Simon McBride doesn’t usually get nervous before shows, but right now he’s having a mini-meltdown. It’s May 22, 2022, and he’s due to walk out on stage at Tel Aviv’s Menora Mivtachim Arena in less than 15 minutes. He’s played hundreds of gigs before, some of them in venues as big as this, but this is different: it’s his first show as guitarist with Deep Purple. And he’s bricking it.
“Basically the shit hit the fan,” he says now. “I was, like: ‘Oh crap, I’m going on stage to play to fifteen thousand people with Deep Purple. How am I going to do this? Aaagh!’”
Back in Tel Aviv, his new bandmates are unaware of what’s going through his mind as they troop out onto the stage and fire up traditional set opener Highway Star. Drummer Ian Paice kicks things off with that immortal, wrist-snap shuffle before keyboard player Don Airey and McBride start decorating the beat with a few familiar chords. Except…
“So I’m standing there in front of this big audience, and Paicey starts playing,” McBride recalls, “and I hear this screaming from behind me: ‘Simon! Simon! Start the bloody song!’ It was Don. I’m like: ‘Oh shit…’”
Snapped out of his trance, he made it through that song, and the next, and the next. That’s when McBride finally unclenched his arse. “It was all good after that,” he says. “That’s when I started thinking: ‘Okay, this will be fine.’”
It’s the kind of baptism of fire no musician wants, let alone one who is following in the giant footsteps of previous Purple six-string maestros Ritchie Blackmore, Tommy Bolin and Steve Morse, the latter of whom McBride is filling in for – temporarily at first, then it became permanent (we’ll get to that shortly). But – a friendly roasting from Ian Paice after the Tel Aviv show aside – McBride has earned his spurs in the eyes of his new bandmates.
“When Steve Morse joined the band thirty years ago, somebody asked him what it was like to step into Ritchie Blackmore’s shoes,” says Purple singer Ian Gillan. “Steve said: ‘As far as I know, Ritchie took his shoes with him when he left.’ Simon walked into this band fully shod.”
The addition of Simon McBride means Deep Purple have officially entered their Mk IX era. For most bands, line-up changes are par for the course, but Purple is an institution where such things are etched into the minds of fans like papal lore. Each incarnation occupies a specific place in the Purple story, their respective merits pored over, dissected and compared with what came before.
Actually, it’s a minor surprise that Deep Purple made it past Mk VIII. In 2017 they announced The Long Goodbye tour in support of that year’s Infinite album. “It may be the last big tour,” Ian Paice said, suggesting that the Purple juggernaut, rumbling along in one form or another for a large chunk of the previous 50 years, was nearing the end of the road. No more weeks holed up in rehearsal rooms and studios, no more endless slogs around the globe, just the prospect of a golden retirement on the horizon. So how’s that working out for them?
“Actually, I retired when I was nineteen,” says Roger Glover. “I haven’t had a job since then. This? This isn’t a proper job.”
The bassist is at home in Switzerland. It’s 9.30am and he’s a few minutes late to our Zoom call, having just stumbled out of bed, although that hasn’t prevented him from sparking up his first roll-up of the day.
If this is what retirement looks like, more people should try it. The last dozen years have seen this venerable and venerated band hit a late career… well, purple patch. The Now What?! album in 2013 marked the start of a restorative partnership with producer Bob Ezrin, which continued through Infinity, 2020’s Whoosh! and 2021’s pandemic-era covers set Turning To Crime.
This unexpectedly productive output continues with their 21st studio album, the enigmatically titled =1. Sonically and musically, it slots in next to their recent, Ezrin-produced albums. It’s the sound of a band who rediscovered the joy of jamming out songs in a rehearsal room just over a decade ago, rediscovering a little of the confidence they’d lost in the process.
The title =1 is Ian Gillan’s. It was inspired by his frustration with the endless bureaucracy and tedious complications of modern life.
