The story of Deep Purple

A roundabout in London

Deep Purple began as somebody else's idea. In 1967 Chris Curtis, the drummer who had just left the Searchers, rang a London clothier called Tony Edwards and asked him to manage a new group. Curtis told him that Brian Epstein was dead, so Edwards could be the next Brian Epstein. The group would be called Roundabout, because musicians would get on and off it like a fairground ride. Edwards liked the pitch. He brought in two partners, John Coletta and Ron Hire, and the three of them formed a company called HEC Enterprises. Edwards later said he put up his shares in the family clothing business as security to pay for equipment, rent and living costs, even though he did not really understand the music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The first recruit was Curtis's flatmate, a classically trained organist from Leicester named Jon Lord. Lord had studied piano from the age of five, gone to drama school in London, and played in the Artwoods with Art Wood, the brother of Ronnie Wood. But Curtis was fading fast. He had started taking LSD, and Lord came home from a few days on the road to find the entire flat, furniture and light bulbs included, covered in aluminium foil. Curtis soon lost interest in his own project, and HEC let him go. They kept Lord, whom Edwards found sensible and easy to talk to, and asked him to build the band instead. Curtis later left music altogether and spent nineteen years working for the Inland Revenue.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The guitarist came from Hamburg. Ritchie Blackmore had grown up in Heston near Heathrow, left school at fifteen, and learned his trade as a session player for the producer Joe Meek and as a sideman for Screaming Lord Sutch. He was living in Germany when HEC persuaded him to come home. Lord brought in bassist Nick Simper, who had survived the 1966 car crash that killed Johnny Kidd. In March 1968 the band moved into Deeves Hall, a country house in South Mimms in Hertfordshire, fully stocked with Marshall amplifiers and a Hammond organ. Dozens of singers were tried, reportedly including a young Rod Stewart, before they chose Rod Evans of a club band called the Maze.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Evans brought his drummer along. His name was Ian Paice, he was nineteen, and Blackmore had already seen him play in Germany and been deeply impressed. The band's first drummer, Bobby Woodman, was unhappy with the direction anyway, so Paice was given an audition on the spot and won the job. In April 1968, on a short tour of Denmark and Sweden still billed as Roundabout, the band pinned name ideas on a board. Blackmore suggested Deep Purple, the title of a 1930s ballad by Peter DeRose that was his grandmother's favourite song. The runner up was Concrete God, which they decided was too harsh. On the twentieth of April 1968 they played their first show as Deep Purple, in Taastrup, Denmark.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mark One and the American hit

In May 1968 Deep Purple recorded their debut album, Shades of Deep Purple, at Pye Studios in London in just three days. They wanted to sound like the American band Vanilla Fudge, stretching pop songs into long, dramatic, organ heavy epics, and they filled half the record with covers. One of them was Hush, a Joe South song Blackmore had heard in Germany. The band cut it in two takes. Their small American label, Tetragrammaton, released it that summer and radio took off. By September 1968 Hush had reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number two in Canada. At home in Britain almost nobody noticed. For a TV spot to mime the song, a roadie had to stand in for an absent Blackmore.[1] [2] [3]

America embraced them. In October 1968 Deep Purple opened for Cream on their farewell tour, playing to more than sixteen thousand people a night at the Forum near Los Angeles, until Cream's management dropped them after a few shows. The band appeared on Hugh Hefner's Playboy After Dark, and on The Dating Game, where Jon Lord took part as a contestant. Their second album, The Book of Taliesyn, was rushed out to coincide with the tour and gave them another hit, a cover of Neil Diamond's Kentucky Woman, which reached number thirty eight. Back in England they were dismissed as a poor man's Vanilla Fudge and played small clubs, often for a fraction of what they earned in the States.[1] [2] [3]

The third album, simply called Deep Purple, came out in June 1969. It closed with April, a twelve minute piece that joined Blackmore's guitar to a full string and woodwind section written by Lord, still the band's longest studio track. The cover used part of Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, which some American shops refused to stock. But Tetragrammaton was nearly broke. It could not even afford to press the album on time, promotion collapsed, and the record stalled at number 162. Soon afterwards the label went out of business, and Warner Brothers took over its assets and released Deep Purple's records in America for the rest of the decade.[1] [2]

