With album and singles success, plus our huge following in the UK, the management realised they were sitting on a goldmine, and upped the pressure and routines. I can’t say we complained because we were so hyped up that it just didn’t matter, as we pushed our notoriety ever further with a foray into Scotland in October 1970, where we took that nation by storm!
| 20th | Edinburgh Odeon |
| 21st | Dundee Caird Hall |
| 22nd | Dunfermline Electric Ballroom |
| 23rd | Aberdeen Music Hall |
| 24th | Glasgow Electric Ballroom (changed to Tiffany’s) |
| 25th | Hamilton Town Hall |
In fact our music and reputation had clearly travelled ahead of us, because the promoters had to switch one of the venues from the Electric Ballroom in Glasgow to Tiffany’s, because Sauchiehall Street was jammed end to end, and we needed a police escort to get us in, and out. It was unbelievable – we were so ‘underground’, so ‘dangerous’, that people were turning up saying, ‘Who is this band?’ As word spread like wildfire, and our concerts needed a police-with-dogs presence, so we began to adjust our pattern of behaviour and performances at gigs. In times past, I’d played to audiences who would stay in their seats, maybe getting up to dance around sometimes, but almost always well-mannered and controlled. However, with Deep Purple progressing as we were, we couldn’t stop external changes beyond our control, which included the seating having to be removed (by promoters), while I invented ‘head banging’, which I’d later describe (Ian Gillan Band days) as performed by a ‘person with rhythm’. In my case, the concept of ‘head banging’ was made all the more dramatic, because of the mane of hair I had, which also covered my face, and which I made sway, as I rhythmically gyrated my head to the music. It was a new touch but, again, totally spontaneous and reflective of the show and excitement we were generating, while it wouldn’t be long before I’d look up, to realise the fans were following my example, irrespective of the length of their hair – or, in later years, perhaps with none at all! If truth be known, I think this added dimension and piece of theatre helped to create a closer bonding between the band and the audiences, because it made the fans almost feel they were part of the band. And if that’s not quite the case, well our shows still became a bigger party than the one that was happening on stage! I’ll quote from Melody Maker (24 October 1970): ‘Now it’s Purplemania. Deep Purple are the latest group to attract Beatlemania scenes in the north of England.’
So we’d arrived at a point where instead of the (mainly) girls sitting politely, with hands clasped on their laps, or perhaps moving just a bit, now there were no seats, and they were flinging themselves at us, fainting, crying and screaming at our feet on stage, as we played ‘Black Night’ to the backs of bouncers.
Getting out of venues also became something of a problem, and we would often call upon skilled backup to see us safely to the waiting cars. It was interesting to hear the view of promoter Jeff Docherty when he commented on the screaming, and suggested that it wasn’t the music we played that created the new ‘concert’, but how we looked that counted, and because they were all very young. However, one member of the band would add to that by saying, ‘I suppose it’s something we’ll have to get used to, after appearing on Top of the Pops!’
We closed 1970 with a trip to Scandinavia and another tour of Germany, where we played Nuremburg, Würzburg, Stuttgart, Hanover, Offenbach (again!) and Saarbrücken; but it was a bad period for us, because the pressures of touring and our self-made lifestyles had begun to catch up with us, even as the rioting got worse. I remember 8 December being a particularly scary show, when fans ran amuck at Lüdenscheid, many trying to get onto the stage, where they smashed gear worth around £2, 000, which was not a small amount at the time! I guess the problem that night was partly due to the fact that we’d played as a quartet, because Ritchie had been taken ill, and was flown back to London for treatment. In fact a little after that, two other members of the band also went down, including me, and so the rest of the German tour was cancelled.
How the business was changing! How concerts were being done differently! How in such a short space of time so much was no longer what it used to be! And that’s before Switzerland, where I had my first experience with Hell’s Angels. The show was in full flow, Purple style, as the crowd got caught up with the energy, and then went berserk. The next thing I knew, about fifteen of these guys were on the stage with their backs to us, and they were manhandling and chucking kids all over the place. It was ugly and really pissed me off, so I started attacking them with a mike stand, and kept on going until they left. However, after the show they were waiting for us to leave the building, and promptly chased us out of town! The incident was quite frightening, not least because whoever was driving took us into a field, where we got well and truly stuck! However, the potential of a wide-open gate in farmland, and late at night, is not to be underestimated, as I’ll try to illustrate.
Back home, once I’d slept off a tour, I used to relax by playing football, and often kept goal for the local Pangbourne police team. They were a great bunch, but, unfortunately, many opposing pub and factory teams saw the matches against us as a way to hand out legitimate violence, and included me in all of that! I’ve often found that, like many musicians, members of the police force have a wicked sense of humour, and I’ll example this by (again) dipping into the future, with the period being the Ian Gillan Band, circa 1976.
