Before We Forget – the forthcoming biography – offers a point of view on Jon Lord and his career and life as a musician that is unique, newly researched and which promises to fascinate the nerds and enlighten the casuals.

The Highway Star’s Rasmus Heide has read excerpts of the book and spent time with author Ovais Naqvi discussing Jon Lord and the book.

From Hammersmith to biographer
London-born Ovais Naqvi’s own first hand experience of Jon Lord was at Whitesnake gigs at the then Hammersmith Odeon in the 1980s. Mesmerised by what he saw and heard from the charismatic figure dominating stage right, Naqvi would continue to follow Jon’s career for the next decades.
Spur Naqvi on to talk about Jon, and fascinating insights, nerdy background details and respectful accolades flood forward. Naqvi is both knowledgable and passionate about the subject of his book, but he is also keen to stress that he didn’t set out to write just another copy/paste biography on Deep Purple’s and Whitesnake’s famed keyboard player.
Asks Naqvi:
– How could a kid growing up in austere 1950s Britain, become so adept at so many forms of music? Jon could play jazz, blues, R&B, soul and pop and compose orchestral music, alongside co-inventing decibel-breaking heavy rock, all with equal facility. With what kind of a musical brain – and with which tools – did he manage to achieve all that?
– My objective was to build a biography that would celebrate Jon Lord’s genius and to approach him from the direction of sound, instrumentation and musical DNA. That is, in essence, what drove this amazing journey.
To achieve this, Naqvi applied a meticulous approach to research as he dug deeper than the accolades usually piled onto Jon Lord as both a musician and a human.
Consequently, Before We Forget portrays Jon Lord through details of his musical upbringing, a detailed look at the music that inspired him as well as – and this is the fascinatingly nerdy part – the instruments on which he wrote and performed his music. As such, Jon’s story is told through facts rather than through anecdotes.

Musical childhood and inspirations
Two years in the making, Before We Forget features all-new insight into Jon’s childhood and teenage years from Jon’s four years younger brother Stephen and from people who studied under Jon’s second piano teacher Frederick Allt.
From a very young age Jon took piano lessons with very accomplished teachers. By employing first rate teachers with a liberal approach to music, Jon’s parents showed how much they believed in a nurturing approach towards his development, explains Naqvi.
There was always music around the Lord household, and Jon was brought up with a very open approach to music. After dinners at an aunt and uncle’s house, the family would often gather and play music together.
Later, when Jon was 16, a part time job at a men’s clothing store would allow him to start buying records and these would include everything from Edward Grieg to Paul Anka. One of Jon’s school teachers guided him towards jazz and consequently Jon would explore both Miles Davis and Gerschwin’s Porgy and Bess. By the age of 17 and still in Leicester, Jon’s theoretical knowledge about music and exposure to different types of music was already surprisingly vast, as Naqvi points out:
– It straddled European classical music, English popular music, contemporary chart music and modern jazz, like Maynard Ferguson and Dave Brubeck. And by the time he got to London in 1961, a vibrant live scene opened up his eyes to the yet edgier sounds of R&B and the blues.

From Hammonds to synths
To cover Jon Lord’s musical equipment, Naqvi talked to some of the most knowledgeable people; Lowrey, Hammond and early synth experts, veterans among Deep Purple’s road crew as well as the specialists familiar with Jon’s instruments. Combined with painstaking research, Naqvi has dissected Jon’s setup of instruments from 1965 to his final recording sessions in 2011.
Before We Forget includes full identification of all the seven Hammond organs Jon Lord played on a permanent and long-term hired basis in Deep Purple and Whitesnake between February 1968 and September 2002. Furthermore, it identifies all the local Hammonds, Lord played on a hired-in basis in his solo career from 2002 to 2011.
– Jon gets labelled as a ’Hammond player’ and he had no shame in that. It was his flagship instrument. However, he also sometimes got unfairly labelled as ’only’ that. I wanted to show – and prove – that he not only pushed that instrument into uncharted territory, but that he was also surprisingly open to other sounds, as long as they served the music.
– In my book, between 50 and 60 other keyboards and effects units are catalogued by era and by tour and album – a quite forensic exercise. He knew his way around the synth world perhaps more than even he was willing to recognise. Modesty and selective memory played a big part in that, explains Naqvi.