“I found myself online, trying to fill in some blurry matrix of traffic lights or motorcycles, trying to prove to a robot that I’m human,” Gillan says, speaking from his home in Portugal. “I thought: ‘This has got to stop.’ We live in a society of compliance. You have to comply if you want to get anything done. You have to jump through hoops. It drives me nuts.”
He began doodling in his notebook. “I wrote this ridiculous equation, with the answer ‘=1’. All that crap on the left-hand side, that’s what you want to get rid of. That’s the whole point.”
He says the idea of ‘=1’ gave him a focus when it came to writing lyrics for the new album that he hadn’t had up to that point. “I didn’t want to conceptualise the album, but I wanted some common thread,” he says. “There’s no literal connection, it’s just a mood thing. They feel like they’re all coming from the same room.”
It’s not clear what that room actually looks like to anyone but Ian Gillan. The album’s first single, Portable Door, finds the singer imagining escaping tricky situations via the titular exit. Another song is called Lazy Sod. Then there’s Old-Fangled Thing, tangentially inspired by the history of the pencil.
“For 2000 years, people were wandering around scratching their heads as to why their erasers had such long handles,” he says of the latter. “Until they discovered the graphite inside it and civilisation was born.”
This is typical Ian Gillan: jokey and serious at the same time. “I do take things seriously,” he counters, “but I happen to be standing in a different place. It’s the parallax effect on reality. Most of us think the same way, because that’s how we’ve been indoctrinated by parents and school and culture. I like to take a step sideways and see things from a different angle. You could call it lateral thinking. But I like to see the funny side of things. So you’re half right.”
It’s not just Gillan who’s marching half a step out of time with the rest of the world. Purple themselves have never really been synced up with what’s going on around them. They’re not perceived as ‘cool’ in the way that former peers Led Zeppelin were and Black Sabbath have become.
“From the beginning, we were all so different as people, different backgrounds, different culturally, everything,” says Gillan. “The only common thread was music, and even that wasn’t common because there was so much in it. So we decided on one thing, and that was to avoid fashion at all costs – fashion in music, fashion in clothes, all of it. We didn’t want to be part of the music scene. It served us well. If you’re fashionable today, by definition tomorrow you’re not.”
There must have been moments when Deep Purple were fashionable, though? He thinks for a second.
“1971, possibly,” he says. Then he changes his mind. “Actually, we’re still waiting."
Roger Glover has his own take on the meaning behind the title of the new album. “=1 is such a strong symbol,” he says. “I think of it now as being the history of the band. We’ve been through multiplications, divisions, extractions, brackets, algebra… all that, and yet we’re still one band.”
There was one more mathematical twist before they started work on =1. It’s the first record they’ve made without guitarist Steve Morse since 1996’s Purpendicular. It’s not news that Morse was Purple’s longest-serving guitarist, clocking up 11 more years than Ritchie Blackmore (28 in total, to the Man In Black’s 17), but what’s less noted is the role he played in helping give direction back to a band who were lacking it at the end of Ritchie Blackmore’s increasingly dictatorial second term, 1984–93.
Except Morse himself is no longer a member of Deep Purple. The reason is complicated and emotive, and while his former bandmates are respectful and sensitive about the circumstances, they’re honest too. According to Glover, Morse had never been happy with Purple’s touring schedule.
“Steve really wanted to end the band around the Infinity album: ‘We’re back on top, we’re doing something great, let’s end now with a bang,’” says the bassist. “That didn’t go down too well with me or anybody else, really. First of all, I don’t want to stop. Second of all, going out with a bang is not the way this band does things. [Adopts hokey showman’s voice] ‘The last, final gig of Deep Purple – where’s it gonna be?’”
In the autumn of 2021, the four musicians – Glover, Paice, Morse and Airey – met in Hamburg to start writing new songs. Two days in, Morse received a call that his wife, Janine, was seriously ill and in intensive care back home in the States. He flew home to immediately be with her.