On their second American tour in spring 1969, Lord and Blackmore quietly agreed that the band had to get heavier, and that Rod Evans and Nick Simper did not fit. Paice agreed. Evans had also fallen for America and wanted to move there. What followed was not pretty. For several weeks the new plan was kept secret, and the three founders rehearsed by day with replacements while still playing gigs at night with Evans and Simper. The old line up played its last show at the Top Rank in Cardiff on the fourth of July 1969. Simper later called his sacking a body blow, and sued the management for breach of contract. The case was settled out of court.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Gillan, Glover and the Albert Hall

The new singer came through an old friend. Blackmore asked Mick Underwood, his former bandmate in the Outlaws, whether he knew anyone, and Underwood pointed to the singer in his own band, Episode Six. His name was Ian Gillan, a Hounslow boy raised on Elvis Presley with a powerful, wide ranging voice. Episode Six had released nine singles and not one had charted. Gillan brought along his songwriting partner, the bassist Roger Glover. Glover first played on a Deep Purple single, Hallelujah, as a session man, then decided to join. Underwood felt guilty for years about ending his own band. The new line up, soon called Mark Two, played its first gig at the Speakeasy in London on the tenth of July 1969.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

They had only rehearsed for a few weeks, so that first night leaned on long instrumentals. Gillan, not sure what to do while the others jammed, found a pair of congas on stage and played those. The band settled into Hanwell Community Centre in West London, chosen, Glover said, because it was the only place where they could make a lot of noise. One of Gillan's first contributions there was the lyric and melody for Child in Time, built on an organ figure Lord had borrowed from Bombay Calling by It's a Beautiful Day. Gillan wrote words about the Cold War and the nuclear threat, and the song became the showcase for his extraordinary range.[1] [2] [3]

Then came a detour. On the twenty fourth of September 1969 Deep Purple played Jon Lord's Concerto for Group and Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the composer Malcolm Arnold. Tony Edwards said Lord had only mentioned it as a dream, and Edwards went straight home and booked the hall. Gillan wrote the lyrics for the second movement on a napkin in an Italian restaurant that afternoon. It was one of the first full collaborations between a rock band and an orchestra, and it gave Deep Purple their first chart success in Britain. Blackmore called it a gimmick. He agreed to play along only if his heavy rock songs got their turn next.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

They did. Deep Purple in Rock came out on the fifth of June 1970, with the five band members carved into Mount Rushmore on the cover. The title was a deliberate answer to the Concerto. Blackmore's rule was simple: if it was not dramatic or exciting, it did not belong on the album. Engineer Martin Birch let the meters run into the red. The record reached number four in Britain and stayed in the charts for over a year. The label wanted a single, so the band improvised one in the studio. Blackmore borrowed a riff from Ricky Nelson's version of Summertime, Gillan wrote what he called deliberately banal lyrics, and Black Night went to number two.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fire on the lake and the Mark Two peak

Success brought a punishing schedule. Fireball, recorded in scraps between gigs, reached number one in Britain in 1971, though Blackmore said it was thrown together under pressure from management. Gillan had also become famous in another world, singing Jesus on the original 1970 album of Jesus Christ Superstar. One of the next songs was born on a coach. On the way to a show in Portsmouth in September 1971, a journalist asked how the band wrote songs. Blackmore picked up a guitar and played a riff, Gillan improvised words about a rock and roll band on the road, and by that night Highway Star was in the set. For the next album they booked the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio and the casino in Montreux, Switzerland, which closed each winter.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They arrived on the third of December 1971. The next afternoon Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention played the casino's final show of the season. During the show someone in the crowd fired a flare into the ceiling, and the building caught fire. Zappa calmly asked everyone to head for the exits. Claude Nobs, who ran the Montreux Jazz Festival and had once been a volunteer fireman, went back in and pulled out young people who had hidden inside. No one died, but the whole complex burned down, along with the Mothers' equipment. From their hotel, the band watched smoke from the blaze spread out across the lake. Soon afterwards Glover woke up saying a phrase out loud: Smoke on the Water.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

