The Dead Daisies recap their most eventful year of 2022 Continue Reading »

The latest issue (#35) of the Rock Candy magazine has Long Live Rock’n’Roll as the cover story, with a 10-page feature inside (you can preview it here). Also in the same issue: 4 pages on Ritchie Blackmore himself, plus another 4 pages on Joe Lynn Turner.

Individual issues and subscriptions are available in both digital and dead tree form from the publisher.

Thanks to our editor emeritus Benny Holmström for the info.

After a couple of years of the pandemic induced hiatus, we not have more or less concrete tour dates for 2023. This is our traditional annual preview.

Steve Morse will kick off the new year with participation in the G4 Experience in Las Vegas on January 3-7. He also has a handful of dates booked in the Northeastern States at the end of February. These will be the first Steve Morse Band performances in quite a while.

Ian Paice will continue playing with tribute band Purpendicular. They have three dates booked in Sweden at the end of January. All other joint shows have been postponed until September, ostensibly due to the drummer being engaged elsewhere.

Deep Purple themselves will resume touring in February with a couple of warm up shows in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Then off to Florida — first on a cruise sailing from Fort Lauderdale on February 13, returning on the 17th, followed by another couple of shows locally. They will perform 4 dates in Japan in mid-March. There are so far very much unconfirmed appearances with the “touring festival” Masters/Monsters of Rock in South America in April, headlined by KISS and Scorpions. Fun fact: the show on April 30th in Santiago, Chile, will be held at the same stadium where the lighting tower infamously collapsed in 1997. The band will then move on to the annual tour of European open air venues starting in June.

Happy New Purple Year, everybody!

The official YouTube channel for the band has posted 50 live tracks from selected 1971/72 bootlegs. Those are tagged as a Live Archive 1972 Vol. 1 playlist and said archive includes:

• Dagenham 19/02/1972
• Royal Albert Hall 04/10/1971
• Wolverhampton 20/02/1972
• San Bernardino 28/01/1972
• New York 31/08/1972
• West Palm Beach, Florida, 14/07/1972
• Leeds 29/09/1972
• Quebec City 06/04/1972 (with Randy California on guitar)

Thanks to Tobias Janaschke and Bo Olsson for the heads up.

Bristol 24/7 has a positively glowing illustrated review of the last gig of the Dead Daisies/Graham Bonnet UK tour held in town this past Thursday, December 15, 2022.

Graham Bonnet was always the unlikeliest looking hard rock star. At a time when those filthy herberts of Motörhead were winning over pimply metalhead teenagers, the clean-cut singer was taking Rainbow into the UK top ten with All Night Long and their cover of Russ Ballard’s Since You Been Gone.

Now fronting his own band, the older and greyer 74-year-old Bonnet still rocks the collar’n’tie and shades look. Reaching those notes is obviously a strain for him, however, and he occasionally looks as though he’s about to burst a blood vessel. Interestingly, he makes no attempt to flog his latest solo material, serving up a set dominated by the Rainbow and Michael Schenker Group classics on which he sang.

Continue reading in Bristol 24/7.

Ian Paice and Purpendicular were in Riom, at la Puce à l’Oreille, on Saturday 26th November. It was their third time there after two sold out shows in 2016 and 2018. The venue was really packed (around 450 people).

The show started on time, at around 9PM and ended at about 10.15PM. That was very short to be honest. There was no opening act.

Highway Star was the opener. The encore was Stormbringer.

3 Whitesnake songs were played, Walking in the Shadow of the Blues, Ready an’ Willin, and Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City.

All the classics were played (Black Night, Perfect Strangers, Lazy ,Smoke On The Water, etc.). No rarities.

The band played 2 songs from their new album, Human Mechanic and No One’s Getting Out Alive, which were very well received by the audience.

Here’s the complete setlist :

1. Highway Star

2. Walking in the Shadow of the Blues

3. Hush

4. Human Mechanic

5. Lazy

6. Ready an’ Willing

7. No One’s Getting Out Alive

8. Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City

9. Black Night

10. Perfect Strangers

11. Space Truckin’

12. Smoke on the Water

Encore:

13. Stormbringer

Cyril Dagouret

More Concerto performances have been announced for March/April 2023, this time in the southeast of Europe. These slot nicely just before the Brazilian performances later in April.

• 15 March – Sala Palatului, Bucharest, ROMANIA
• 18 March – National Palace Of Culture, Sofia, BULGARIA
• 22 March – Sports Hall Mirza Delibasic, Sarajevo, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
• 24 March – Hall Drazen Petrovic, Zagreb, CROATIA
• 25 March – Cancarjev Dom, Ljubljana, SLOVENIA
• 02 April – Hala University Palacheho, Olomouc, CZECH REPUBLIC

Bruce Dickinson is once again the big name on the billboard, with the rest of the band consisting of John O’Hara (Jethro Tull) on keyboards, Tanya O’Callaghan (Whitesnake) on bass, Kaitner Z Doka (Jon Lord, Ian Paice) on guitar, Bernard Welz (Jon Lord, Don Airey) on drums, and Mario Argandonia (Scorpions) on percussion. Paul Mann will be directing what would presumably be the local orchestras.

Tickets can be booked through the links on Dickinson’s website.

Thanks to BraveWords for the info.

Deep Purple live at the Capital Centre, Landover, Maryland, USA, on January 15, 1976. This a slightly longer version of the video that has been floating before. Now with more drumming! Continue Reading »

Goldmine publishes a retrospective of “insightful glimpses into the band’s musical soul” taken from Roger Glover’s interviews that he gave to the magazine over the years.

Roger Glover’s opinion on concert bootlegs

When you’re in a band you really don’t know what you are, what you represent to fans. We know what we are between us. And bootlegs in the early days were definitely frowned upon. It was illegal and they didn’t sound that great. But I remember when I was considering reforming Deep Purple for Perfect Strangers, whether it was a good idea or not, and that was when I started listening to some older recordings and thinking, “Actually, we were a lot better than I thought we were.” (laughs) I was all for it then. And as soon as we started playing I knew that it was right. We jammed together and it felt so good. We’ve always been a live band. The whole point was live. Back when I first started with the band, you know, we didn’t get played on the radio. We didn’t have any kind of coverage or anything. It was just the audience that was there that night. Actually, nothing much has changed in that respect. Music is a kind of a strange and wonderful art form. You can’t touch it or smell it or see it. The moment you hear it it’s gone. With a museum you can look at things, with books you can read them and so forth but music’s just here and gone. And the only way you can actually capture that is by recording something live, which is not the same experience as being there of course. Being there is everything.

Continue reading in Goldmine.

P.S. Happy belated, Reverend!

Yahoo! Entertainment (of all places) has a short piece about Deep Purple’s appearance at the legendary Fillmore club in San Francisco in November 1968.

The nascent British rock outfit had made their American album chart debut in September of that year with their first LP, Shades Of Deep Purple. The record had reached its peak of No.24 two weeks before the Fillmore shows, and was now edging down from 31 to 32 as they stepped onto the stage for the first of four consecutive dates, as the supporting act for local psychedelic rock heroes It’s A Beautiful Day. The bill also included the newly-formed San Francisco soul-jazz-rock outfit Cold Blood.

Continue reading in Yahoo!.

We don’t know if Bombay Calling was performed at these shows, but it’s very possible. If that’s so, we can pinpoint when Child in Time was conceived.