DEEP PURPLE
Voices Of Rock & Metal (Issue 108: Jan 2019)
Unquestionably one of the greatest bands that Britain has ever produced, the members of Deep Purple refuse to rest on their laurels. Since teaming up with famed producer Bob Ezrin in 2013, the band has released a string of superb original albums in the form of ‘Now What?!’, ‘Infinite’ and ‘Whoosh!’. Longstanding guitarist Steve Morse had to leave the band after the surprise covers album ‘Turning To Crime’ in order to look after his ailing wife, so Irishman Simon McBride was drafted in to cover guitar duties. When Morse announced that his departure was permanent, McBride was given the job full time. His first studio recorded work with veterans Ian Gillan, Ian Paice, Don Airey and Roger Glover is a new, all original record, the enigmatically titled ‘=1’. Vocalist Gillan talked to James Gaden about the new blood in the band and solving the equation…
"Purple is primarily an instrumental band, it always has been, and these songs are born out of jam sessions when we write in a studio."
We spoke when ‘Now What?!’ came out (FW#58) and I said to you I thought it was one of the best things Purple had done for ages, and since then it’s been a real… ahem, purple patch of albums, if you’ll pardon the obvious pun! Is the common denominator having Bob Ezrin as your producer?
Certainly he was a catalyst in two respects, yes, I would agree with that. Bob’s two main contributions have been in the arrangement phase… Bob’s not involved in the writing; we do all the writing usually with a pair of one week writing sessions. Then we have a third session which is longer, probably a couple of weeks, for arrangements, and that’s when Bob rocks up. At that point the songs are still in development, there’s hardly anything in the way of vocals, but we’re examining what is underneath, the nuts and bolts of it all. Purple is primarily an instrumental band, it always has been, and these songs are born out of jam sessions when we write in a studio. Bob comes in and tightens them up. Before, we were quite vague about arrangements and it used to be a war of attrition between what the drummer thinks, what the keyboard player thinks, what the banjo player thinks, what the singer thinks… and Roger (Glover) of course, who used to produce us. Bob came in to make those decisions; he will say, “That’s ugly, that bit’s good, let’s get rid of that, but repeat this part…” He’s an objective voice that we respect, which made the arrangements and material more listenable.
louder•than•everything•else
His second contribution is the actual sound he gives us. I said when the ‘Now What?!’ record was done, in my opinion it was the best sound we’ve ever had. It was all exciting in the early days with Martin Birch producing us, but our approach then was “Let’s turn everything up louder than everything else.” There’s more sophistication in Bob’s approach and God… it’s exciting, he gets the balance right! Instead of reducing the volume to make space for a solo or a vocal, he creates a hole in the middle, so the power isn’t diminished. It’s a process that requires great skill and great ears. All credit to Bob for him being a co-arranger and he really comes into his own getting the best out of us in the studio and making it sound right.
To your point about the band being instrumental at its heart, Ian Paice told us (in FW#92) that Purple create pieces of music, not songs, and you will sometimes say, “I can’t put a song to that, that needs re-working.” So are you thinking about melodies and lyrics right from the start of the jam sessions?
Up to a point, but not really... [Laughs] You don’t want to inhibit or change the natural flow of things. The way we work is we go at it for maybe six to eight hours a day; non-stop music that flows everywhere, through every sort of rhythm, chord structure and style. One minute you’ll hear them playing Jazz, then it can be quite orchestral, then into Hard Rock… it’s a natural flow of influences from the individuals in the band, that’s what makes Purple what it is. So sometimes I can find it very easy to put an instant tune to things, but the material is never really finished until the arrangement stage. So, many times, I’ve had a song half-written and the guys have decided they don’t really like the music I was working to, and they change something. That in turn means what I wrote doesn’t work anymore, so I have to tear it up and start again. It’s happened so many times… I think I tore up six songs just on this album alone. So I let the guys sort the music and I’ll sometimes come up with lots of ideas, other times I have to just lock myself away and work through things.
Roger told us (in FW#78) that when Michael Bradford produced the band for ‘Rapture Of The Deep’, it became a hard album to make. He described it as “doing it on a budget in Michael’s home studio, which is not much bigger than a cupboard and it was not a pleasant process.” Bob prefers to put the band in big studios. Is that a prominent factor in what has reinvigorated Deep Purple?