We did a show in Norwich, which was an end-of-tour gig, and where a party had been laid on, including some strippers, who were brilliant. Well, all was going perfectly well until this twat tried to gatecrash. He was asked to leave but, as he went, he grabbed the tablecloth at the end of the buffet and dragged it along with him. So, with our hospitality fare spread across the floor, I went absolutely mental, and raced out of the hotel to sort him out, but he’d got away. Still irritated, I returned and ended up chatting to this guy in reception, telling him what had happened, before I returned to the party.
Unfortunately, Zoe and I had not been getting on very well, and she obviously thought I’d been out there with one of the strippers. The more she went on about it, the more l wished I had been! Anyway, we had a huge argument on the way through the hotel to the car; we’d not had one for a couple of days, by which time I’d downed a couple more Scotches. Once in the car, and on our way out of the market square, I spotted a police car, and this recognition sufficiently cleared my mind, so that I drove carefully down a one-way street, although realising they were looking to follow me. It then became decision time, and, without a map, I took the first available left turn and put my foot down. The thought of being caught horrified me, but, however fast I seemed to be going, there they remained, until after a couple of miles I started to look for an exit – anything to get them off my back. And then I got lucky, as my lights picked out an open farm gate a little way on (just like the one in Switzerland), through which I rocked into the field, and pulled up inside the high hedge, where I switched off the engine.
Well, first to explain is the fact that I ‘rocked’ into a field; and by this I mean that taking a sudden and sharp left in a Rolls-Royce of the vintage I had … well the car did ‘rock’, and the experience was both dramatic and frightening! So there we sat, puzzled that the blue lights hadn’t gone flying past us, until the police, who we’d shortly discover were similarly parked on the other side of the hedge, must have decided to end their game, as they made their presence known with a couple of peeps on the blue light, or hooter. Oh well, that’s it, I thought, and opened the driver’s door to meet ‘the law’ as he came through the gate and walked towards me, saying: ‘Nice bit of driving, Ian. No chance I could have your autograph, is there?’
It was a brown-trouser job, but I most willingly signed, and then drove home extremely carefully – in fact, rewriting the definition of ‘careful’ to be even more than ‘extremely’! It was very stupid what I’d done, and brought back my father’s words that would caution me against momentary acts of lunacy, which could result in my being maimed, killed or, worse still, doing it to somebody else. Otherwise, it wasn’t the first time the law has been kind to me in this country, and I realise and appreciate that.
In a different way, I’ve tried to compensate for moments of selfishness or irresponsible stupidity, through the realisation that I do have a responsibility to the public and, in particular, to the many thousands – possibly millions – of fans who come to my shows, buy my records and merchandise, even have my picture on their bedroom wall. You can show humility in various ways, beginning with the signing of autographs, which I’ve always tried to do as much as possible, including outside stage doors, when all I really wanted to do was to get back home or to my hotel. I know a lot of artists like to get away from venues as quickly as possible, but even a brief ‘after the show’ exchange of gratitude and friendship with the fans is fine by me, and, apart from putting my mark on scraps of paper, a gig entry ticket, brochure, or the odd record or two, there’s also the occasional surprise encounter when a part of anatomy is exposed to me, and signing that is also perfectly acceptable!
There’s another way in which people like me can show we have a reasonable side to us, and the occasional visit to a fan in hospital is one way of recognising my appreciation for the life I’ve been allowed to discover, apart from the fact that it brings me back down to earth! So there was this time when we were gigging at the Dome in Brighton, and, after the soundcheck, someone told me about this young boy who was lying in a coma in hospital. He was known to be a great fan, and so I went to see his parents, and together we visited him. I just sat and held his hand, talking quietly about whatever – I can’t remember – before taking my leave.
When I got home, I made a tape and sent it to him, and, a little while later, I got this message telling that he’d come round, and so I returned to the hospital. It was a choking experience just to see the look in his eyes, because, although he’d suffered brain damage and couldn’t feed, he seemed fully aware of what was going on, and the occasion brought memories flooding back of the days with Episode Six in Beirut, where I came to understand how it can take another person’s misfortune to make you revisit your own priorities.
There was no let-up in our touring schedule, and 1971 saw us on a major UK tour, where we pulled capacity crowds and were very big box office. In February alone we did the Royal Albert Hall, Hull, Sheffield, Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Bristol, Plymouth, Manchester (cancelled), Newcastle, Coventry, Leicester, Croydon (cancelled) and Brighton – all this as our reputation again preceded us, sometimes to cause quite serious and unexpected problems.