With no venue, Nobs found them a theatre called the Pavilion. They recorded the backing track for a riff Blackmore had built from four simple notes, working title Title Number One, while neighbours complained and police hammered on the doors as roadies held them shut. Then they were thrown out. The band moved into the empty Grand Hotel, set up in a corridor lined with mattresses, and finished the album. Machine Head came out on the thirtieth of March 1972 and went to number one in Britain. It was dedicated to Claude Nobs, who became Funky Claude in the lyrics. Smoke on the Water was not released as a single in America until May 1973, when it reached number four.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 1972 they toured Japan for the first time. The Japanese label wanted a live album for the local market, and the band agreed only if they could use their own engineer, Martin Birch. Three shows in Osaka and Tokyo were recorded on an eight track machine. Nobody took it seriously. Lord said the budget was about three thousand dollars, and only Glover and Paice turned up to mix it. Made in Japan came out worldwide anyway in December 1972 and became one of the best loved live albums ever made. Paice later called it probably the best live rock album of all time. Along with Machine Head, it helped make Deep Purple the top selling artists in America in 1973.[1] [2] [3]

Inside the band things were falling apart. They had barely stopped since 1969, several members had been seriously ill, and Who Do We Think We Are was made by musicians who were hardly speaking. In December 1972 Gillan wrote to management saying he would leave on the thirtieth of June 1973, and he played his last show in Osaka the day before. Blackmore had said he would only stay if the band got a new bassist, so Glover went too, deeply hurt. Gillan later said a decent manager would have sent them all on a long holiday instead. Jon Lord called the end of Mark Two at its peak the biggest shame in rock and roll, because they had been writing so well.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Coverdale, Hughes and California Jam

The first new recruit was Glenn Hughes, the bassist and singer of the Midlands band Trapeze. He was only interested once he heard the band might add Paul Rodgers of Free as a second lead vocalist. Rodgers turned them down because he was starting Bad Company. So Deep Purple advertised, without saying who they were, and the tapes poured in. One came from David Coverdale, a twenty one year old from Saltburn on the north east coast who was selling clothes in a menswear shop. His demo was, by his own account, recorded while very drunk. He had no proper photo, so he enclosed one from his mother's mantelpiece of himself as a skinny Boy Scout. Blackmore loved his deep, bluesy voice.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Coverdale was unveiled at Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire on the twenty third of September 1973, the day after his twenty second birthday. Management wanted him remade. According to the album's history, John Coletta told him to fix his squint with contact lenses, put him on amphetamine based slimming pills, and asked him to shave his moustache and change his name, which he refused. His first time in any recording studio was with Deep Purple, back in Montreux. Burn, released in February 1974, reached number three in Britain and number nine in America. Its title track opened with a riff close to George Gershwin's Fascinating Rhythm, and the slow blues Mistreated became a concert centrepiece.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixth of April 1974, Deep Purple co headlined the California Jam at the Ontario Motor Speedway, a festival broadcast on ABC television. They insisted on going on at sunset and kept the crowd waiting. Blackmore later said he agreed to play because he was told the band would make half a million. At the end of their set he threw guitars into the crowd, repeatedly smashed a network camera that had been getting in his way, and a pyrotechnic charge in his amplifiers exploded, briefly setting the stage alight. The band escaped by helicopter to avoid fire marshals and police. Their managers paid for the camera, and the footage became the first full length concert sold on video tape.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The next album, Stormbringer, arrived in November 1974, and the funk and soul that Hughes and Coverdale loved was now front and centre. Blackmore hated it and dismissed it as shoeshine music. He had already slipped into a Los Angeles studio with singer Ronnie James Dio and his band Elf, meaning to cut one song the others had rejected. It turned into an album. In March 1975 he told his bandmates in a Munich hotel that he was leaving. His last show with the band was at the Palais des Sports in Paris on the seventh of April 1975, and the split was announced that June. His new band was Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tommy Bolin and the collapse

Lord and Paice considered ending the band, but Coverdale begged them to keep going and played Lord a record: Spectrum, by the jazz drummer Billy Cobham. The guitarist on it was a young American from Sioux City, Iowa, named Tommy Bolin, who had also played in the James Gang. Lord was stunned. Bolin turned up to audition in Hollywood with hair dyed green, yellow and blue, plugged into a wall of amplifiers, turned everything up, and the job was his. He was cheerful and easy going, a big change from Blackmore. In the summer of 1975 the band recorded Come Taste the Band in Munich, and Bolin wrote or co wrote seven of its nine songs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

