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The Latest Breaking News from Jon Lord

“We had an exploding Marshall cabinet. The roadies put too much gasoline in it, and it almost blew Ritchie Blackmore offstage”: A metal fan’s guide to Deep Purple, one of hard rock’s original Holy Trinity

Along with Sabbath and Zeppelin, Deep Purple helped craft the primordial goop that spawned metal

Metal Hammer

“Pink Floyd weren’t available. Jon Lord turned it down. So it came my way”: Roger Glover made an unexpected success of the soundtrack to a movie that never happened – but was it prog?

Having recently quit Deep Purple, the bassist was looking for a new challenge in 1973. It came in the form of The Butterfly Ball And The Grasshopper’s Feast, featuring notable prog guest stars

Louder

“I had a meltdown. Cocaine psychosis took over – it’s a form of paranoid schizophrenia”: How Deep Purple split from Ritchie Blackmore and made a funky masterpiece in Come Taste The Band

Ritchie Blackmore was out, US hotshot Tommy Bolin was in and Deep Purple’s Mk IV line-up were about to make the most under-rated album of their career

Louder

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"There has been no better ambassador for the electric guitar": Bernie Marsden, remembered

Best known for co-founding Whitesnake and as a writer of some of their classic songs, Bernie Marsden spent a lifetime walking in the shadow of the blues

Louder

Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan: ‘I’ve seen parties too wild to describe’

The frontman of the heavy rock monsters talks to Mark Beaumont about booze, the sexual wildness of the Sixties, living out Spinal Tap moments, and the band’s new album

The Independent UK

“We’d arranged to do an album of new material together. He called me… ‘I’ve got cancer; do you mind if we put things on hold?’ Sadly it never happened”: Rick Wakeman’s tribute to Jon Lord

Deep Purple icon, who inspired Yes counterpart to remake Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, had a wicked sense of humour and was a true progger at heart

Louder

"The freedom and joy we had, and the confidence in each other, is remarkable": Ian Gillan looks back at Deep Purple's Machine Head era

With Deep Purple’s original plans for their sixth album having literally gone up in smoke, Machine Head was a triumph snatched from the jaws of disaster

Louder

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“Nothing’s worse than hearing someone say, ‘Deep Purple? They’re just like Black Sabbath, knocking out riffs’”: the birth of Deep Purple Mk II and the transformation that changed rock

How Deep Purple went from one-hit-wonders to become one of the greatest rock bands in history

Louder

"I'd never been able to see what other people liked about us. Suddenly I understood": Roger Glover's seven favourite Deep Purple songs

Roger Glover's seven favourite Purple patches, including the one that was "like rap before rap"

Louder

"He told me 'I'm giving all the magic stuff up and I’m just going to play.' A few days later he was dead": The apocalyptic life of Graham Bond, one of British music's great lost talents

Graham Bond told people he was the son of Aleister Crowley. His life was blighted by drugs. And on May 8, 1974, he died under a train in North London

Louder

“It shows every member of the band doing what they did best – Gillan’s vocals, Jon Lord’s keyboards”: the In Rock classic that’s Tony Iommi‘s favourite Deep Purple song

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi reveals his favourite song by fellow rock pioneers Deep Purple

Louder

"One demo was of a guy playing one finger piano on Black Night": When the call went out to replace Ian Gillan in Deep Purple, only one man got an audition

In 1973, Deep Purple replaced Ian Gillan with an unknown singer. They then went on to make one of rock’s most underrated albums, Burn

Louder

“Metallica would jam on their stuff in rehearsals, songs like Black Night and Highway Star”: Lars Ulrich on his lifelong love of Deep Purple and the genius of the Machine Head album

Lars Ulrich is a lifelong Deep Purple fan – and here’s why

Louder

That mix that made Deep Purple great was never stronger than on Machine Head, and never clearer than it is now, on its 50th anniversary edition

This reissue of Deep Purple's 1972 album Machine Head adds remixes, Montreux and BBC live sets, audio fairy dust and more

Louder

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Louder

"It was starting to feel like the band had run its course": Whitesnake entered 1984 on a high, but everything was about to change

Whitesnake's last album before MTV propelled them towards US superstardom, Slide It In marked the end of an era for the band

Louder

“We were the original bearded pirates. Nobody gave us a chance”: the epic story of how Whitesnake became the greatest blues rock band of the early 80s

Before MTV and hair metal, Whitesnake were the greatest blues rock band of the early 80s

Louder

“I’m so fortunate not to have died. I’ve overdosed, been pistol-whipped, shot at, stabbed, run over in a car... and I’m still here”: Glenn Hughes, The Voice of Rock, has lived the lives of 10 men, and he's not finished yet

Glenn Hughes, The Voice of Rock, looks back upon a lifetime of fabulous, and sometimes terrifying, rock 'n' roll adventures

Louder

“I was completely petrified by Kate Bush singing Wuthering Heights on TV. Anyone I was scared of I was interested by”: How Matt Berry discovered prog

Toast Of London star and self-taught musician became a fan of Jean Michel Jarre, Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd and more

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Louder

“We didn’t want to be extras, we didn’t want to be bit men… If you haven’t got an ego, you shouldn’t be doing this”: Rick Wakeman on the Keith Emerson collaboration that never happened

The “brothers in keyboards” had plans for a show together, a tour with Jon Lord and perhaps even an album before tragedy made it all impossible

Louder

"I’d heard this one thing, Smoke On The Water or something. But I’d never actually seen them": the night an ex-Beatle gatecrashed a Deep Purple show for an impromptu jam

At a gig in Sydney in 1984, Deep Purple were joined by surprise guest Arnold Grove –aka former Beatles guitarist George Harrison

Louder

"It appeared that he had fallen down an elevator shaft, but we knew that he was murdered": the traumatic story of Deep Purple's visit to Indonesia in 1975

At the beginning of the Come Taste The Band tour, Deep Purple stopped off in Jakarta to play a show en route to Japan. It did not go well

The Guardian - UK

Bernie Marsden obituary

Powerfully expressive British guitarist and songwriter who was a key member of the rock band Whitesnake

Louder

“My mum said, ‘What about the drink and drugs and wild women?’ I said, ‘That‘s what I want to do this for!’”: the life and times of Bernie Marsden, British blues-rock‘s secret weapon

In 2020, Classic Rock sat down with late ex-Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden to talk fistfights with UFO, patching things up with David Coverdale and meeting James Bond

Louder

"I do like a good yarn!" Rick Wakeman and Journey To The Centre Of The Earth

As he prepared to bring a live version of his classic solo album to the stage 40 years later, Rick Wakeman looked back on the epic Journey To The Centre Of Earth

Louder

The making of Deep Purple's Machine Head: "Smoke On The Water only made it onto the album as filler"

Let the members of Deep Purple MKII be your guide to the chaotic recording of Machine Head, an album that could have been very different to the one we know and love

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