For example, we received late notice that we’d been banned from the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, because the authorities had deemed us unsuitable for the venue, while Croydon’s excuse was that the weight of fans in the balcony might cause it to collapse. Actually, their stage did in fact collapse, but that would be on a different occasion sometime in the future, and I forget which band I was fronting at the time (not Deep Purple). Perhaps the reason for the debacle was the sheer amount of backline gear we stacked onto it. Anyway, March saw us with three shows for the BBC, before we went to Germany to do four dates, and then to Montreux in Switzerland for another two, followed by Brussels and places in Scandinavia, where we did four more.
Our health really should have alerted someone to question our routines, and we had some problems with Roger, who’d been complaining of stomach pains, about which a £200 fee for his ten-minute consultation in London’s Harley Street, did nothing to really help! It was therefore a no-win situation for him, because he’d paid to be told there was nothing wrong, while, if there had been something to worry about, he’d have felt just as bad. More to the point, someone wasn’t doing their job, because he became incapable of returning for the several encores the fans were calling for, and Chas Hodges (Heads, Hands and Feet, and now Chas and Dave) had to help out with the rock-’n’-roll closer, ‘Lucille’. Ritchie’s less helpful contribution to our bass player’s agony was to suggest that, if he was going to die, he should do it on stage, so we could cremate him as part of the act! Ritchie was in good form in that period, assuming ‘good form’ can include another phase of using his catapult to brighten up long car journeys, this time by flinging peas at passers-by and men digging roads. Silly, really, but, unlike with the River Thames incident of times past, at least the police didn’t catch up with him.
A gig in Amsterdam, at the Concertgebouw (I think), gave me the chance to do something different. We’d just driven from a show in Germany, and I had a severe bout of bronchitis, which I often used to get. I had a croaky voice, felt very unwell, and knew I’d be going into a fight with one arm tied behind my back (in a manner of speaking). So I decided to help sort out the illness in the backstage bar, and, while dealing with a couple of large Scotch and cokes in a beer glass, I became aware of ‘cue calls’. I was on notice that the band were cranking up ‘Highway Star’, and the next thing I knew was that Ian Hansford was shouting at me to ‘Get on stage, Ian, get on stage!’ Well, I guess I went into autopilot, and, in my finest Dick Turpin boots, I walked through the door to what I thought was the stage, except it was the entrance to the stage, and it was also at the top of a flight of carpeted stairs. Two balcony spots picked me out, and then brilliantly and professionally followed me, as I performed all kinds of mid-air manoeuvres, before landing flat on my back, and raising a full glass of my Scotch-and-coke to the cheering crowd! Not a drop was spilled, and the audience loved it. I don’t think I could have done a thing wrong after that, and, although I croaked my way through the show, nobody gave a toss!
We were now locked in our own bubble, and nothing in the real world touched us as we went from one town to the next – although newsworthy, to me at least, were the facts that my Rolls-Royce had broken down, and that hot pants had arrived as the new design ‘shocker’, which fat and thin gals alike wore. Otherwise, apart from hearing Mick Jagger had been married in the South of France, and that Chelsea had won the European Cup against Real Madrid, life went on pretty much as usual, as we travelled to wherever John and Tony sent us.
We made Fireball in our last recording project at De Lane Lea and the Olympic Studio, and it was also the last album we’d record for Warner Bros.
As with most progressive hard-rock bands of that period, we avoided singles, but ‘Strange Kind of Woman’ (‘I’m Alone’ on the B side) was released in February, and the album was on the shelves in time for our next American tour of 1971.
Opinions varied about Fireball, and I know Ritchie was quoted as saying, ‘It was nothing, really,’ going on to add that being on tour was no way to write an album, and that the only time we got to write in Deep Purple was when someone was ill. Well, given that, during the period in question, most of us had indeed been ill, including himself with appendicitis, I’m surprised he didn’t feel better about the project, while I thought we kept up our progressive standards with the album, and am proud of it: songs like ‘No No No’, ‘Demon’s Eye’, ‘The Mule’, ‘Fools’, ‘Anyone’s Daughter’ and ‘No One Came’, a lyric that simply echoes my fears then (and thereafter) about the ultimate horror of an empty hall. As for the track ‘Fireball’, well we found a new use for the central-heating system at the studio, so what you hear at the beginning – the whooshing sound – is simply the system being switched on!
No one came from miles around
And said, man your music’s really hot
Oh, I knew what they meant…
However, if I liked the album, I was definitely in the minority, because Jon, Roger and Ian Paice were also pretty negative about it, except to suggest it surely can’t have been that bad, because it went to the top of the UK charts in September, and made No. 32 in the States. And so another July arrived (1971), and we embarked on a major tour of Canada and America, playing huge arenas, football stadiums and halls, taking in places such as St Lawrence, Toronto, Buffalo, New York, Hamilton (Ontario). Further shows quickly followed that took us through the whole of August as well. We crossed America, passing through (stopping of course!) Philadelphia, Cleveland, Ohio, Milwaukee, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, Houston and Salt Lake City, to mention but a few, and now our fame was such that we began to travel in a personal jet, with Deep Purple slashed across it, and accompanied by Rod Stewart and the Faces, who were the real bad boys of rock ’n’ roll’! To be honest, Rod was a flash bastard (look who’s talking), but a great pro.