Basically if the sound is rubbish, you’ll play rubbish, your heart isn’t in it. Michael is a lovely bloke, a great friend, and the first album we did with him was in a large studio in Hollywood. The second was done in his home studio and it was chalk and cheese. I didn’t like the sound in there at all, nor did I like the sound of the album. I think there are some really good songs on there, ‘Rapture Of The Deep’ being one of them, but it was inhibiting. If you sing in the house, full of joy, and then you sing in the bathroom or shower, it suddenly sounds so much better... you’ve got natural reverb.
fought•to•escape
Paicey hates working in a small room. We fought to escape that back in 1969, where that was standard. Set your equipment up anywhere, it didn’t matter where you were because the engineers would throw blankets over the gear, reduce everything to zero and say, “Don’t worry, we’ll rebuild the sound”. That was why so many records sounded the same, they were engineer creations and it sucked the air out of you. Purple wanted to record in a town hall or a gymnasium because we wanted to make a racket, displace the air. We weren’t playing with small amplifiers anymore and we wanted to record as such. Paicey is quite right, there are some great rehearsal rooms, but they are just too small for us. People say, “Well nobody else complains” and we just say, “Well… there you go.” [Laughs]
On to the new album, which I love; obviously the big change is the newcomer, Simon McBride on guitar. I first became aware of him when he played on your ‘Contractual Obligation’ live releases. I was really impressed… was it Don Airey who brought him to your attention?
Yes, Don introduced me to him. I did an Eastern European tour with the Don Airey Orchestra and there was this guy, this kid – yes, he’s 44 – but this kid really impressed me with his technique, his articulation and his control. He didn’t try and blast everything out, he came forward when needed… his playing was immaculate, just incredible. I got excited and when we spent a year without working due to Steve’s very difficult and tragic family circumstances, we had to make a decision. We needed to get back on the road or it would all fold up. We made the transition; Simon was the first name on my lips and of course, Don’s too. So we drafted him in as a deputy for Steve. He fitted right in straight away so there was no further discussion. He played the gigs, then he played more gigs and then suddenly Steve wasn’t there anymore. We had finished a tour and I was in a bar and I looked at Simon and said, “Are you in the fucking band, or what?” He said, “Er, I dunno?” and I said, “Alright.” And that was it, nothing more was said! [Laughs] But it became evident he was and that he has been a welcome part of the family ever since.
"I did an Eastern European tour with the Don Airey Orchestra and there was this guy, this kid – yes, he’s 44 – but this kid really impressed me with his technique, his articulation and his control."
Listening to this album, it sounds like Simon’s been in the band for ages, there’s not a hint of him being a newcomer. It just sounds like Deep Purple.
It does work well, doesn’t it? He’s brought a lot of drive back into the band, a lot of energy. Our 70s records were, above all, so full of energy and that has been a bone of contention throughout my whole career. I always want an edge, some energy; I don’t like over-arranged, predictable, Poppy-type Rock. The songs should come naturally and be easy to write… ‘Child In Time’ was written in about ten minutes. Most of those early songs were done so fast. And working this last summer, after tearing up those six songs, my bits felt like a struggle until I came up with the idea “=1”. I realised the theme needed to be simplicity and that helped get the energy and the drive back. Suddenly I felt, “Oh, I can sing to this, easily!”
Have you seen our latest interview with Deep Purple in Issue 115?
I was going to ask about the album title. Roger said ‘Whoosh!’ was your title so I was wondering who it was that came up with ‘=1’?
Yeah, that was me. I was struggling last summer, I had about eight songs written but they were just… okay. I felt no sense of cohesion that they belonged on the same album. They were just random songs, it wasn’t turning me on. During that time, I was having trouble with bureaucracy, as I do… you know how you want to fix a tap but you can’t just get someone round to sort it anymore, you have to go through all these processes? You have to fill in forms, you want to look at a website and you have to accept cookies, then you’ve got to identify what’s a traffic light to prove you’re human… urgh. So I doodled this extraordinarily long, complex equation which ultimately just equalled one. It was my way of saying you don’t need a thousand people involved; you don’t need to prove you’re a human being to a bloody robot, you don’t need all this other stuff, just do it. So the theme of the album became simplicity and the equation survived as sort of a little totem for me in the background. It was never intended to be the title, but it became such a powerful little thing, it just went hand in hand with the lyrics and the tunes. Everyone at the label picked up on it and they did a wonderful blend of complexity and simplicity for the artwork.
A lot of bands from your era are content to tour the “greatest hits” year in, year out, but while Purple have constantly toured, you’ve also moved forward and continued making really strong records. With the changes to the music business, such as physical sales declining, the rise of streaming and people listening on their phone or TVs rather than a stereo, did it ever disillusion you with regards to recording new material?
Not really, because when the mood is there, you have to do it. I do think there were times when we went through the motions because people said it was time we had another record out. In the early days we didn’t like the business very much, there was a lot of pressure regarding what we should be doing or writing. But we made the decision early on to avoid fashion, for the obvious reason that if you are fashionable this week, you are, by definition, unfashionable next week. Some people like to chase fashion and popularity… that’s not what we do. We just jammed together and an idea might pop up. If we liked it, we might put it in a show before we’d recorded it to see what people thought. It was spontaneous. You can’t do that now because of things like YouTube… somebody films it on a phone, uploads it, then it’s out there, it can’t evolve. Lots of things like that have come along which people say “isn’t this great!” when in fact it stops you doing things. It all depends where you stand, I suppose.