It was a good record made under a dark cloud. Bolin was using heroin, and Hughes was deep into cocaine. At one point during the Munich sessions Hughes was sent home to London, and the public was told he had a liver infection. Come Taste the Band came out in late 1975 to decent reviews but modest sales, number nineteen in Britain and forty three in America. The tour that followed was worse. Crowds shouted for Blackmore, and Bolin, who had never played the old songs his way, struggled. Lord later summed it up bitterly: they travelled the world and destroyed Deep Purple's reputation everywhere they played.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The darkest night came in Jakarta in December 1975. The band had been told they would play a theatre of about seven thousand people. The venue turned out to be a stadium holding more than a hundred thousand, guarded by the army. After the first show, their bodyguard Patsy Collins fell down a hotel lift shaft and died of his injuries. Glenn Hughes, tour manager Rob Cooksey and another minder were taken in by police in connection with his death. The next night the band was forced to play again, and riot police attacked the crowd with dogs. A judge ruled Collins's death an accident. Jon Lord said for the rest of his life that he believed it was murder.[1] [2]

The end came at the Liverpool Empire on the fifteenth of March 1976. Hughes apologised to the crowd for a poor show, blaming jet lag. Afterwards Lord and Paice shook hands and agreed it was over. When Coverdale walked in, in tears, to announce he was quitting, they told him there was no band left to leave. The split was made public that July. On the fourth of December 1976, after opening for Jeff Beck in Miami, Tommy Bolin died of multiple drug intoxication, including heroin. He was twenty five. Blackmore said his death was an incredible loss, not only for Deep Purple but for guitar fans everywhere.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Scattered, faked and reborn

The eight years apart were busy ones. Blackmore's Rainbow became a major hard rock band, and Roger Glover joined him in 1979. David Coverdale formed Whitesnake, and Jon Lord and later Ian Paice both played in it. Before that, Lord and Paice had tried a short lived band called Paice Ashton Lord. Ian Gillan first quit music for business, losing money on a hotel and a motorcycle company, then came back with the Ian Gillan Band and then the hard rocking Gillan. At Christmas 1978 Blackmore asked Gillan to sing for Rainbow. Gillan said no, but the two jammed together at the Marquee, their first time on a stage together since 1973.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1983 Gillan made a surprising move: he became the singer of Black Sabbath. The album Born Again was recorded at the Manor Studio in Oxfordshire, where Gillan, after a night at the pub, borrowed Bill Ward's car, raced it round the studio's go kart track and crashed it, escaping just before it went up in flames. He turned the story into the opening song, Trashed. On tour he could not remember Sabbath's lyrics, so he taped them to the stage floor, only for dry ice to hide them. The band played Smoke on the Water every night as an encore. Gillan called the whole year the longest party he had ever been to.[1] [2] [3]

Meanwhile a fake Deep Purple went on the road. In 1980 a management company persuaded the original singer, Rod Evans, to front a new band under the old name. He was the only member who had ever been in Deep Purple. The shows in America, Canada and Mexico went badly, and chairs were thrown at the stage in Toronto. The real band's company sued and won 672,000 dollars in damages, and Evans lost his royalties from the early records. He left music entirely and went back to work in respiratory therapy in California. He has not appeared in public since, and his former bandmates lost touch with him completely.[1] [2]

In April 1984 the real thing returned. The classic Mark Two line up of Blackmore, Gillan, Glover, Lord and Paice reformed, announced it on Tommy Vance's radio show, rehearsed in Stowe, Vermont, and signed a worldwide deal with PolyGram. Perfect Strangers, released on the twenty ninth of October 1984, reached number five in Britain and seventeen in America and went platinum there. The 1985 American tour out grossed every act that year except Bruce Springsteen. Back home they headlined Knebworth on the twenty second of June 1985 in front of eighty thousand fans, in torrential rain and six inches of mud.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The battle rages on

The old wounds reopened fast. The House of Blue Light, in 1987, was a long and difficult record, and Gillan said he could hear five professionals but not the spirit of the band. On that tour Blackmore broke a finger trying to catch his own guitar after throwing it in the air. By 1989 Gillan and Blackmore were at odds again, and Blackmore called a rehearsal without him. After a furious row, Glover, Gillan's oldest friend, told him he had gone too far this time, and Gillan was fired. That same year Gillan sang on the all star charity remake of Smoke on the Water for Rock Aid Armenia, after the 1988 earthquake. Blackmore played on it too.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band tried Survivor's Jimi Jamison, who could not get out of his record contract, and settled on Joe Lynn Turner, Blackmore's former singer in Rainbow. The one album with Turner, Slaves and Masters in 1990, reached only number eighty seven in America, and critics said it sounded like a Rainbow record. Jon Lord never really counted it as Deep Purple, though Blackmore liked it best of the reunion albums. With the band's twenty fifth anniversary coming, the record company, Lord, Paice and Glover wanted Gillan back. Turner was pushed out in 1992. Blackmore gave in only after, according to the band's history, receiving 250,000 dollars.[1] [2] [3]

