In case you’ve forgotten it, we repeat it once again — one simply can not “delete” something from ’em ol’ interwebs. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

Case in point: apparently the track listing for Deep Purple’s new album went down some sort of trade database, probably with the notice not to publish it until the D-day. Also apparently, some French retailers didn’t get the latter memo and published it. Just as apparently, Powers to Be™ tried to delete said info from the ‘net in the attempt to prevent the spread. To no avail.

Anyhow, it appears that the new album Turning to Crime will be a collection of covers:

1. Volume 1
2. 7 And 7 Is (Love)
3. Rockin’ Pneumonia And The Boogie Woogie Flu (Huey “Piano” Smith)
4. Oh Well (Fleetwood Mac)
5. Jenny Take A Ride! (Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels)
6. Watching The River Flow (Bob Dylan)
7. Let The Good Times Roll (Ray Charles & Quincy Jones)
8. Dixie Chicken (Little Feat)
9. Shapes Of Things (The Yardbirds)
10. The Battle Of New Orleans (Lonnie Donegan/Johnny Horton)
11. Lucifer (Bob Seger System)
12. White Room (Cream)
13. Caught In The Act (Medley)

Discuss.

This post has been brought to you by our Department of Unsubstantiated Rumours. Thanks to Andrey Gusenkov and Blabbermouth for the heads up.

David Coverdale has celebrated his 70th birthday in his own style, being interviewed for the ABC Audio:

I’m going to ignore it. It’s not 70, by the way, it’s 69 plus one, so you can stick that in your old pipe…and light it. But the circumstances…just snuck up on me, and I’m just simply not prepared emotionally.

Read more in ruralradio.com.

Thanks to Yvonne for the info. Photo: DC’s twitter.

Geir Myklebust specifically for the audience of our site reprints in his blog the questionnaires that members of Deep Purple Mark 2 have answered back in 1970. These originally appeared in the November 21, 1970 edition of the New Musical Express.

Professional name: Jon Lord
Real name: Jon Lord
Birthdate: 9th June 1941
Birthplace: Leicester
Personal points: 6ft 1/2 in. 12 st, green eyes, brown hair
Parents` names: Miriam, Reginald

Professional name: Richie Blackmore
Real name: Richie Blackmore
Birthdate: 14.4.45
Birthplace: Weston-Super-Mare
Personal points: 5ft. 11in, 10st, green eyes, black hair
Parents names: Personal

Read more of Jon’s and the ever so private Ritchie’s answers. Ian, Ian, & Roger to follow, hopefully.

[Update Sep 21]: Gillan’s answers posted.

[Update Sep 22]: So are Paicey’s.

[Update Sep 23]: …and Roger’s. His most memorable one liner:

Biggest disappointment in career: They all seem big at the time but they`re forgotten now

Many thanks to Geir Myklebust for this labour of love.

In an interview to Geoff Barton of Classic Rock, Glenn Hughes recalls his days of blow and hookers more blow. With champagne on top. And a little seance in between.

“I was loaded on coke and the champagne was flowing. But I’ve never smoked a lot of pot, so my memories of those times are pretty vivid,” the bassist/vocalist declares. Hughes’s cocaine addiction got so serious it threatened to destroy him. But he pulled himself back from the brink and has now been clean and sober for 30 years. Let those vivid memories commence.

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Ritchie Blackmore

When I got the gig as bass player in Deep Purple I was only aged 21. We went to Clearwell Castle to work on the Burn album. Ritchie rigged up my room with hidden speakers. In the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of all these ghost noises. I was scared shitless! The next night me, Baz Marshall [Purple roadie] and Ritchie held a séance. Baz was a farmer and he’d recently lost one of his cows.

We started the séance and suddenly the room echoed with the sound of a cow mooing. Only this time it wasn’t a wind-up! Blackmore freaked and ran out. When it came down to it, he was a bit of a scaredy-cat. But Ritchie was the king of the prank – we all know that. Even today, he always carries a water pistol around with him. I have it on the greatest authority.

Continue reading in Louder Sound.

Thanks to Gary Poronovich for the info.

A vintage interview with Ian Gillan by Allan McDougall originally published in the New Musical Express on November 7, 1970. This was taken at the Olympia in Paris, where the band had played on November 1.

Roger is a fantastic bass player.