Personally I always felt new material was good to freshen up the show. We had the advantage that within our “classic” songs, the arrangements were flexible and allowed us to jam them and extend them live. Plus we had lots of songs that were never played on the radio that we could use if the mood took us. Part of the journey of getting there was having to write material and make records. It’s not really any different now; we’ve gone from having music papers and radio telling people about us to YouTube, social media and the like; it’s an evolution. I remember back in the day when CDs were first put out, and I heard the “digital” version of ‘Machine Head’. It was absolutely appalling. It was a flat copy, dull as ditch water; the reason being the engineers had to learn all over again about the dynamics of this new format. Recording digitally is a different technique to using a tape. Analogue limited how many tracks you could have; with digital it’s endless with no diminishment of quality. So you would be careful on analogue about overdubs.
positive•evolution
Now that’s not a problem anymore, which is a positive evolution, but you can’t be dominated by it. It’s just a medium, so we blend; we use old techniques for writing and when the songs are written, we refine them and we record them digitally, but together in a room. You have to have that human aspect. I love hearing the squeak of a bass drum pedal or an intake of breath. I don’t like when it’s all filtered out and homogenised, it’s not human to me. There’s no edge, no intimacy. Yes it can sound impressive because you get this wall of production, even solos sound huge, and it helps on low quality broadcasts or when you are listening on your phone’s speakers, but that’s like listening to the record through the keyhole, it sounds completely different with headphones. So as a band, you adapt and just do the best you can. From our point of view, the performance and the songs is everything. The rest of it is in the hands of skilled technicians.
In the beginning of your career you were in a band called Episode Six with Roger, doing more Psychedelic Pop style music. Did you always have an urge to go into Hard Rock or was that more happenstance by joining Deep Purple?
We were commercial to start with. I turned professional with Episode Six and did the Dusty Springfield tour, which was a real eye-opener… it was fantastic. There was a lot to learn, we were very green and inexperienced. Plus, Episode Six was a harmony band. I have to say, with the greatest respect, they weren’t the greatest musicians in the world, but they were competent and the sort of stuff we used to do, it was quite Flower Power. I loved harmony music anyway, ever since I was a boy soprano in the church choir. Good harmonies always brought tears to my eyes. If you watch the movie ‘The Jersey Boys’, that moment when they finally sing ‘Sherry’ in the recording studio, at that moment I literally had tears rolling down my face. It was just… wow, it touched me so deeply.
Episode Six were doing a lot of covers, so we needed to write some original stuff. We did about thirteen singles I think, but we were just chasing hit records. Roger started writing and I started joining in. Together we learned everything we could about songwriting, really worked at it for hours and hours, learning the percussive value of consonants, what to do here and there. We learned how things work, how to construct things… and ironically, that’s the complete opposite of what we do in Purple! [Laughs] The upshot though, regarding Hard Rock, I had all three of the Deep Purple albums before I joined. I played them over and over and over, there was some absolute magic in there. That came from (Ritchie) Blackmore, (Jon) Lord and (Ian) Paice, that was the essence of the group. Rod (Evans), bless him, was a lovely guy, but he wasn’t really a Rock singer, and Nicky Simper was great, a very good bass player. But then I got recruited, Nicky wasn’t there; they asked me if I knew any bass players, so I brought Roger along. That worked out pretty well. We cut a single, called ‘Hallelujah’, which wasn’t very good. It was in the lighter style of what Purple were doing originally. Strange, really, when you think of the pent-up energy that Blackmore, Lord and Paice had…
so•serendipitous
So when Roger and I joined, it wasn’t just as a bass player and singer, we were brought in as a songwriting team. And that’s why Deep Purple ‘In Rock’ was so serendipitous. Those songs were written in no time at all, we just… did them. As I said, ‘Child In Time’ was written in ten, maybe fifteen minutes, as songs should be, in my opinion. And that was what happened on this new one. When I tore up all the old rubbish and got the “=1” focus and the theme of simplicity, I think I did my contributions to every song in about two weeks. It was a wonderful period at the end of the summer and every song just… happened.
There’s no point asking if this is the last Deep Purple album because people have been asking that question for ten years and the answer is always “maybe”. So, I’ll just end by saying everything the band have done since ‘Now What?!’ has been gold to my ears, and this new one is no different, I’ve played it to death.
Top man, thank you! I must admit, I’m enjoying playing it. My favourite track at the moment is ‘Old Fangled Thing’. Last week it was ‘Bleeding Obvious’; that was the first track we wrote. My favourite line in the whole song is “the salient point departed and parked itself in a lonely part of town, in a backstreet”. It was just a joy, writing this stuff. That fitted so well because the arrangement is so complicated, it’s got all different tempos and speeds and dynamics, textures… it was a real challenge to figure out what I was going to do with it. In the end, the juxtaposition of the complexity of the music and the title of the album, the theme of simplicity… ah yes, it’s bleedin’ obvious isn’t it! [Laughs]
Listen to the album on Spotify
"I loved harmony music anyway, ever since I was a boy soprano in the church choir."
VOICES OF ROCK & METAL
DEEP PURPLE
Issue No: 108
