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Author’s Top 10 Jon Lord performances on record
While we wait for Before We Forget – the forthcoming biography on Jon Lord – its author, Ovais Naqvi, offers his personal Top 10 favourite recorded performances by Jon Lord – and explains his choices.
Learn more about the book: Before We Forget – the story of Jon Lord.
1. Deep Purple: Knocking at Your Back Door (Perfect Strangers, 1984)
Jon’s intro to the track and to the album still gives me the thrills that “Deep Purple are back!” I bought the cassette of the album the day it came out in October 1984. I still think it’s one of the all-time great song intros. It’s in “rubato” (free time) and apparently JL put it together on the spot in Stowe, Vermont, while the album was being recorded in the mobile studio. It’s just awe-inspiring. No one else I can think of in the music world could do something that “big”, on demand, on the spot. The intro is film soundtrack quality music creation by someone clearly deeply schooled.
2. Deep Purple: Flight of the Rat (Deep Purple in Rock, 1970)
Blackmore somehow always implied later than he wanted to go down a heavy rock path in 1969/70 while JL wanted to do only orchestral stuff. One listen to Jon’s work on In Rock tells you what BS that is. Jon cuts out the Leslies, takes the Hammond straight it into the Marshalls and blows every other keyboard player off the stage for decades. Just the solo on this track in incendiary, malicious and full of unpredictable danger. He tears up the Hammond textbook on this album alone. He clearly wants to prove something to Blackmore and to the world in general and boy, does he prove it.
3. Deep Purple: Highway Star (Made In Japan, 1972)
Purple remains a live band first and foremost. I just saw them in Dubai last November and they still cut it live. Jon’s solo on this version of Highway Star is as dynamic and metallic as it gets. It’s edgy, kinetic and totally riveting over 50 years later. It’s lost none of its edge and all the digital, MIDI, sampling and recording technology of the last five decades can’t recreate or improve on the sheer mayhem of what Jon does here. Totally impromptu and improvised. Madness.
4. Deep Purple: Burn (Burn, 1974)
Jon’s solo, like the Highway Star studio one, is “worked out” as opposed to entirely improvised, hence the Bach and the contrapuntal lines of Hammond and ARP synths. The organ solo reintroduced the Leslies into the JL set up on this album for first time since 1970 and it shows in an airier and maybe proggier approach to the sound and playing. It’s a masterful Hammond solo and I still listen to it certainly a couple of times a month.
5. Deep Purple: Hold On (Stormbringer, 1974)
It is the second Deep Purple album that year and a shift in musical direction. They get funkier, turn Blackmore off completely, but play some effortlessly genre-free music, like Stormbringer, and Hold On, in this case a slice of funk that features a sublime Lord solo on the Fender/Rhodes MK I 73 Suitcase version. It’s as funky as anything out there from American bands of the era and showcases Lord’s musical vocabulary and vast musical memory.
6. Jon Lord: Gigue (Sarabande, 1976)
A great, stirring orchestral piece featuring the Philharmonia Hungarica, with a fabulous guitar solo from Andy Summers (later of The Police) and an extended Hammond solo from JL that somehow sounds like nothing Lord has played before or since. I think God gave him an Access All Areas (AAA) Hammond organ pass at birth because he really could go anywhere on the instrument. It’s very likely completely improvised since he and Martin Birch drove to the Stadthalle in Oer-Erkenschwick (near Dortmund) straight from the Come Taste the Band recording in Munich in early-September 1975. (That’s a 700 km drive from one side of Germany to the other).
7. Deep Purple: This Time Around/Owed to G (Come Taste the Band, 1975)
The first half is a Lord/Hughes composition created on the spot in Munich in August 1975. If this was by any other band, it would be a rock and pop standard, just as Stairway to Heaven or Careless Whisper are. It’s a great example of the industry’s musical prejudices that it’s not, but Glenn’s singing and Jon’s playing are spectacular and epic. The piano is fabulous, but it’s the swirling ARP Odyssey 2800 Mk I synth sounds that make this totally special and atmospheric. Again, Jon will have created the sonic backdrop on this track on the fly. Mindblowing arranging capabilities, the secret sauce he brought to all the bands he was in. He would have made a great producer (had he wanted to go that way).
