Deep Purple

I don’t quite remember when I first heard a Deep Purple song.  I must have heard “Smoke on the water” when I was young but I don’t remember.  Well, that does not surprise me.  There was a time when I detested Abba (so much that I actually rubbed out a cassette containing “Voulez vous” to record some pathetic Tamil songs from the Radio).  My first memory of a Deep Purple song is from a Phillips advertisement in the late 80’s.  It shows an old lady listening to “Highway Star” real loud on a Phillips music system. Her husband desperately crawls by to turn it down.  When he succeeds the lady asks in annoyance “But why did you turn it off, it was so nice” (in a beautiful British accent, if I remember right). He turns it on and is blown off.  That should definitely have been my first Deep Purple experience.  Fortunately for me I liked that one.

My next memory of Deep Purple is from my first year of hostel.  The E-block was a building inspired by the Cellular jail.  Privacy was not a factor in consideration when it was built.  So everything you talked in your room travelled across to all your neighbours and of course you heard everything that is happening around too.  To make things interesting and annoying there were guys who played their music real loud.  These were folks who had amplifiers and pot speakers.  They played their favourite song of the month/weeks continuously for one to two hours every day in the evening.  A member of this elite group had a fascination for a song which involved a lot of screaming and lot noises.  I hated this song.  Much later I realized that it was “Child in Time” by Deep Purple.  Since then, of course, my appreciation for this song has improved a million times.  I have no idea why (could it be thanks to Annu Malik’s using it as an “inspiration” in that Aamir Khan movie).

Since those days, I have got deeper and deeper into Purple’s music.  I love a lot of their songs, especially from Machine head and earlier albums.  These are probably the best rock songs ever.  The above said “Child in Time” is one terrific song.  At some point of time, I was able to get through the screaming and shouting to understand its beauty.  This is definitely one song that wet my eyes.  At the other end of the spectrum are “Highway star” and “Speed king”.  The latter is a very cool song with a wicked Ian Gillan laugh at the end and the beginning is also bloody cool.  It starts off with a lot of noise from Ritchie Blackmore before settling into a quiet Jon Lord organ.  Then all of a sudden Ian jumps in shouting the lyrics – total chaos.  As to other pieces, there is the early number “Hush” sung by Rod Evans.  For a long time, I did not realize that this was not Gillan (stupid me). 

Another great album is, of course, their live album “Made in Japan”.  It had some super long songs with lots of guitar playing and screaming.  The song “Strange kind of woman” had this deadly interplay between Ian and Ritchie.  And then there are those real long “Space Trucking” and “Lazy”.

I love many of Marks of the Deep Purple with Mark II being the favourite. It was during this time that they made the three rocking albums (In Rock, Fireball and Machine Head).  Mark I is a close second though.  A lot of good instrumentals and some of them had such cool names like “Wring that neck”.  Once Gillan left and David Coverdale came in, the songs got quite boring except probably for “Stormbringer”.  After that I lost track of the Marks till Steve Morse came in.  Since then things have started looking much better.

And so my Purple journey continues.  My biggest regret s that I have not seen any concert of theirs live and don’t think I ever will.  But I will always love their songs and will continue to buy and download their albums.  For me, thing don’t get much better than listening to “Speed king”, a song made nearly 40 years back.