How Deep Is Your Purple?
Friday is always fun - because it's about music. So there's a playlist (or two). And here we are in 2023, talking about music for the first time. Why should this be any different...
I’ve been thinking about Deep Purple rather a lot lately. Probably thinking about them, more than I’ve been listening to them – but that’s only because I almost felt like I did all of the listening to them between the ages of about 13-23. Seriously, for a decade there I thought that Deep Purple was the great band, I certainly thought they were underrated/forgotten. I felt like everyone focusing on Led Zeppelin needed to take some of that attention and bend it towards Purple.
And then you realise that such arguments are silly, it’s The Beatles vs. The Stones all over again. Why not both?
So I calmed my farm, and just leamed right into loving Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple (and continued loving The Beatles and The Stones. And a lot of other things too of course).
But it’s fun to think about bands, to read about bands, to watch documentaries and concert footage, and then to listen to them again. And I’m always into finding new ways in, new ways of listening. So, my focus lately with Purple has been listening out for the drumming.
Listening to songs that really feature/showcase the phenomenal chops of Ian Paice.
I was lucky enough to interview Ian Paice, his jazzy feel on songs like One More Rainy Day, and the heavy metal be-bop of his attack on Speed King was a big part of the early Deep Purple appreciation for me. I’d known Smoke on the Water forever. The way you just know Light My Fire, and Stairway to Heaven, and Satisfaction, at least a dozen Beatles songs, and Hotel California….just one of those songs that, for my generation at least, has felt like it’s always been there. I knew Smoke, and loved it, but didn’t really know anything much about Deep Purple beyond that. For a while anyway.
And then, one of the very first CDs in our house was The Deep Purple Singles – the version without Smoke on the Water.
My mum loved Hush and Black Night and that’s why she wanted the CD. And I quickly loved those songs too – I was at that age where I was bonding with my parents over music, they were rediscovering their record collection (well, replacing it with CDs, buying back old memories) and I was just tuning in to anything and everything.
I was also obsessed with guitar players, so Ritchie Blackmore was really the star of Deep Purple for me. At first. So much so that I went right down the rabbit hole of finding as many of the sessions he played on by beat combos, one hit wonders and no-name hacks in the 60s. He’s there playing colourful guitar on a great range of the weird and wonderful. In much the same way that Jimmy Page did too. But there’s no Donovan or Kinks in the Blackmore story. It’s things like this weird wee gem!
I started to buy whatever Deep Purple albums I could find, back in the days of cassette tapes.
I started with the classic Mark II line-up, grabbing In Rock, Machine Head and Fireball. And I moved back to Mark I and forward to Mark III, grabbing The Book of Taliesyn and Stormbringer.
A favourite was 1984’s Mark II reunion, Perfect Strangers. But they were all favourites.
At least to begin with.
I loved the near beat-combo vibes of the band in the late 60s, loved the big proto heavy metal vibes of the classic early 70s era, and then got really into the Mark III line-up. Not as many people rave about that now, but the David Coverdale era1 brought about some really interesting music, and maybe the secret hero of the line-up here was the bassist Glenn Hughes, also a great vocalist. He really added some colour to the sound. People dismiss Mark III as the funky side of Deep Purple. But maybe the greatest song they ever made was Burn. And that’s a Mark III classic. The very start of Mark III. I sometimes think, these days, it’s the best album too. The title track just might be the single reason you need to listen out for the way Ian Paice drives the band.
There was one other line-up in the band’s initial run, but they only had one album. And I wasn’t into it at the time. As good as Tommy Bolin was, he wasn’t Ritchie Blackmore. That was my take at the time. But I’d later listen to Bolin playing on records by Alphonse Mouzon and Billy Cobham and then check out his work replacing Joe Walsh in the James Gang, and decide he was brilliant. (And that album has aged better than some of the others in the band’s catalogue).
To me, Deep Purple always really needed Blackmore though, because he was angry, and that energy drove so much of the music. It’s not that it’s angry music as such, or particularly dark, but that wayward drive of Blackmore creates the tension. He doesn’t play well with others. And yet it is his playing that somehow inspires the others. He is the phantom of their opera, haunting each tune, trying to steal the show. And I love that.
Anyway, that’s all deep band-nerd stuff.
After a while, I didn’t need to hear Deep Purple. I just listened out for their influence, and never really quite found it or felt it in much else, certainly not in anything enduring. Was Jon Lord the key ingredient then? It seems he was never replicated. He was guilty of a lot of the band’s overreaching. But then that is part of what made this band too.
And the various side-projects and solo albums from the dozen-odd band members never meant much to me, really. But it’s hard to deny that really good stuff, those vital records made between 1968 and 1975. And maybe the best-ever “comeback” record – when the Mark II line-up put away their fighting words in the mid-80s and made a fist of it yet again for Perfect Strangers.
Deep Purple played a very background role in my life throughout my late-20s. And then, out of nowhere, I found myself chatting on the phone with one of my early drumming heroes.
I wrote about how much I love Ian Paice’s playing here. (You can check out that entry and others with my Drummers You Just Can’t Beat e-book too if you like!) It had been such a thrill to interview him, and to see the band play live – probably Mark 37 of the group by the time I got to see them, but good enough. In fact, they were mostly terrific.
And also that surreal thing of interviewing Ian Gillan live on TV! I still crack up about that. There I was, off to do my regular CD-review thing on the telly early one morning, but the lead singer of one of my all-time favourite groups is out there for an interview to plug his gig. The host of Good Morning asked me to sit in and help steer the interview. What a great thrill that was. But totally weird as well!
In fact I wrote about that late last night. Because I think about that a lot. And I wanted to just jot down a wee version of that memory.
And now here I am trotting all this out for you. Or for me. Or for us all?
The two Ians.
I wrote about Gillan, and thought about Paice. I watched Deep Purple: Masters from The Vaults from the old DVD collection; a bunch of clips of the band in its prime. That had me thinking that I’d never seen a proper (decent) documentary about the group. So I found Deep Purple: Videobiography online, which is both not a decent (proper) doco and also totally what I was looking for (I’m forever a sucker for those “Unauthorised” and “Under Review” -styled docs where the jaded music hacks sit around knowing-it-all about their once favourite band…
Erm, okay, now this is getting awkward.
I made a playlist of some favourite Deep Purple tracks, but it doesn’t include all the obvious things, only some of them. Because it’s a playlist that focuses on Ian Paice’s contributions to the group.
And it’s Friday, the first of the year, but nothing changes there, I’m still trotting out the Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good! playlist. We are up to Vol. 98. And I hope you find something of interest for you on this, the first edition for 2023.
So, any Deep Purple fans out there, old or new? And anyone else love finding new ways in to listen once again to an old favourite?