Gillan rewrote the lyrics and melodies of songs built for another singer, which Blackmore felt ruined them, and the record was aptly named The Battle Rages On. It came out in July 1993. On the European tour the tension was obvious. A filmed show in Birmingham shows Blackmore skipping guitar parts and throwing water at a cameraman. Gillan later called it one of the lowest points of his life. After a concert in Helsinki on the seventeenth of November 1993, Blackmore left Deep Purple for the second and final time. Joe Satriani flew in to finish the Japanese dates. Gillan said later that had Blackmore stayed, the band would simply have ended.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Satriani was asked to stay, but a solo contract with Sony made that impossible. In 1994 the band unanimously chose Steve Morse, the American virtuoso behind the Dixie Dregs and a former member of Kansas. Morse was a different kind of player, precise and playful, with a background in jazz fusion, country and classical music. He had once even worked as a commercial airline co pilot. Gillan later admitted that he had been just as difficult as Blackmore in the old days, but said the day Blackmore walked out was the day they had to rebuild. Within a couple of years, he said, they were playing arenas again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Steve Morse and Jon Lord's farewell

Morse brought a burst of energy. Purpendicular, released in February 1996, was loose and varied, and songs like Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming stayed in the set for decades. The band toured constantly, followed it with Abandon in 1998, and in 1999 revisited the Concerto for Group and Orchestra, whose original score had been lost back in 1970. Lord painstakingly rebuilt it with the help of a Dutch fan and musicologist, Marco de Goeij, and the band played it again at the Royal Albert Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra. Lord said later that the piece changed his life twice, the second time by giving him the courage to build a career outside the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2002, after a British tour, Jon Lord retired from Deep Purple on friendly terms to concentrate on orchestral music. He left his old Hammond organ to his successor, Don Airey, who had already filled in when Lord injured his knee in 2001. Airey was a veteran of Rainbow, Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake, and had even conducted the orchestra for the 1997 Eurovision winner, Love Shine a Light. Lord's departure left Ian Paice as the only founding member. The new line up of Paice, Gillan, Glover, Morse and Airey would stay together for twenty years, the longest in the band's history, starting with Bananas in 2003 and Rapture of the Deep in 2005.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Jon Lord was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2011. He told fans that writing music would be part of his therapy, and he kept working, including a new recording of the Concerto that he reviewed before he died. He died at the London Clinic on the sixteenth of July 2012, aged seventy one, after a pulmonary embolism, with his family around him. Tributes poured in. Metallica's Lars Ulrich said there had simply been no musician like him in the history of hard rock. The next year's album, Now What, produced by Bob Ezrin, included Above and Beyond, with a line Gillan wrote before the funeral: souls having touched are forever entwined.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

For years the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ignored them. Deep Purple had been eligible since 1993, and Glover heard that a juror had dismissed them as one hit wonders. Musicians including Gene Simmons, Geddy Lee, Slash and Lars Ulrich campaigned loudly. The band were finally inducted on the eighth of April 2016 in Brooklyn, with Ulrich making the speech. Blackmore stayed away after being told the current band would not perform with him, Rod Evans did not appear, and Nick Simper was left off the list altogether. Lord's widow accepted his award. The band played Highway Star, Hush and Smoke on the Water. Two months later Paice suffered a mini stroke, but was back on stage within weeks.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The long goodbye that keeps going

