Continue reading in Music Radar.

Italian language Swiss site tutti.ch features writeup of the story how the album was made. Consult SotW lyrics for the English version. 😉

Wall Street Journal has also jumped on the anniversary bandwagon, but their effort is hidden behind a paywall. Let us know if there’s anything interesting if you’re a subscriber.

In this video tutorial one can learn how to play the Smoke riff with literally zero prior music experience. Which is the majority of people on this planet. Continue Reading »

The Dead Daisies have just announced a massive European tour this summer. It will start in early June and wrap up 2 months later. The dates are a mix of The Daisies supporting the likes of Foreigner, Judas Priest, and Whitesnake in bigger venues and headlining the smaller ones. Most of the shows have been rebooked from 2020 and 2021, so if you still hold the tickets check with the local promoters and/or venues for the validity.

Full details in our calendar.

Joe Satriani recently spoke to Los Angeles radio station KLOS, and within the hour long chat several Purple related topics were touched upon.

The first time I heard ‘Hush,’ it just came to me through the radio at the perfect time of my life. So that just became ingrained in my psyche. It’s part of the soundtrack of me growing up. And hearing that at Jones Beach in the summer… Everything that was happening for a young kid like myself, that was the sound I loved.

As I became a musician and guitar player, I followed the band up until… I guess it was ‘Live in Japan.’ And, and then, of course, by then, the journey had taken me somewhere else, I got into all kinds of music. And I started to kind of drift away from what they were doing. But part of what I consider to be real heavy rock, is what they did, on the first few albums.

And I’ll tell you a funny thing. When I got the call to replace Richie in the band, of course, I turned it down immediately. Because I just thought nobody can replace Ritchie Blackmore. You just can’t do that. And then, of course, I changed my mind, because I thought, ‘I really want to play with these guys.’ And I’m willing to accept abuse from the fans. [laughs] Like get on stage or in a room with these guys and play.

I wound up getting some cassettes from Roger [Glover] a week before I had to fly to Japan to start the tour. And so I was really cramming. And the cassettes I think were from a Stuttgart show where Ritchie had left halfway through the show. So there’s guitar for the first cassette. And then the second cassette comes in, and there’s no guitar. And that’s what I had to learn, the show from there. So I get to Tokyo, and we have one rehearsal in this medium-sized, very acoustically dead room. The band is set up, just like they would be on stage, and I plugged in and we played ‘Highway Star’ and I… I could not believe it.

Because in that room, that band sounded exactly like ‘Machine Head.’ It was freaking me out. They were so good. Each person – John, Ian, Ian, and Roger, they just sounded exactly like they do on that album. And I was so impressed with their musicianship, their kindness, their acceptance of this kid from Long Island, who’s suddenly ending there in the band. It took a long time to wrap my head around that. Every night that we would play, I kept thinking like, ‘Wow, what am I doing in this band? This is, Rock Royalty to me.’ Luckily, I had so much to remember. That first set of shows in Japan was really about me remembering how not to screw up the show. Because they were a well-oiled machine on that tour. And I just wanted to make sure I didn’t screw up.

Thanks to Ultimate Guitar for the heads up and the transcription.

The Dominus Orchestra (we’ve introduced them last month) is hosting a release party for their live album A concert tribute to Paice Ashton Lord’s – Malice in wonderland. The party will be held in a suburb of Athens on April 30, 2022. Drop by for some fun and frolic if you’re in the neighbourhood.

Who: Dominus Orchestra
What: Malice in Wonderland tribute release party
When: April 30, 2022, at 9pm
Where: Johnny Rock bar
Irinis 2, Nea Filadelfia 143 41, Greece
Ειρήνης 2, Νέα Φιλαδέλφεια Αττικής 143 41

Thanks to andreas leutgeb for the info.

Classic Rock has a piece titled The story of Hush, the song that blasted Deep Purple into the US charts and beyond, and it is exactly what it says on the cover. Complete with quotes from the man who at the time was living in the same general neigbourhood, albeit had very little to do with the actual original ’68 version — Roger Glover.

A racing pulse, shrieking organ fills, impossibly catchy chorus… Hush blasted out of speakers in the summer of 1968, taking the newly formed Deep Purple into the upper reaches of the US chart. First recorded by American country-soul singer Billy Joe Royal, who’d been gifted the song by his friend Joe South, Hush came to define early Purple in its mercurial fusion of psychedelic R&B and hard-nosed rock.

Purple’s Hush might not have happened at all, had it not been for Vanilla Fudge’s epic revamp of a Motown classic the previous year.

“Vanilla Fudge had covered a Supremes hit [You Keep Me Hangin’ On] and turned it into something else,” explains Purple bassist Roger Glover. “And that was such an inspiration. That’s what the band tried to do with Hush: put their own spin on it.”

Continue reading at Louder Sound.

David Coverdale will host a new six part show on UK’s Planet Rock radio. The first of the shows will air this coming Saturday, March 12, 2022, at 1pm, with special guest Joe Elliott. Subsequent installments will broadcast the same time weekly until April 16th.

Planet Rock radio is available in the UK on DAB, on their free app, on Freesat, Sky, and Virgin Media TV, and also online. Caveat: in theory, the latter is also available only in the UK and asks to confirm your postal code when trying to access from what it thinks is “abroad”. Little birdie tells us that ‘SW1A 1AA’ works just fine, thankyouverymuch and God save the Queen. 😉

Thanks to Planet Rock for the info.

Graham Bonnet Band has a new album. It is called Day Out in Nowhere, and is due to be released on May 13, 2022, via Frontiers Records.

The album features a number of performance and co-writing guest appearances, including our own Don Airey.

Similar to the first two [Graham Bonnet Band] albums, it will reflect different eras of my career, but with a contemporary twist. I’m also delighted to be playing with the original members of the Graham Bonnet Band: Beth-Ami Heavenstone who has been my constant partner (on and off stage) since meeting back in 2012 and guitarist Conrado Pesinato, who’s innate musical style elicits some of my best songwriting. Conrado and Beth-Ami also produced this record which made the process seamless.

Track listing:

1. Imposter
2. 12 Steps To Heaven
3. Brave New World ft. Roy Z
4. Uncle John
5. Day Out In Nowhere
6. The Sky Is Alive
7. David’s Mom
8. When We’re Asleep ft. Mike Tempesta, John Tempesta
9. It’s Just A Frickin’ Song ft. Don Airey
10. Jester ft. Jeff Loomis, Kyle Hughes
11. Suzy

Graham Bonnet – vocals
Beth-Ami Heavenstone – bass
Conrado Pesinato – guitar
Alessandro Bertoni – keyboards
Shane Gaalaas – drums

Video for the opening track Imposter:

Thanks to BraveWords for the info.

The Dead The are back in the studio, working on a new album tentatively due out by the end of 2022. Brian Tichy is back doing the drum duties.

Brian & Doug hit the LA studios… Set up drums today and gettin' sounds tomorrow before the recording process starts!! 🥁🚀👍🏻
Let the ROCK begin! ⚡️⚡️#TheDeadDaisies #InTheStudio pic.twitter.com/O2sqjDADpZ

— The Dead Daisies (@TheDeadDaisies) March 7, 2022

Officially day 1 in the studio for the new Dead Daisies record! We can’t wait for you to hear it! 🎵🤟🏼 pic.twitter.com/q6z4XLCFwv

— The Dead Daisies (@TheDeadDaisies) March 8, 2022

The have also released another live track in the Live From Daisyland series — it is Bustle and Flow recorded last November at the Rock City in Nottingham, UK.

Thanks to Blabbermouth and Gary Poronovich for the info.