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[reviews by Rev. Keith A. Gordon]
ARTIST: Deep Purple
COMMENTS: The British hard rock scene of the 1970s was rich with talent and imagination, bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, UFO, Uriah Heep, Wishbone Ash, Humble Pie and others dino-stomping their way through stadiums, arenas, and hockey sheds on several continents. Few of these turbo-charged rock ‘n’ roll leviathans endured into the new millennium, and only two that I can think of – Purple and Heep – have continued to consistently make vital, energetic music to the present day, Deep Purple recently releasing its 21st studio album, Whoosh!, in August 2020.
Deep Purple has enjoyed what is essentially the same line-up since 1994, including founding member Ian Paice on drums alongside the creative one-two punch of singer Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover. Guitarist Steve Morse took Richie Blackmore’s seat at the table in 1994 when the fabled string-shredder decided to pursue the Renaissance full-time. Keyboardist Don Airey, known for his stints with Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath, replaced the retiring (and beloved) Jon Lord in 2002, so this is an old group with decades of musical chemistry to draw upon. This particular show – a 2017 FM broadcast from the BBC Radio Theatre in London, England – is from the band’s “The Long Goodbye” tour in support of their then-new album InFinite.
At a little more than an hour, the show’s set list seems to have been designed to squeeze into a finite broadcast window, and it offers four tracks from InFinite, including the incendiary show-opener “Time For Bedlam” and the menacing “Birds of Prey.” A pair of songs each from Machine Head and In Rock – notably “Smoke On the Water,” “Lazy,” and the mega-kiloton explosion that is “Bloodsucker” – provided radio listeners the classic hits they crave, while deeper catalog cuts like the title tracks from 1984’s Perfect Strangers and 1971’s Fireball provide the hardcore faithful with their concert memories. The show’s encore includes Purple’s first stateside hit single, a rockin’ cover of Joe South’s “Hush,” and their first U.K. hit, the non-album track “Black Night.”
The sound quality of the show is pretty good overall, with decent separation of instruments. Gillan’s vocals sound clear, even if his between-song comments are sometimes a bit muddy. Airey’s keyboards seem to ride high in the mix and Morse displays his six-string skills with both soaring fretboard runs and more nuanced jazzy flourishes. Glover’s bass lines are often lost in the din but, at times, as on “Uncommon Man,” his striking rhythmic sense provides a foundation for the performance.
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ARTIST: Deep Purple
COMMENTS: Another fine concert from Deep Purple’s “The Long Goodbye” tour, this one performed in their familiar haunt of Montreux, Switzerland for the 2018 Montreux Jazz Festival. Like most shows along this tour, the band hits the stage to the sounds of Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War,” an unlikely but appropriate classical passage with which to introduce the still-rockin’ noise-makers. The concert’s set-list has been expanded by several songs from the previously-mentioned 2017 London how, drawing additional material from the band’s smash Top Ten U.S. breakthrough, 1972’s Machine Head. Curiously, the show features only three songs from their then-current release InFinite, replacing one with a deep cut from 1996’s Purpendicular.
Opening with the adrenaline-fueled, red-lined “Highway Star” from that album, the band shows that they’re in Switzerland to rock, and the following take of Machine Head’s “Pictures of Home” pulls no punches, with Ian Gillan’s banshee vocals, Steve Morse’s tortured guitar licks, and Don Airey’s flamboyant keyboard runs driven forward by Ian Paice’s unrelenting drumbeats and Roger Glover’s whiplash bass lines. It’s a heady performance, to be sure, of one of the band’s more obscure tracks. The aforementioned Purpendicular track, “Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming,” is provided a gorgeous guitar intro by Morse before Gillan’s soft vocals lull the listener into an almost hypnotic trance that is broken by the song’s up-tempo chorus and Morse’s high-flying solo.
Otherwise, the performances of songs like “Bloodsucker,” “Birds of Prey,” and “Lazy” don’t differ a heck of a lot from the London performance, with a couple of notable exceptions. They list a “keyboard solo” on the Setlist.FM website that is really just an extended intro to “Perfect Strangers.” The encore performance of “Hush” incorporates a bit of “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s with Airey jamming on his keyboards and Glover spanking his bass like the legendary Donald “Duck” Dunn. The song rolls into an extended bass solo before finishing up with “Black Night.” Overall sound quality for the show is nowhere near the FM broadcast sound of the London concert, with muddier vocals and not much in the way of mid-range dynamics. There’s a bit of hollow “cavern” feel to the performances, but if you turn it up loud enough, it’s quite an enjoyable concert!
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ARTIST: Deep Purple
COMMENTS: The third entry in our Deep Purple bingethon, it’s now late 2019 and the band is still flogging their eternal “The Long Goodbye” tour with a stop at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston, one of 32 U.S. shows the band performed that year. The setlist doesn’t vary much from a year previous, still relying heavily on Machine Head and In Rock for the bulk of the material. Only a single song (the delightfully bombastic “Time For Bedlam”) makes the cut from 2017’s InFinite LP which, now two years in the rearview mirror, has mostly been abandoned in favor of “classic” Purple jams.
Show-opener “Highway Star” provides the immediate amphetamine rush that fans demand, with a slightly-different instrumental introduction quickly giving way to Ian Gillan’s machine-gun vox and Ian Paice’s jet-propulsion drumbeats. Don Airey’s keyboards slash and burn their way throughout the performance the way that Jon Lord’s once did (R.I.P. July 2012), and Steve Morse’s guitar screams while Roger Glover’s bass throbs like a toothache. The band has seemingly chosen a different track from 1971’s Fireball for each change of the season, and for this 2019 tour they’ve resurrected “Demon’s Eye,” a malevolent, dark-hued song with a fantastic vocal performance from Gillan, backed by a deliberately-paced rhythmic soundtrack with shards of Morse’s fretwork puncturing the mix.
The “keyboard solo” for this performance seques into “Lazy,” with Airey incorporating enough notes from Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” for the audience to recognize. They flavor their encore performance of “Hush” with a bit ‘o the Allman Brothers Band’s “Hot ‘Lanta” before roaring full-tilt into the Joe South cover while “Black Night” is given an extended performance with some instrumental jamming and scraps of melody from other songs interplayed. Only a couple songs shorter than the 2018 Montreux Jazz Festival performance, and with essentially the same set list, but with a notch better sound quality, I’d give the nod to this Boston show above Montreux for the casual Deep Purple fan (the rabid fan will search online for all three performances).
With the band sidelined from touring in support of the recently-released Whoosh! album by the Covid virus clampdown, it’s unlikely that we’ll hear much (if anything) from Deep Purple this year, which is a shame as the new album is every bit as good as just about anything the band has ever recorded and several songs would take flight on stage. As these three shows display, however, recent Purple performances capture a still-invigorated band performing a mix of exciting new material and re-imagined classic songs.
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