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Like the mother of all Seventies flashbacks, the smoke drifted once more across the water of Lake Geneva, and fire strafed the sky, to the sound of power chords fit to crack Mont Blanc. As Deep Purple piled into their most famous hit, “Smoke on the Water”, during their 10th appearance at Montreux Jazz Festival, organisers pulled out all the stops to recreate the 1971 fire at the nearby casino during a Frank Zappa concert that inspired the song.
“We did the show on a stage on the lake that was absolutely spectacular,” says Purple singer Ian Gillan, down the phone from the Zurich mountains a week later. “They raised the backdrop and all of a sudden Lake Geneva was covered in smoke and red lights. The simulation of the fire was pretty impressive, apparently.”
It’s not the only moment of late that Gillan and his fellow seventysomething bandmates – together on and off, in varying formats, since 1968 – might have imagined they were back in the early Seventies, hammering out career-defining albums (1970’s Deep Purple in Rock, 1972’s Machine Head) at the vanguard of a new generation of hard rock pioneers. Their new, 23rd album =1 follows a run of chart hits including top 10 records Infinite (2017) and Whoosh! (2020), suggesting a band in late-career resurgence. Driven, perhaps, by the fact that their audience seems to consist almost entirely of horn-waving Benjamin Buttons.
“It’s very exciting,” Gillan enthuses. “About 15 years ago, something weird happened. There was a whole new generation of fans. Our audiences from about 2009 or 2010 onwards have been mainly 15- to 22-year-olds. That’s been a great input of energy in the shows.” It’s not the classic catalogue they’re after from this notoriously solo-heavy band, Gillan believes, but the sort of virtuosic playing that has also made modern alternative stars of the likes of Khruangbin. “It’s the live shows that they’re into – the improvisation. For me, Deep Purple has always primarily been an instrumental band, and I think that’s what the kids get off on.”
Produced by Bob Ezrin, =1 also throws back somewhat to the sounds, themes and sonic intensity of Purple’s imperial Seventies period, when Gillan, bassist Roger Glover, drummer Ian Paice and since departed keyboard and guitar legends Jon Lord and Ritchie Blackmore were considered part of an “unholy trinity” of British hard rock alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. “No Money to Burn” harkens back to his days of pre-stardom poverty – “Roger and I only had one set of clothes between us when we joined Purple in ’69, so we couldn’t go out at the same time,” he says. “I have been very poor at times. In fact, I was recording the other day and I had to steal dog biscuits to feed myself!”
Our audiences from about 2010 has been mainly 15- to 22-year-olds
It’s also, I suggest, a surprisingly lusty record for a band who long since swapped the Jack bottle for the travel kettle. “You mean salacious?” Gillan chuckles. “It’s a bit naughty in places I suppose, but it’s only very mild and at my age [78], really, come on. [But] I’m a night person, I live the nightlife, I’m in rock’n’roll and I mix with exciting people. We don’t live in the conventional world.”
He cites “A Bit on the Side”, the true story of meeting a beautiful young woman in an “adult club” in Germany. “I poured her a glass of champagne and she sat down, we talked. She said her name was Charlene from Berlin, and we had a lot of interesting things [in common] – I had been to some interesting places and so had she. We were winding down and I noticed that she needed a shave. It turned out she wasn’t really Charlene from Berlin. She was Charlie from Belfast.” “I don’t care which way you lean,” Gillan sings, mingling the political with the overtly sexual with a tongue-lapping wail, “I don’t want no left or right/ I want front ’n back/ and a little bit o’ lovin’ on the side.”
Everyone’s seen Spinal Tap and that’s pretty much what happens
Anything goes? Try roadhouse rocker “Now You’re Talkin’”, which finds Gillan at a free-love Sixties party, stepping over “a whole load of bodies … I don’t know who’s doing what to whom”. “Have you never been to a party like that?” Gillan asks. “You haven’t lived. That was all that happened in the Sixties! You’d go to a party and you were stepping over people all over the place who were doing all kinds of things… when you’re a teenager in your early twenties in the Sixties, that was just normal. The one in ‘Now You’re Talking’ is a compilation. I’ve seen people falling out of upstairs windows and getting up and walking back to the bar. I’ve seen parties in Beirut, parties in Australia and parties behind the iron curtain that were just too wild to describe.”
He recalls his awakening as a lifelong night crawler, at a 2am Munich bierkeller, sometime in the 1960s. “The place was full of night people and I thought ‘This is where I belong’. There were police, actors, hookers, waiters, people who were winding down and finished work late. People were playing guitars and smoking joints. I didn’t smoke my first joint till I was 38 years old so most of my life was quite mild by comparison with later generations, but we did know how to enjoy ourselves.”
Purple’s enjoyments revolved primarily around the post-gig tipple or fifty. “I wasn’t a drunk,” Gillan says. “I just used to enjoy a drink and I was in company that did – pretty much everyone did. We didn’t do drugs so we just did booze. And you obviously can’t perform if you’re legless so you wait until afterwards. There’s a certain element of discipline there which is more along the lines of self-survival than anything else.”
