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"Perhaps more than any other rock band, Deep Purple proved that a group of musicians could undergo consistent and even traumatic turnover, yet still achieve remarkable success over a long span of time." (Eduardo Rovadavia - Classic Rock)
"[This album] provides us with a fantastic insight into the development of the music of Deep Purple"(This review)
This is album review number One Hundred and Eighty Three in the series of retro-reviews of both vinyl and CD albums from my collection.
The series is called Cream of The Crate and each review represents an album that I believe represents significant musical value, either because of its rarity, because it represents the best of a style or styles of a music or because there is something unique about the music, the group or the particular production. The first fifty reviews were based on vinyl albums from my collection, with the following fifty on CD albums from my collection. Links to all these reviews can be found at the bottom of the page.
One of the developing music forms in the 1970's, was that of heavy metal music, and I have dipped into my crate for one of the few such albums I have.
The group in this retro-review is Deep Purple and this is a vinyl album and is titled - The Deep Purple Singles. Released in Australia in 1980 by EMI on the Axis label it has the identifying code of AX.1042. It is an eleven track album.
It is said that the story of the formation of Deep Purple is a tangle of coincidences, nebulous ideas and raw enthusiasm. It started out with Chris Curtis who in 1967 carried around the fantasy of building a group centred around himself in his old Searchers role as both drummer and lead singer.
His idea was to put together a band which would immediately be ready to take on the world. Because of his previous success with the Searchers his idea grabbed the attention of businessmen Tony Edwards and John Coletta, who agreed to finance and manage the new group, which at that time existed only in Curtis' imagination.
Their investment would eventually pay off beyond their wildest dreams, but that would be largely due to the incredible musical chemistry between the first two musicians enrolled into the plan, that was organist Jon Lord and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and not really from Curtis, who would soon disappear from the scene.
Brought together in December 1967, they quickly hit upon one of the most unique and universally loved 'sounds' in rock music. Even with Curtis out of the picture Edwards and Coletta had no hesitation in backing a group built around Lord and Blackmore. The line-up was quickly completed with experienced ex-Johnny Kidd & The Pirates bassist Nick Simper, plus singer Rod Evans and drummer Ian Paice, both from The Maze.
Deep Purple Mark I
Once the band was finalised in March 1968, there was no hanging around, a debut tour followed in April (during which 'Deep Purple' was chosen to replace original name 'Roundabout'), and a first album was hurriedly recorded over a single weekend in May.
This was Deep Purple Mark I !
Now on one hand this first version were busy - very busy and released three studio albums and one live album inside 9 months. But as we will see when we get to the singles that were released, the band was terribly lacking in direction and this was reflected in their music. Sure the group had a "hard" edge to it, but it was pop/commercially focussed and this didn't sit comfortably with Lord and Blackmore, and with the rise and rise of what was now called heavy rock and would soon be given the more apt label, of Heavy Metal, the two boys saw that this was the music Deep Purple should embrace.
Simper and Evans, now seen as being unsuited to the band, were to be replaced.
The split was not as straightforward as it could have been with both Simper and Evans kept uninformed as long as possible. Even after their replacements Ian Gillan and Roger Glover (from Episode Six) had already been enlisted and begun recording and rehearsing with the band, Simper and Evans remained in the dark, and continued to play live with the band for some time.
Of course neither was pleased at learning of their demise from the band through the musicians' grapevine.
The new lineup took Deep Purple into a number of realms, but in the main it was Heavy Metal that kept them alive. In 1973 there was another reforming and with it more struggles and more successes and the band actually went on in one form or another right through until today.
Rear L to R: Blackmore, Lord & Gillan
Front: Paice & Glover
This was Deep Purple Mark II.
All up 14 musicians can rightly claim to have been a member of Deep Purple at one time or another, and in addition to those in MkI and Mk II.
Track Listing:
Side 1
1. Hush
2. One More Rainy Day
3. Emmaretta
4. Wring That Neck
5. Hallelujah
6. April Part 1
Side 2
1. Black Nigh
2. Speed King
3. Strange Kind Of Woman
4. I'm Alone
5. Demon's Eye
6. Fireball
This album has singles covering the period 1968 through to 1971 and so we are focussing on that period. Now there is little doubt in my mind that Deep Purple were predominantly a live music band, who did a good job post Mk I, with albums but not all that successful with singles. Certainly side 1 of this album which is a compilation of singles released during those early year, shows a certain weakness.
Side 1 of the album really is the more "pop" phase of the group, and in the main were recorded by Deep Purple Mk I. Track 1 is Hush, a Joe South hit, which despite claims on the White version, was not written by him but was in fact written by Billy Joe Royal. The track was lifted from the band's first album - Shades of Deep Purple (1968).
It kicked off with quite a rush selling 200,000 copies in the first fortnight, which at that time was a large number. In the US, music paper headlines screamed things like, "Unknown British group takes U.S by storm". The problem for the band was though, that back in their own country they were really failing to make much of an impression despite Hush.
Richie Blackmore
Kicking off with the sound of a cockerel crowing, the electrified and uptempo version of Deep Purple certainly demanded that you listen. But listening back, while it is interesting to hear this early version of Deep Purple, and while the guitar playing of Richie Blackmore was already indicating that the man could play, the vocals of Ron Evans just don't sit right.