Life in Deep Purple has never been dull. Whether it’s Ian Gillan and Ritchie Blackmore exchanging barbs (and worse) band members being written out band history, or that grand piano purchased for the wife of a drug dealer, the Purple Posse can be relied on to keep things interesting.
Here are 25 of Deep Purple’s maddest moments.
1. Rock’n’Roll Circus nightclub, Paris, October 1970: As Ian Gillan went to sit down, Ritchie Blackmore pulled away Gillan’s chair. Blackmore: “What I didn’t realise was that behind us was a big drop of about 15 feet and Gillan fell down – crunched his head… after that he was never the same.”
2. The Mk II line-up got together in the studio in 1970 to write a hit single but the inspiration didn’t flow. They went round the corner to the pub – the Newton Arms, near Kingsway, London – and returned to the studio pissed. They immediately laid down their biggest UK hit: Black Night.
3. The rest of Deep Purple barely talked to Roger Glover during tour dates in 1973. Glover had been ousted from the band but nobody had bothered to tell him. He was left to drink alone in hotel bars, wondering why he was being cold-shouldered.
4. Tommy Bolin injected himself with inferior-grade heroin in Jakarta, Indonesia, December 1975. Bolin lost the use of his left arm and couldn’t play anything other than simple chords. This meant Purple were effectively without a guitar player for their subsequent Japanese tour. Purple were daft enough to issue the recordings anyway, as the last concert in Japan album.
5. At a gig in Wembley, current Purple keyboardist Don Airey interrupted his solo to play I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside. Hmm. That must be that well-known holiday resort, Wembley-on-Sea.
6. Shortly after the Mk II line-up split, the press picked up on strategically placed ‘leaks’ that Paul Rodgers would replace Ian Gillan. So, er… Rodgers didn’t.
7. Ian Gillan, speaking in an interview with Charlie Steffens of KNAC, December 2006: “Ritchie Blackmore? No, I don’t talk to him at all. That asshole – I will never speak to him again, as far as I’m concerned. He turned into a weird guy and the day he walked out of the tour was the day the clouds disappeared. It was the day the sunshine came out and we haven’t looked back since. There are certain personal issues that I have with Ritchie. Nothing I’m going to discuss publicly, but deeply personal stuff. As far as I’m concerned, the divorce came a long time ago. I never want to see or hear of him again.”
8. Ritchie Blackmore, speaking on Swedish TV, October 1993: “One of these days I’m going to attack Ian Gillan in a back alley. He’s bigger than me. He’s probably a better fighter. So I’m going to do it with a few friends of mine. Probably Swedish. and we’ll beat him up. But he won’t know it’s me.”
9. Arriving at a gig in sydney in may 1971 to soundcheck, Purple discovered the ‘Marshall’ amps provided were locally built cabinets containing just one useless speaker horn. The band threw a strop and told the promoter they wouldn’t play. The promoter told them they would – or they’d have their legs shot off. And so they did – sounding terrible and nailing the cabinets together to stop them vibrating across the stage.
10. Original vocalist Rod Evans actually toured america in 1980 with a band called Deep Purple. He was sued successfully by Purple’s management – and reportedly lost the rights to his Purple royalties as a result. As Jon lord said years later: “I only blame Rod for being silly. He should’ve known it was going to be difficult to get away with a fake Purple. After all – he was doing it in public.”
11. Merchandise sold on a noughties Purple tour included a Machine Head T-shirt with Blackmore’s face missing from the album design. According to some, Blackmore’s management sued Purple for use of his image on the shirt. According to others, Purple simply didn’t want to be associated with Blackmore any more.
12. Purple were secretly rehearsing with Ian Gillan and Roger Glover while still doing live dates with founding singer and bassist Rod Evans and Nick Simper. Simper is reportedly still angry about the presumed subterfuge. When the band were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2016, he wasn’t invited.