Book excerpt from chapter 4: We’re Gonna Make It:

”At the start of this new era [Deep Purple Mark 3], Lord stopped using the Marshall Major amplifier and the Marshall “Plexi” PA cabinet alone and returned to pairing them with Leslies, resulting in a noticeable shift in his Hammond sound from the Deep Purple Mk II studio and live albums to Burn – an example being the spectacular organ solo on the new album’s title track. Lord’s Hammond sound immediately felt melodic and more “airy”, reflecting something closer to progressive rock given the album’s title song and its stylised musical and abstract lyrical content. Lord returned to using Leslie cabinets alongside the Marshalls on all subsequent studio and solo albums and in live concerts to the end of his tenure in Deep Purple and into his solo career after 2002.”

While Jon Lord’s name is synonymous with the Hammond organ, he also worked extensively with synthesizers that would feature prominently in his playing from the mid 1970s and onwards, probably peaking around the late 1980s on Deep Purple’s The House of Blue Light album.
Keyboards like the RMI 300B Electra-Piano, the Fender/Rhodes Mk I 73. the ARP Odyssey 2800, the Polymoog and Memorymoog, Yamaha CP-80, DX1 and DX7, Emulator I & II and the Korg M1 workstation, amongst various others, feature prominently on Deep Purple and Whitesnake recordings and live. Unpicking some of those sounds and later, samples and patches on recordings, was an exercise in itself.
Thus, the biography also contains a definitive summary of all the recording and onstage keyboards and effects units he used in the same period – quite an array of electric and acoustic pianos, monophonic synths, polyphonic synths, effects units, sampling units, MIDI synthesisers and by the 1990s, offstage keyboard modules and expanders.

Book excerpt on Jon’s use of the Hohner Clavinet D6:

”Across 1976 and into the early-1980s, the Hohner Clavinet D6 sat above the Hammond, with the ARP String Ensemble positioned above it, creating a somewhat towering four-tiered keyboard stack that one cannot miss in music videos and concert footage of the period.”
”The Hohner Clavinet (D6 and Clavinet/Pianet Duo models) remained highly favoured by Lord across the mid-197os and into the Whitesnake era. The Clavinet was used to create funky, rhythmic scene-setting on songs such as Ghost Story from Paice Ashton Lord’s Malice in Wonderland, the intro to Whitesnake’s She’s a Woman from the Ready an’ Willing album and across tracks uch as Girl from Whitesnake’s 1981 album, Come an’ Get It. The Clavinet was also deployed to establish the core rhythmic pattern on Hollywood Rock and Roll, from the Before I Forget solo album that was released in June 1982.”

Key career points
All of Naqvi’s research on Jon’s musical equipment is woven into a study of Jon’s musical styling and techniques and insights into his compositional career and shows an adventurous and explorative musician with hugely varied influences.
Along the way, Naqvi’s narrativ expands on a few crucial turning points in Jon’s career.
For one, Jon’s – and Ritchie Blackmore’s – classical inspiration wasn’t all about Johann Sebastian Bach. Edvard Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Vaughn Williams and others should also be mentioned on a list of inspirations that show the broad eclecticism of Jon’s classical taste. The book identifies 20-25 classical pieces, from Thomas Tallis to Samuel Barber (that’s four centuries of composition), that featured regularly in Jon’s music – and that’s only a start.
Secondly, Jon Lord wasn’t so much inspired by progressive rock – players and friends like contemporary keyboard front runners Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman – as he was by rhythm’n’blues and even jazz-rock. When Glenn Hughes started pushing Purple towards black music and Ian Paice’s drumming started getting funkier and more groovy, Jon would join in with ideas and a playing technique that came more from jazz and black music, including from artists like Stevie Wonder.
This was rarely something Jon would talk about but you can hear it in the music, says Naqvi and points to Jon’s performances on his First of the Big Bands album with Tony Ashton as well as on Deep Purple’s Stormbringer album and later on Paice Ashton Lord’s Malice in Wonderland.
Thirdly, Naqvi refutes the idea that Jon was forced into playing heavy rock on In Rock when really he wanted to play more classically inspired music after the Concerto for Group and Orchestra. Naqvi describes in detail Jon’s efforts to develop a heavier sound by dropping the Leslie amp and plugged his Hammond straight into Marshall amps. This wasn’t the work of someone reluctantly going along, Naqvi points out.