In 2017 the band released Infinite and set off on what they called The Long Goodbye Tour. Paice said it might be the last big tour, but added that they should never say never. It was not the last. Whoosh, produced again by Bob Ezrin, arrived in August 2020 after a pandemic delay and reached number four in Britain, their highest charting studio album there in forty six years. It included a new version of And the Address, the instrumental that opened their very first album in 1968. Ian Paice was the only musician who played on both. A covers album, Turning to Crime, followed in 2021, and on it Roger Glover shared lead vocals on a Deep Purple song for the first time.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2022 the long stable line up finally changed. Steve Morse's wife Janine was diagnosed with stage four cancer, and in July he announced he was leaving to care for her, after twenty eight years in the band. In a warm farewell he joked that he was handing over the keys to the vault holding the secret of how Blackmore's Smoke on the Water intro was recorded, because he had never got it open. His replacement was Simon McBride from Belfast, who had won a national young guitarist competition at fifteen and had played in Don Airey's solo band. McBride became an official member in September 2022.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The McBride line up released its first album, called Equals One, in July 2024, again produced by Bob Ezrin. In April 2026, on a tour of Japan, the band met a lifelong fan who happened to be the prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. She had played in a Deep Purple tribute band as a girl, later took up the drums, and joked that when she fights with her husband she drums along to Burn. She handed Ian Paice a pair of signed drumsticks and told him, you are my god. In July 2026 the band released their twenty fourth studio album, Splat, with Ian Gillan saying it recaptured the spirit of the music they made from 1969 to 1973.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As of 2026, Deep Purple are still touring, with Ian Paice the only member to have played in every line up since 1968. They are counted with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath as the founders of hard rock and heavy metal, and have sold more than a hundred million records. Their influence runs through Iron Maiden, whose Steve Harris cited them as a model for heaviness, through Metallica, whose drummer first saw them at nine, and through the neoclassical guitar playing that Blackmore helped invent. And that four note riff remains, as Toto's Steve Lukather put it, the first song every kid learns to play.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Deep Purple

Ritchie Blackmore and Ian Gillan. The defining feud of Deep Purple. They clashed over music, money and the pace of work from 1971, and Gillan wrote Smooth Dancer about Blackmore. Gillan left in 1973, was fired in 1989 after Blackmore called a rehearsal without him, and saw Blackmore quit for good in 1993. Gillan later admitted he had been just as difficult, and said the two had long since made peace, though he would not share a stage with him in 2016.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jon Lord and Ian Paice. The two founders who held the band together. They were the only continuous members from 1968 to 1976, and together they decided to end the band in Liverpool in 1976. They formed Paice Ashton Lord and both joined Whitesnake. They were also family: Lord married Vicky Gibbs and Paice married her twin sister Jacky, so the two men were brothers in law as well as bandmates.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ian Gillan and Roger Glover. A songwriting partnership that began in Episode Six. Gillan would only join Deep Purple if Glover came too, and Glover later came up with the title Smoke on the Water while Gillan wrote the words. They left in 1973 and returned together in 1984. In 1989 it was Glover who told Gillan he had gone too far, just before he was fired, yet it was Glover who pushed to bring him back.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord. Rivals and partners at the heart of the sound. Lord drove his Hammond organ through Marshall amplifiers to match Blackmore's volume, and on stage they traded musical jokes and challenges. Lord led the early classical experiments, and Blackmore agreed to the Concerto only if he got to make a heavy rock record next. Blackmore later said Lord gave the band stability and remembered ideas when he forgot them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes. The two voices of Mark Three. Coverdale was an unknown, Hughes an experienced singer who had expected to front the band himself, and they often argued over who sang what. But they became close friends and wrote You Keep On Moving together in Coverdale's flat above a Wimpy bar in Redcar. Coverdale's lyric for Dealer was about trying to pull Hughes back from addiction.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tommy Bolin and Glenn Hughes. The closest friends in Mark Four, and partners in its drug problems. Hughes shouted across the room at Bolin's audition that he was coming home with him. Their friendship ended painfully. The last time they met, at the Beverly Hilton in 1976, they ended up fighting on the floor because Bolin had left his girlfriend, Karen Ulibarri. Hughes and Ulibarri later became a couple and married.[1] [2] [3]

Tony Edwards and Deep Purple. The manager who paid for it all. A clothier with no background in rock, Edwards bankrolled Roundabout using his family shares as security, booked the Royal Albert Hall for Lord's Concerto, and sent the band back to the studio for a single, which became Black Night. He managed them until 1976. When he died in 2010, Blackmore wrote that without Tony Edwards there would be no Deep Purple.[1] [2] [3]

Martin Birch and Deep Purple. The engineer who captured their sound. Birch was about the same age as the band and recorded them loud, letting the meters run into the red. He engineered or produced eleven Deep Purple albums, including Machine Head and Made in Japan, and In Rock thanked him as a catalyst. He went on to produce Rainbow, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, and died in 2020 aged seventy one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Claude Nobs and Deep Purple. The Montreux Jazz Festival founder who saved their most famous album. After helping people escape the casino fire in 1971, Nobs found the band a theatre and then the empty Grand Hotel to record in. They dedicated Machine Head to him and immortalised him as Funky Claude. Nobs died in January 2013 after a skiing accident, aged seventy six.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ian Gillan and Tony Iommi. Brief bandmates who became lasting friends. Gillan sang on Black Sabbath's Born Again in 1983 and toured with Iommi for a year. They reunited for the Rock Aid Armenia version of Smoke on the Water in 1989, were honoured in Armenia, and formed the charity group WhoCares to help build a music school in Gyumri. Gillan has called Armenia his spiritual motherland.[1] [2] [3]

