Category Archive: Gigs

Deep Purple has been called a heavy metal band, a hard rock band, a progressive rock band and much more by media and music industry professionals over the last 40 plus years; but Ian Gillan, Deep Purple vocalist feels that these labels are all wrong.

“Media loves to put a label on you; we have never thought of that, if you need a definition it is a rock band. Calling us heavy metal is just ludicrous, classic rock is like a tombstone around your neck. We went through the phase of dinosaurs and wrinkly rockers. I don’t really know how many more insults they can throw at you.  A rock band, that’s what we are,” Gillan states.

The wide range of band influences brought in by the band’s members over the years has ensured that really, Deep Purple remains unclassifiable in terms of genre. When Gillan joined the band in 1969, Jon Lord’s input with jazz, organ and orchestral composition were huge, Richie Blackmore the guitarist at the time, was the Jo Meeks’ music productions guitar player for the first independent rock studio in England, and was also a touring musician with a lot of American rock n’ roll stars. Roger Glover the Deep Purple bass player loves all things folk and the drummer was inspired by big band swing.

“It was a completely mixed bag of influences brought into the band, so it is no wonder it is hard to define,” explains Gillan.

Ian Gillan had his own set of blues and rock n’ roll influences including the young Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. The band that influenced Gillan in terms of singing and vocal tone as opposed to writing  was Cliff Bennett and the Rabble Rousers.

“It took years and years and years to get my voice into a way that I was happy with it. The bands of the time that I loved, but had no influence whatsoever on me were The Small Faces, and Amen Corner,” says Gillan.

The band has always been slightly eccentric in their approach to fans and publicity, Deep Purple still does not have its own publicist.

“We never really thought about the audience or commerciality because we were just too stupid to figure that out. We still don’t have a publicist, I think sometimes someone from the record label puts one up when we have new products out. Generally speaking we don’t have a publicist so we are not really aware of our worth,” says Gillan.

When he joined the band in 1969, Deep Purple had already had three hit albums and two number one hit singles in America, but they wanted to change their style and they wanted to write their own material, so he and Roger Glover joined, not just as a bass player and singer, but also as a songwriting team.

“I always remember at our first show in the Speakeasy in London with just a few people there mostly consisting of roadies, but when the band cranked up I just looked across and thought, ‘This is it mate, this is what we have been waiting for,’ so that to me was a moment when I realised that we had stumbled into something, maybe stumbled is the wrong word, we had fallen into something that was what we had been dreaming of and that was in 1969,” remembers Gillan. “It has been downhill ever since.”

In 1971, Deep Purple composed their most famous song to date, a song that has been played more times than any other track in the world; Smoke on the Water. The song and its lyrics were born out of an almost tragic event when the band was recording in Montreau, Switzerland.

“`We were in Montreux in Switzerland in 1971 recording the Machine Head album, and the place we were recording was in fact a theatre in a casino, which was made of wood and was a few hundred years old. I was watching the last show of the season and we were moving in the next day. We were watching Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention when someone came in with a flare gun and set fire to the place and it went up blazing and many exciting things happened, lots of dangerous things happened and we went down the coast of Lake Geneva and watched it burn,” Gillan says.

The band then had to find alternative accommodation to record in and at the end of the session the engineer told Deep Purple that he needed one more song. The band was short of time and was leaving Switzerland the next Day.

“We decided to pull out the sound check track from the first day and write a biographical lyric about the making of Machine Head, which started out ‘We all came out to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline to make records for the mobile we didn’t have much time’ etc etc , so the lyrics go through and explain the biographical making of this record. Watching that casino burn to the ground was one of the most vivid things I have seen in my life. We were very close to it, so on the last day Roger [Glover] came up with the title ‘Smoke on the Water’, which he had written on a napkin. I don’t know why, but as writers we do this sort of thing, and that was how it ended up,” explains Gillan.

The track then languished unheard on the record as a filler track for a year or more until someone at Warner Bros saw how well the song was going down during the concerts and did an edit from the seven minute version to something that people would play on the radio.

“We never really thought about those things when we made records, we still don’t. Anyway, it got played a lot on the radio and ended up being the most played track in the world ever,” says Gillan.

Deep Purple have a brand new album coming out in April, but Gillan was not able to talk about it.

“I have only just heard the mixes, I have not even heard the masters yet, we can’t do any of the material on stage because of YouTube and the next day it will be out and spoil the surprise. I don’t know how the information got out. I think it was the constant pressure well, when are you going to make a record, so we did one and it will be out in April and it is really too soon at the moment to start talking about it,” he states.

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