In September 1976, Jon Lord came straight from the Come Taste the Band sessions with Deep Purple in Munich to rehearse and record the Sarabande album at Oer Erkenschwick near Dortmund.

Inspired career decisions
In 1995-96, Jon found himself at a crucial turning point in his professional and personal life. Deep Purple’s mark 2 reunions had run their course, nearly twenty years had passed since Jon’s last major solo work (Sarabande, 1976) and then within a year Jon lost both his parents.
However, this devastating loss seemed to ignite a renewed period of contemplation for Jon. Around the same time he seemed to discover a spark of fresh energy from sparing with his new Purple partner, guitarist Steve Morse, and viewed together Jon’s new circumstances in life seemed to reinvigorate his creative energies and spur him on to compose and record a peerless masterpiece in the intensely emotional and very personal Pictured Within album.
Furthermore, running into Marco De Goeij in Holland who had transcribed large parts of Jon’s original Concerto for Group and Orchestra also seemed to whet Jon’s appetite for new career challenges. Thus, once the Concerto had been fully resurrected at the Royal Albert Hall in 1999 and toured the world the following year, Jon gathered the final courage necessary to leave Deep Purple in lieu of a full blown solo career.
– It’s almost like Jon came to a realisation of ”what are you doing?”, reflects Naqvi today.
As Jon concentrated more on composition, his live performances all over the world became more infrequent – invariably always together with orchestras – and the instrumentation became secondary.
The nature of Jon’s touring activities procluded shipping a Hammond organ out to very concert, and so he played all his solo shows on local hired-in Hammonds, all of which are detailed in the book.

Another rare photo from the Sarabande sessions. Jon Lord greets Klaus Weber, Philharmonia Hungarica trumpet player. Behind is Jon’s custom Fender/Rhodes 73, used on tour in 1975.

The personal solo years
While Jon was often reticent to credit himself and talk about himself, during the solo years 2000-2012, his music attained an autobiographical spirituality where his attitudes and his beliefs were allowed to shine through.
Naqvi mentions To Notice Such Things (2010 album) as a musical work that shows hints of family values, is laced with melancholy and airs of both sadness and hope. In Naqvi’s words, Jon’s personal side is described as strongly ”English” with a firm belief in freedom of expression whatever the implications but also with a strong insistence on harmonious co-existence. Jon was suspicious of politicians and double talking in general.
Thus, through his research, Naqvi arrives at a portrait of Jon’s personality that is a careful reflection of the musical openness, free of prejudice, that permeated his career of both performing and composing music alone and with others.
For the book, Paul Mann – conductor, friend and curator of Jon’s musical legacy – has provided important insights into Jon’s ways of working and his meticulousness particularly in his later years after leaving Deep Purple.

Conductor Paul Mann with Jon Lord during rehearsals for the Concerto for Group and Orchestra sessions at Liverpool Empire in June 2011.

”Greater than any other player”
In short, Before We Forget promises an exciting, enlightening and thorough journey through Jon Lord’s musical life, brimming with details and gently told through the people who knew Jon as a musician and as a friend.
Let’s conclude this preview with Paul Mann’s succinct take on the relationship between Jon’s music and his equipment:
”Jon’s concern was above all with sound and in all the years I knew him, I don’t remember him ever talking very much about the equipment he used. The range of colours he could get from the Hammond organ was greater than any other player I’ve ever heard.”

Before We Forget by Ovais Naqvi hits UK stores in April. Right now, pre-orders are available for a 250 copies only edition signed by Paul Mann and the author through https://beforeweforget.store/