8. Paice Ashton Lord: Remember the Good Times (Malice in Wonderland, 1977)
By now, JL had discovered the Hohner Clavinet D6 and it features in later period Purple after 1975 and in PAL and Whitesnake. Ernst Zacharias, the German engineer who invented it, created the instrument to recreate Bach’s clavichord sounds and instead it became a funk rhythm machine par excellence, as deployed to great effect by players like Chick Corea and Stevie Wonder. Lord got heavily into it and it’s all over this track – tune into the super funky outro Lord plays. Lord could truly play anything – and sound completely authentic in any such genre.
9. Deep Purple: Almost Human (Total Abandon, Live in Australia ’99, 1999)
The song is decent, but Lord extemporises into a near Calypso-style solo on the Hammond that is probably 48 bars or so, but takes the song into a completely different musical zone (the feel reminds me of Soul Limbo by Booker T. & The MGs, used as the theme music for 1970/80s BBC TV Test match cricket coverage!). By now, the JL Hammond has a lighter sound to it throughout the 1990s – maybe he was a bit done with “heavy” and wanted to take his sound elsewhere and to chill out a bit (and give his hearing a rest). It’s a fabulous solo that nearly has Lord dancing as he’s playing it. A brilliant example of pure improvisational bliss where the player is in a “flow state” and totally disconnected from what his hands are doing.
10. Jon Lord: Andante (Concerto for Group and Orchestra, 2012)
JL’s last ever performance on record. He was wracked with illness by this stage, but showed up at Abbey Road in August 2011 to record his organ solo under the watchful eye of his great collaborator and by this stage, musical guardian angel, Paul Mann. He plays the solo on the famed Studio Two Hammond RT-3 organ, which dates from 1962 and was played by the likes of The Beatles and Pink Floyd. It’s all on video and both breathtaking and painful to see how much effort and concentration goes into what he’s doing. He sounds like Jon Lord to the last and Paul still talks about it with awe and admiration. What a fitting end to an extraordinary musical life.
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/
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
I would rank his keyboard solo in “Rat Bat Blue” first, followed by “Burn” and “Highway Star”. But my alltime favorite album from Jon is “Sarabande”. I think it is his masterpiece. Looking forward to the book!
January 7th, 2026 at 22:18Nice choice, but somewhat obvious except for maybe Flight of the Rat. I personally agree with all of it, but would have stuck in “Rosa‘s Cantina“ somewhere.
January 8th, 2026 at 01:11The author probably knows this already, but the intro to KAYBD was actually used in the soundtrack to a forgettable film from 1986, “Biggles.”
January 8th, 2026 at 03:17A few interesting points from Ovais. “Blackmore somehow always implied later than he wanted to go down a heavy rock path in 1969/70 while JL wanted to do only orchestral stuff”. Blackmore and the other musicians, Ian Gillan was another, wasn’t he one who also wanted to go down the heavy rock path. We could probably place Glover and Paice in there too. Regarding the KAYBD intro, “No one else I can think of in the music world could do something that “big”, on demand, on the spot”. Each to their own. It is a grand opening, dramatic in its delivery. Cheers.
January 8th, 2026 at 03:50I’ll be the first to add to the list!
Rat Bat Blue. An extraordinary solo in an extraordinary song.
January 8th, 2026 at 05:51The intro to You Fool No One from the California Jam. So much energy.
“Knocking at Your Back Door” : “The intro is film soundtrack quality music creation by someone clearly deeply schooled”
KAYBD was actually used in the film Biggles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biggles_(film)
January 8th, 2026 at 07:31Nice to have this, he sounds passionate enough for Jon’s music to call him a ‘friend’ 🙂
Out of the 10 choices, the most surprising for me is “Hold on”, because it is a tune I always have associated to the great guitar solo and not as much as the organ work. But he does have a point
January 8th, 2026 at 11:08Re KAYBD…..wonder why no credit then?