Ritchie Blackmore and Candice Night. Blackmore's partner in life and music since the early 1990s. They began living together in 1991, moved to her native Long Island, and founded the folk rock duo Blackmore's Night, which took Blackmore away from hard rock for most of his later career. After an engagement of nearly fifteen years they married in 2008, and they have two children.[1]

Rod Evans and Deep Purple. The original voice of Hush who became the band's ghost. Dismissed in 1969, Evans later fronted Captain Beyond, then in 1980 led an unauthorised Deep Purple and was sued, losing his royalties. He vanished from music. Ian Paice said in 2015 that nobody knew where he was. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2016 but did not attend.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Deep Purple

• Jon Lord once appeared as a contestant on the American TV show The Dating Game, in October 1968. Deep Purple were the first rock band to perform on the show during their first American tour. While the band played, Lord also sat in as one of the contestants. That episode is now believed lost.[1] [2]
• Deep Purple never recorded or performed the old ballad Deep Purple that gave them their name. The song by Peter DeRose was a hit for Larry Clinton in 1939 and for Nino Tempo and April Stevens in 1963. It was Blackmore's grandmother's favourite, and she played it on the piano.[1]
• The album Machine Head is named after the tuning pegs on a stringed instrument. Machine heads are the tuning knobs on a guitar or bass. The back cover shows the headstock of Roger Glover's bass. The front cover photo is a reflection in a polished metal sheet.[1]
• Made in Japan, one of rock's most famous live albums, was recorded for about three thousand dollars. Jon Lord put the budget at around three thousand dollars. The band did not care much about it, and only Roger Glover and Ian Paice turned up to mix it.[1]
• Space Truckin' was played as a wake up call for the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003. NASA crews on mission STS-107 heard it in orbit. After Columbia was lost, Steve Morse wrote a short instrumental requiem for the astronauts, Contact Lost, released on the album Bananas.[1] [2]
• In 1972 a Deep Purple concert at London's Rainbow Theatre earned them a Guinness record as the world's loudest band. The 1975 Guinness Book of World Records listed them as the globe's loudest band. Their reputation for volume later shaped the record breaking sound system at the California Jam.[1] [2]
• Blackmore said he owed Beethoven a lot of money for the Smoke on the Water riff. He claimed the four note riff was a reversed take on the famous opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Friends of the band thought it was too simple to work.[1]
• Deep Purple's first official music video for Smoke on the Water came out in March 2024, fifty two years late. It was made for the Machine Head super deluxe edition. The song was remixed by Dweezil Zappa, the son of Frank Zappa, whose concert was burning when the song was born.[1] [2]
• Ian Paice has used a double bass drum on record only once, on the title track of Fireball. Paice normally plays a single bass drum. On stage the second drum for Fireball had to be set up during the break before the encore.[1] [2]
• Ian Paice is missing part of one lung after childhood illness, which led to rumours he had only one. Pneumonia at the age of six turned into tuberculosis, and part of the lower lobe of his left lung was lost. He also plays a left handed kit.[1]
• Ritchie Blackmore bought his first car in 1984, after learning to drive at thirty nine. His band flew in its own chartered jet in the seventies, yet he did not learn to drive until the year of the Mark Two reunion. He also speaks fluent German.[1] [2]
• Blackmore fitted a useless strap lock to the headstock of a Stratocaster just to confuse people. It did nothing at all. He also screwed down his middle pickup so it could not be used, and was among the first rock players to scallop his fretboard.[1]
• In 1974 Blackmore took cello lessons from Hugh McDowell of the Electric Light Orchestra. He said playing an unfamiliar instrument gave him a sense of adventure. The cello fed into the medieval flavour of Rainbow's early music.[1]
• A replacement Hammond organ Jon Lord used for decades was bought from Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac. His original Hammond C3 broke down in 1973. Lord kept the replacement until he retired in 2002 and passed it to Don Airey, who later retired it as worn out.[1]
• The Burn instrumental A 200 was named after a head lice shampoo. Fans assumed the title was science fiction, which Coverdale denied. According to the album's thirtieth anniversary notes, Jon Lord named it after a lice treatment called A-200.[1]