13. Thoroughly pissed off with the monsoon-like weather, Ritchie Blackmore wore Wellington boots on stage for Purple’s big comeback show at Knebworthi n 1985.
14. More on that ill-fated trip to indonesia in December 1975: One of Purple’s road crew, Patsy Collins – also Tommy Bolin’s bodyguard – was killed in a six-storey fall down a service elevator shaft at the band’s hotel in Jakarta.
15. Then at a Purple concert the following night, Indonesian police armed with machine guns, truncheons and a pack of Doberman pinschers waded into the audience, injuring over 200 people.
16. Purple were due to close the show at the Plumpton festival in 1970 – but Yes turned up late, forcing Purple to take the stage first. Anxious for Purple not to be upstaged, Ritchie Blackmore instructed his roadie to set fire to his amps, hoping to damage the stage (with, allegedly, the ultimate aim of burning the whole damn thing down) and thus prevent Yes from performing. Luckily, a rival roadie for The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band was on hand with a fire extinguisher.
17. Smooth Dancer (a track from Purple’s 1973 Who Do We Think We Are! album) contains lyrics by Ian Gillan that reference Ritchie Blackmore in all but name: ‘Black suede, don’t waste your time on me/Black suede, I sense your mockery/I tried to go along with you/But you’re black and I know just what to do.’ (at the time, Blackmore’s uniform of choice was black suede.)
18. The instrumental Coronarias Redig was originally supposed to have vocals by David Coverdale. But Coverdale fell asleep in the studio after a night’s hard partying. “The band’s revenge was to take my camera and cover me from head to toe in Scandinavian hard-core porn magazines,” Coverdale recalled. “When I got back to Redcar I took in my film to be developed at the local chemist – and of course my reputation was ruined. It was obviously me, and it was obviously porn.”
19. Deep Purple got their name from a song by Bing Crosby, a favourite of Ritchie Blackmore’s grandmother. Other names under consideration included Orpheus, Fire, Concrete God and Sugarlump.
20. Purple’s Burn album closes with an instrumental, A200, which – it turns out – is a code for ‘critter cream ointment’. “if you’re unfortunate enough to catch the critters [crabs] wandering about your nether regions, that’s the stuff you had to put on it,” said Ian Paice. “if you happened to get a little bit of infestation, that would be the stuff.”
21. Ritchie Blackmore staged a séance at The Hermitage in north Devon, during the recording of Fireball. Roger Glover recalled: “I was lying in bed at about three in the morning, when an axe smashed through my door.” The mad axe-man turned out to be Blackmore. Glover grabbed a handy chair leg, found the guitarist hiding in a darkened part of the house and “stopped mercifully short of clubbing him to death”. Blackmore and ian Paice’s girlfriend, Wendy, were conducting a séance in the next room. Glover said: “It had apparently taken control of their senses. or maybe mine.”
22. Mitzi Dupree (a track on Purple’s The House Of Blue Light album) is about an ‘entertainer’ Ian Gillan once encountered – a woman who employed her nether regions to fire ping-pong balls with unerring accuracy. Gillan was understandably smitten by Ms Dupree, singing: “I miss you, I love you, Mitzi Dupree / My darling Mitzi Dupree.”
23. During Purple’s 1972 Us tour Ritchie Blackmore was taken ill with hepatitis. He was replaced in the band first by Al Kooper – even though Kooper was, by his own admission, “a keyboard player who only dabbled on guitar” – and then by Randy California of Spirit fame.
24. During Purple’s tour of Texas in February 1976, two drug pushers pursued Glenn Hughes from city to city. Whatever happened to them? “One guy’s in jail for life,” Hughes divulged. “I flew him and his wife first-class to Hawaii. I bought his wife a white Steinway piano. I thought I was paying them back for being so nice to me. The next thing I knew the guy’s been busted supplying another band. The other guy? he’s dead – he OD’d.”
25. Concerto For Group And Orchestra. Yes, it’s about time we drew a veil over that one.
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