That said, he did once wake up after a heavy night on the sauce with Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler to discover he’d drunkenly agreed to join early Eighties Black Sabbath. The resulting tour was famously the most Spinal Tap of them all, with Gillan unable to read his lyrics for the dry ice while dwarves fell off an oversized replica of Stonehenge. “There were hilarious things,” he laughs, recalling other such antics with Purple. “In Amsterdam, I did make a rather dramatic entrance through the wrong door. I found a little artists’ bar in the gods backstage and missed the cues for Purple starting. They just poured me a large drink in a huge goblet. There was probably a serpentine staircase for an opera, or something like that – I stepped out into space and did a few somersaults, landed on the stage having not spilled a drop of my drink. It was spectacularly clever, one of my great achievements in life.”
The early-Seventies Purple, on paper, seem like a deeply turbulent group: egos clashed, members came and went faster than Tory prime ministers and the Gillan era line-up collapsed into a David Coverdale-fronted version in 1973. But Gillan points to the band’s 1984 reunion as a far more difficult show to keep on the road.
To be a 40-year-old rebel…that’s not very rock’n’roll
“In the Seventies we just broke up,” he says. “Everyone’s seen Spinal Tap and that’s pretty much what happens. Outside influences come in, too much money, ‘we’re immortal’, all that rubbish. Then you go off and you try to do things individually and realize it’s the collective effort that really made it work. So you come to your senses and you try to get back together again, by which time everyone’s changed a little bit. You all have an experience of coping with life in a different way, you all have families and sorts of things that affect your maturity. You’re all maturing at different rates until you come to your senses and by then it’s too late. To be a 40-year-old rebel… that’s not very rock’n’roll.”
Around their second reunion in the early Nineties, with long-standing tensions between Gillan and Blackmore dissipating when the latter left to make medieval minstrel music with Blackmore’s Night, “we steadied the ship and got back on course”. Until the arrival of new guitarist Simon McBride in 2022, the line-up hadn’t changed in 20 years. In the meantime, Gillan had found his own personal counterweight in meditation, through which he learned to moderate his smoking and drinking.
“At an early stage in my life I decided I had to change,” he says. “I was too wild and there were things going on that were just not good if I wanted to have a future as a musician. I started meditation at that point and I found a lot of things that you could control. That was important, to start meditating and clear the decks of a load of the irresponsible behaviour, if you’re going to survive. It’s pretty important to get on top of things. You got to deliver, whether you’re on stage that night or whether you’re writing 14 songs. There’s no point laying around being drunk.”
Today, moderation is key to Purple’s survival. Gillan doesn’t drink or smoke during the nine months a year that the band spend on tour. “You can’t survive if you keep going through life like that, your body can’t take it,” he says from hardened experience. “So you’ve got to be practical in a physical sense. It blows your mind too. You evolve or die.” He’ll still let his hair down with a blended malt whiskey or two off the road though. “I’m still having a great time.”
His rebel spirit remains unquenched too, albeit directed these days at what he calls “the new establishment”. “I got really bored with being a rebel and I’m really excited by being a rebel now. I rebel against the new establishment and I’m loving every moment of it. Mostly you just sit back and laugh.” What does he see as the new establishment? He chuckles again. “You’re not drawing me into that one. I’ll tell it lyrically.”
I wonder if new album track “I’m Saying Nothin’” is a reaction to the danger of rock stars expressing opinions in the social media age, but Gillan insists it’s about the tight-lipped nature of “the perfect crime as a work of art”. On the topics of Keir Starmer and climate change he remains similarly zipped. His thoughts on the modern discourse do seep out, however, when discussing his parents’ diametrically opposed political stances. “You’d have a leaking tap and you have a family meeting, ‘Are we gonna get a socialist plumber or are we gonna have a capitalist plumber?’” he says. “And then the other side says ‘What if he’s a racist or a misogynist?’ ‘Whatever the hell he is, if he’s the only one in town I’m going to use him. Otherwise, I’m going to be up to my neck in water by the end of the year.’ And that’s pretty much an analogy for life in Britain today.”
Gillan is excited by the young rock bands he shares festival bills with today. “There’s all these thundering rhythms going through it. There’s no conventional songwriting that you would imagine would be the case but it’s completely fresh and very exciting.” But he struggles to hear his own legacy “muffled and diluted” within it – until I point out that it’s the overdriven power of hard rock legends like Purple that has been intrinsically infused into the rock-adjacent pop of acts like Yungblud, Halsey and Olivia Rodrigo. “It’s almost woven into the whole concept of expression, rebellion and freedom,” Gillan agrees, as if suddenly seeing the wild-at-heart spirit of Purple’s power-chord revolution gathering afresh. “That huge energy is very much part of it, it’s immense.” Where there’s still “Smoke…” there’s still fire.
Deep Purple’s new album ‘=1’ is released 19 July on earMUSIC
Deep Purple tour the UK from 4 November in Birmingham, London, Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow. Tickets available now