I talked to Ian Gillan about Roger and he agreed.

“Yeah, he doesn’t get so much glory as Jon or Ritchie, because Rog is very unobtrusive. The rest of us are dead flash on stage, but Rog just choogles along quietly on bass, keeping a rock-steady beat for little Ian, and keeping Jon and Ritchie up to scratch with chord progressions when they’re freaking out all over the place.”

Read more in Music history for those who are able to read.

Thanks to Geir Myklebust for posting this.

Some time in early August Ian Gillan spoke to the Tales from the Road podcast hailing from India. (Low key does not even begin to describe it — they have grand total of 23 subscribers on Youtube.) It is another one of those lengthy video chats courtesy of the pandemic. When pressed about studio plans during the touring downtime, Big Ian quipped that “There were lots of things going on”, but he “can’t talk about it quite yet”.

Thanks to Yvonne for the info.

Rolling Stone magazine is on a family tree streak with an in-depth profile of Neil Murray for their Unknown Legends series.

Was the cover of Lovehunter created to cause controversy? It’s pretty out there.
I guess to an extent. But it was really more of a management idea than anything to do with the band. I think out of anybody, I was the least in favor of it. It was kind of a bit too heavy metal and not representative of the music of the band, in my opinion. It’s a popular image for merchandise and stuff, but it’s rather adolescent, let’s put it like that.

In a way, it’s better than the next album, Ready an’ Willing, where they just took a bunch of photos from the back of the Trouble album, made them into silhouettes, and stuck a picture of Bernie in there from somewhere. I thought that was real cheap. No spirit at all.

There was another idea that came before that. I’m not sure if I saw it, but it was chucked out by David, I think. It was a kind of stopgap thing, anyway.

More to the point, the band and David’s lyrics and how he was onstage were getting criticized a lot. The rock press was very much post-punk, “let’s not be demeaning to women” kind of thing. David almost took that as a red rag to a bull. “OK, I’m going to do it even more because this is not to be taken seriously. This is how we are. Deal with it.”

Read more in the Rolling Stone. Seriously, go and read the whole thing. Yes, it is long. But that’s what makes it good — lots of great insight into the bands and people he’s been working with over the years.

Various members of the band said in the interviews that all thing permitting they would like to go to the studio some time this summer. Check.

There have been a conspicuous silence from the band’s camp in the recent weeks/months. Check.

Someone has leaked today the collage you see above. Check.

The turningtocrime.com domain has been anonymously registered on July 30, 2021, with a German provider. It is now being redirected to a not (yet?) existing page on the record company website. The same company that has a track record of whimsical promotion campaigns. Check.

Those are the facts that we know.

[Update Sep 1]: Said page on the record company website has gone live and now contains a countdown to something happening at 16:01 CET on October 6, 2021.

Thanks to Darker Than Blue for the image, that they in turn attribute to Mathieu Pinard / Rock Hard magazine.

Take a heavy rock song and turn into a lullaby? We could totally see how this could be done to Temple of the King, but Stargazer, Heaven and Hell, or The Last in Line? Surely not. Until someone did… Continue Reading »

The online successor to the Classic Rock magazine has a track-by-track guide feature on Burn with contributions from Coverdale, Hughes, and Paice.

Burn

David Coverdale: I wrote about half a dozen sets of lyrics for this song – I was that keen! The final words to Burn – and also the words to the Stormbringer song for the next album, for idle curiosity – came about because I was just trying to please Ritchie [Blackmore], I guess. These lyrics aren’t the stuff I would normally write; I looked upon them as science-fiction poems.

Glenn Hughes: Blackmore came up with that classic rock riff, but there’s a lot of talk about it being ripped from something that was written in the forties. [George Gershwin’s] Fascinating Rhythm, wasn’t it? I think it could be from that. Every artist borrows from other artists – but this is a classic example of where Ritchie may have taken something from the forties or fifties.

Ian Paice: It’s a pretty well-played track. It’s got a rapid pace about it. I’ve always said that playing fast is a lot easier than playing slow, because if you play something fast and you screw up, nobody really hears it. But if you play slow and you screw something up, then everybody hears it. I think that as an opening statement from the Mark III line-up, it’s pretty cool.

Continue reading in Louder Sound.

Thanks to Yvonne for the info.