January 8th, 2026 at 13:29@5
David, Rat Bat Blue is indeed an excellent moment. I think it is highly influenced by Bach here (a little after 1:30) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVAPgZyXPNE
I would add many, but Lalena is a personal favourite from studio works
January 8th, 2026 at 15:08It’s always interesting to read a list of favorites of others – no one has a corner on what is “the best,” but everyone has a right to their favorites. This is a good list, but personally I would give a slight nod to “Hard Lovin’ Man” for my In Rock choice (though FOTR is a close second) and also prefer “High Ball Shooter” to “Hold On” on Stormbringer. And I much prefer Jon’s solo intro to “Lazy” on Abandon to his solo on “Almost Human.” I agree with Uwe on “Rosa’s Cantina” from Purpendicular, and “Rat Bat Blue” deserves to be there somewhere. But I strongly applaud the choice of Jon’s solo on “Andante” from the studio version of the Concerto. It is extremely moving, particularly if you can watch the video of it, which I can’t find on youtube but is included in the 2 CD edition of the studio recording of the Concerto. Pretty hard to limit your list to 10 favorites – Jon left a wealth of superb solos to explore and enjoy.
January 8th, 2026 at 15:18Ahem!
All of In Rock first!
Then: All of Machine Head + Who Do We (really*)Think We Are + Fireball
Finally: The Battle Rages On + House of Blue Light + Perfect Strangers + =1
– imho and all that 😃
I really don’t like to split up albums, I have always seen them as works of art that needed to be together 🤩
*didn’t we miss a ‘really’ somewhere in that title?
Ps: Uwe: you mocked me relentlessly because I quoted someone from YT who said that the new album would be released at Ian’s b.day, because you said how completely ridiculous it would be to release an album while the buying audience were on holiday!
Well, when was =1 released?!
– man I’m good several months later 😄😄
January 8th, 2026 at 15:30Jon’s technical mastery and musical expression brought him into the ranks of rock greats who possessed the greatest talent to leave behind music, music full of freedom supported by classical harmonic, rhythmic and melodic solutions. Lord was a great romantic at heart who excelled in the full freedom of his imagination
He was a master of support. He had the skills to play like Emerson, Wakeman but he preferred to avoid it, instead using his skills to orchestrate complex, layered accompaniments.
First from him …in my memory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XT4u_Hr0W8
January 8th, 2026 at 16:22Too many to name- mine include : No No No & Demons Eye
January 8th, 2026 at 17:33No one played like Jon Lord!
I finally have found someone who paid attention to the Hold On keyboard solo. I’ve always found it awesome and never really understood what was so special about Ritchie’s solo in that song.
Another big fav of mine is Jon’s solo on Touch Away.
January 8th, 2026 at 18:10The Dancing Girls riff (WS – S&S).
January 8th, 2026 at 18:45I would add A:200 into the mix.
January 8th, 2026 at 19:46Another sublime Jon solo: on “No No No,” including the brilliant hand-off from Ritchie.
January 8th, 2026 at 20:06@ 11 – =1? I didn’t realise Jon was involved with that album Karin?????????? Unless he was spiritually there or dropped in from the other side perhaps. Cheers.
January 8th, 2026 at 20:49The most memorable thing I’ve ever heard Jon play is the intro of the studio version of Child in Time – magical tone and masterful phrasing … unmatched!
January 8th, 2026 at 21:25@18
Well MacGregor what can I say?😃😄
I can hear his influence the same way Paul McCartney could hear his Linda in the choir on a newly made record, after she was dead !
Sometimes people just live on in our hearts, and even though it isn’t possible, I can hear Jon in =1!
Yeah, I know it is Don, but there are certain moments there 😊
(And no I don’t believe in ghosts!)
I do appreciate Don very much, but for me there is no one like Jon Lord. He had this certain quality that is so hard to describe and define 😊
January 8th, 2026 at 21:41Jon’s work on The Battle Rages On is hardly ever praised. The title track,Anya,A Time To Kill and the 2 solos in Solitaire are among my favorites.
January 8th, 2026 at 21:50