• David Coverdale sent Deep Purple a Boy Scout photo of himself with his audition tape. He had no proper picture, so he borrowed a framed one from his mother's mantelpiece. He mainly hoped to get it back before she noticed.[1] [2]
• Ian Gillan recorded all his vocals as Jesus for the original Jesus Christ Superstar album in about three hours. Tim Rice hired him after hearing Child in Time. Gillan was later offered the film role but asked for a huge fee, so it went to Ted Neeley.[1]
• The Book of Taliesyn cover artist was paid thirty pounds, minus his agent's cut. The illustrator John Vernon Lord, no relation to Jon Lord, drew the cover. It was the only record sleeve he ever designed, and the original artwork was never returned.[1]
• The single Emmaretta was named after a cast member of the musical Hair whom Rod Evans was trying to woo. Emmaretta Marks was in Hair when Evans met her in America. The early 1969 single failed to chart.[1] [2]
• The band once dropped plans to move to America because Ian Paice could have been drafted for Vietnam. During their early American success they considered relocating, but at twenty one Paice was eligible for the draft.[1]
• Rod Evans left music after the fake Deep Purple lawsuit and worked in respiratory therapy in California. His Captain Beyond bandmate Bobby Caldwell said in 2017 that Evans was doing great, was married to another respiratory therapist, and had no plans to perform again.[1]
• Steve Morse worked as a commercial airline co-pilot between 1987 and 1988. The guitarist, who later spent twenty eight years in Deep Purple, also became a hay farmer in Ocala, Florida.[1]
• Don Airey conducted the orchestra for the song that won Eurovision in 1997. He arranged and played on Love Shine a Light by Katrina and the Waves, and conducted the orchestra at the contest.[1]
• Don Airey played most of the bass parts on Judas Priest's album Painkiller, on a Minimoog. Airey revealed this in a 2020 interview. Priest bassist Ian Hill was ill during the sessions.[1]
• Roger Glover's first solo hit featured an animated video of a guitar playing frog. Love Is All, from The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast, was sung by Ronnie James Dio. It flopped in Britain but went to number one in the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia.[1]
• Roger Glover did not sing on a Deep Purple record until 2021. He shared lead vocals on The Battle of New Orleans, on the covers album Turning to Crime. He had once sung a whole concert when Gillan was ill in the seventies.[1] [2]
• Spirit guitarist Randy California played one show as Deep Purple's guitarist in 1972. With Blackmore ill with hepatitis, Al Kooper rehearsed with the band first, then suggested California, who played in Quebec City on the sixth of April 1972.[1]
• Gillan and Blackmore jammed together at London's Marquee at Christmas 1978, five years after Gillan quit. Blackmore had just asked Gillan to sing for Rainbow. Gillan said no, but they shared a stage for the first time since 1973.[1] [2]
• For a British TV spot miming Hush in 1968, a roadie stood in for Ritchie Blackmore. Blackmore was unavailable for the David Frost Show, so roadie Mick Angus took his place. It did not help sales in Britain.[1]
• Deep Purple played Moscow's State Kremlin Palace in 2008 at the personal request of Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev, then chairman of Gazprom and about to become president, was a fan. Gazprom sponsored the concert.[1]
• Metallica's Lars Ulrich bought Fireball after seeing Deep Purple in Copenhagen in 1973, when he was nine. His father took him to the show. Ulrich later called Made in Japan his favourite album and gave the speech at their Hall of Fame induction.[1] [2] [3]
• Ian Paice is the only musician on both versions of And the Address, recorded fifty two years apart. The instrumental opened their 1968 debut album. The band recorded it again for Whoosh in 2020, and Paice was the one player on both.[1] [2]
• Glenn Hughes gave his Deep Purple era Rickenbacker bass to Black Sabbath's Geezer Butler. Hughes played it on Burn, Stormbringer and Come Taste the Band. Butler used it on Sabbath's Never Say Die tour in 1978.[1]
• Tommy Bolin said he had only four guitar lessons and never learned any scales. In a 1975 interview he described himself as self taught and playing entirely by ear.[1]
• Japan's prime minister Sanae Takaichi said she drums along to Burn when she argues with her husband. She told the band this when they visited her office in Tokyo in April 2026. She also played keyboards in a Deep Purple tribute band as a girl.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.