“We were in there for another week,” says Glover. “Me, Don and Paicey, just jamming around on various things.” He grimaces. “It sounded like a band at the Holiday Inn bar. You need a guitarist.”
They were more than happy to give Morse the time he needed to be with his wife – who wouldn’t be? “There was no thought of replacing him,” says Gillan.
Morse returned to play a handful of shows with the band in early 2022. But there was a further tour later that summer.
Gillan: “Steve wasn’t able to get back out on the road, and it was as simple as that. He didn’t want to move far from home. Completely understandable. But we just wanted to work.”
Glover: “The thing is, there was no guarantee how long Steve was going to be away. It could have been a week, it could have been a year. There was no way of knowing. We couldn’t stop, we had commitments, we had tours. Steve’s always complained about the length of the tours, so the writing was on the wall, in a way. But we had to make a really tough decision.”
On July 31, 2022, it was announced that Steve Morse was leaving Deep Purple to concentrate on caring for his wife, who was suffering from stage four cancer. Today, Glover admits that it was the band’s decision to part ways with him.
“It was really tough,” he says. “We talked about it, we discussed it back and forth: ‘What are we going to do?’ We couldn’t take no action, something had to happen. He got [the news that he was being let go] from the management, but I called him and we talked. He was not happy, either. It was hard and it was sad, and after twenty-eight years of making some great music with Steve, it was… for me it was a tough decision. But that’s life sometimes.”
Glover says he’s talked to Morse since he left the band. “I’ve spoken to Steve several times. He was my choice in the band in the first place. There’s a connection between us that the others don’t have. So yeah, it’s difficult. But we talk, and we laugh. He’s a survivor.”
Morse’s exit left Deep Purple a man down. Did they think of giving Ritchie Blackmore a call and telling him there was a job going?
“Ha ha ha,” Glover says drily, arching an eyebrow. “No.”
As it did many people, covid hit Simon McBride hard. “I had three years of doing nothing,” he remembers, speaking to Classic Rock via Zoom from his home just outside Belfast, where an impressive collection of guitars is visible hanging on the wall behind him.
“I even applied for a job in Asda. I didn’t get it. I thought: ‘I’m not even good enough to work in Asda…’”
So I’ll join Deep Purple instead?
“I mean, basically, that’s what happened, yeah,” he says with a laugh.
The retail industry’s loss was rock’n’roll’s gain. The 45-year-old McBride is a good fit for Purple. He’s confident without being cocky, unafraid to speak his own mind. Asked if working with producer Bob Ezrin was intimidating, he replies: “No. He tried, but I think he met his match with me. I wasn’t taking any nonsense.” (He does caveat this with fulsome praise of Ezrin’s studio technique, adding that “he’s a lovely guy”.)
While the guitarist is new to Purple, he’s an old hand on the scene. In his teens he played in Irish rockers Sweet Savage and with former Commitments star Andrew Strong, before making a name for himself as a blues-rock hotshot in the Gary Moore mould. He released three solo albums between 2008 and 2022 and appeared on records by Whitesnake offshoot Snakecharmer, musician and druid Clive Culbertson, and many more.
McBride’s entry into Deep Purple seemed fated. He’s been a member of Don Airey’s solo band since the early 2010s, and has appeared on stage with all of his future bandmates. “Just never at the same time.”
It was Airey who put McBride’s name forward to step in when Steve Morse first became unavailable. “Don sent me a tape about four years ago: ‘Listen to this great guitarist,’” says Glover. “And it was great. When it happened with Steve, there was no question about anyone else. Simon was the first choice. The only choice.”
Not that McBride saw it coming. He first received an email from Purple’s manager around Christmas 2021, asking him if he was free to stand in for Steve Morse at a handful of US shows the following February. In the end, Morse played the gigs, but he was unable to do a few dates that were scheduled in late May and early June. Could McBride step in then?
“I said: ‘Yeah, cool, I’ll do them,’” he says now, with a casualness he probably wasn’t feeling at the time.
The first of those shows was the one in Tel Aviv, which started with McBride almost fluffing his big entrance. The tour was due to run until the end of summer 2022, but even then it was still a temporary thing. He fully expected Morse to return.
“For me, Steve was the guitarist,” he says. “At that point I was just a session guy. I know how to deal with that stuff. It’s a great experience to go and play, then you’re done, you go home and you never think about it again. You don’t get caught up in: ‘I’m the new Deep Purple guitarist.’ No you’re not.”
Except at some point midway through that tour he was. McBride was on the road with them in Europe when he got a sense that something was afoot. The band’s manager had flown out to a gig, which rarely happened, in Germany.
“I remember sitting in some bar, drinking those small German beers with no gas you get over there, and Don’s knocking them back,” McBride remembers. “I was looking at him, thinking: ‘There’s something going on. You’re celebrating something.’”
The next morning, he got the message: the gig as guitarist with Deep Purple was his if he wanted it. “They’d had a meeting that day. I don’t know what was said or what went on.”
A couple of nights later, McBride was sitting in another hotel bar, this time with Ian Gillan. At one point, after a few more beers, the singer asked him a question: “Are you part of this fucking band, or what?’”
“And I was like: ‘Yeah,’” says McBride. “There was a lot of celebrating.”
Has he spoken to Morse about it?
“Only over email. He was lovely at the start – whatever I needed, gear-wise, he said to use his. I spoke to him recently over email when his wife passed away [Janine Morse died in February 2024]. I get on fine with Steve. There’s no sour grapes there. It just is what it is.”
Has he had any grief from the more dug-in factions of Purple’s fan base?
“Steve got grief, Satriani got grief, Tommy Bolin got grief,” he says. “But strangely, when I joined it was more positive than anything. I could see people slagging me off, but the management were going: ‘It’s very minimal – it’s ninety-nine per cent positive.’ You’re always going to get the hard-core Ritchie fans who stopped listening to Deep Purple after he left. But Ritchie hasn’t been in the band for thirty-odd years. Times move on.”
The senior members of Deep Purple have seen all this before, many times. Occasionally they’ve been the reason for it. In 1973 Gillan resigned from the band, followed by Roger Glover (the bassist had less choice in the matter, being fired by Blackmore). “I was young, confused, arrogant, immortal,” Gillan says. “I was finding it hard to cope. I didn’t know how to.”
Then there’s Ritchie Blackmore. His relationship with the other members of the band that he co-founded has been a decades-long combination of soap opera and Greek tragedy. Glover recalls how the glorious, we’re-in-this-together early 70s gave way to something more stressful after their 1984 reunion, with the guitarist eventually choosing to walk out of the studio whenever the rest of the band refused to play the songs he’d written.
Blackmore left Purple for the second and final time in 1993. His no-show when Purple were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2016 suggested the two parties weren’t on each other’s Christmas card lists.
“Ritchie’s been on his own road for a long time,” says Glover. “He’s not involved with us at all. He’s been suing us, there’s been bad feelings over the years. It’s cost us a lot of money. But since we changed management [circa 2020] he’s come on board. He’s now part of the Purple family. Not personally. Through his people.”
That’s not to say a reunion is on the cards.
“Happiness is important to us at this stage,” Glover says diplomatically. At the same time, retirement also isn’t on the cards. The Long Goodbye that was promised a few years ago seems to be a fairly open-ended concept. But when the end does eventually come, Deep Purple are more than happy to go gentle into that good night.
“The stress and the enormity of that decision is beyond us,” Glover says of a pre-determined expiry date. “We’re a band that carries on until we stop. If the last gig happens to be somewhere outside Edinburgh, or in a field in Poland, or wherever, then that’s the last gig. No hoopla. That’s never been the Deep Purple way.”
=1 is out now via EarMUSIC. Deep Purple tour the UK in November.