Remember also that he and his band had been doing this sort of thing for years, so they knew every trick in the book! Of course, they were a great show, which in a way was surprising, because they were so into enjoying themselves that they were arseholed all the time! Ron Wood, Ian McLagan, Ronnie Lane and Kenny Jones saw their job as one long party, so our hungry new band, out to impress, became a hard act for them to follow. Still they knew their business, but, my God, offstage they were something (even more than) else! For example, there was one gig at which Rod invited everyone back to his hotel, into which we were also booked. So what looked like a whole stadium of youngsters arrived in the lobby and other areas for what turned out to be one huge, long beach party, where all the straw shades were torched; a session upstairs involved Ritchie and Rod throwing food at everyone; and finally, when Russ Warner, from the label, came to calm things down, he was dumped in a bath. The hotel manager also came up to complain, and Ritchie bundled him up in a fire hose, which for some reason prompted me to start mooning, with a newspaper on fire and wedged up my bum! Sadly, the police arrived to spoil everything, but the record companies kindly picked up the bill for damage: $25, 000!
And so the show would ‘up and off’ to the next venue, where the Faces would fall off the plane, be guided to the next concert hall, and entertain their fans, who’d just had forty-five minutes of Deep Purple! Noteworthy is the fact the transition from our large halls in the UK to America’s much bigger large halls, ice hockey arenas and football pitches called on new resources and reserves of energy and alcohol, a situation not helped by the fact we were touring with another band, who hardly set a great example when it came to moderation! I often found the whole thing daunting, and we’d all suffer in many ways. For example, at about lunchtime, I’d start to get superstitious, and would feel increasingly less inclined to chat to anybody. It was hard, and I’d go into my own little world, trying to focus on the night ahead. It wouldn’t be a question of worrying about the words – they’d vary anyway – and it wouldn’t be a question of how I might dance or move around, or what I’d say to the audience: it would be about fears – fears that someone might not be well, that the show might be less than perfect, constant fears, until we’d arrive at the next arena, where we’d hit the stage and fall into our wonderful groove!
Even before we went out with the Faces, we’d become aware that our show might be getting a bit stale, and so we went to some lengths to look at it again, helped of course by the new material from Fireball, which helped stimulate the brain cells. Of course, our shared interest and ongoing willingness to improvise was at the heart of each performance, but, unlike with jazz, for example, we didn’t have to be intense or with furrowed brows, and we’d continue to see the lighter side of things being just as worthy to slot into a particular moment, if the mood felt right.
My Aunt Nelly’s got a big fat belly
And tits tied up with string
She sits in the grass with her finger up her arse
Singing, ‘Help, God save the King.’
So our performances very seriously mattered to us, but that didn’t exclude moments of eccentricity such as ‘Aunt Nelly’ being permissible, or for Ritchie to borrow from ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, or for Jon to counterbalance things with imperious classical contributions, where he’d borrow from Bach fugues or the works of Tchaikovsky. None of what some might consider our off-the-wall moments were ever thought to diminish our claim to being ‘very serious’ people in our work; indeed, they have emerged and grown to enhance what we do.
I was once reported as saying, ‘We play for whoever wants to hear us. If the hall’s full of heads smoking joints, that’s OK; but, if the next night it’s all schoolkids dancing about and yelling “Yeah … ‘Black Night’ … ‘Black Night’”, well that’s also perfectly OK by me.’ And that sums up my approach to rock ’n’ roll, in pursuit of which our guitarist started to give us an increasingly bad time with encores, and we’d approach the end of some shows not knowing if he’d be coming back on stage with us. As mentioned earlier, we’d already been given the clue that this tendency might become more than an occasional whim, on which his final decision would usually be decided by whether he believed the fans were ‘deserving’ of an encore or not. However, whatever his decision might be, just the uncertainty as we approached closure was, shall we say, unhelpful!
Frank Zappa once said that a musician can go crazy on tour – the hotel life, the concerts, the planes; and so perhaps our tour with the Faces had that kind of effect on us. Suddenly, it seemed important that we get back to the UK and rediscover our perspective and sanity, see whether we needed to change, and, if so, in what direction? Otherwise, so far as the management was concerned, rediscovering our perspective meant going straight back to work, and by 1 September we were back in Germany doing a TV special, followed by Vienna on the 4th, and eight more shows by the month end. One thing’s for sure: we could never say we were being neglected, and I’ll admit that, even when things were overwhelming, there were many occasions when the ‘job’ gave us moments to treasure, in a way that no other business could ever do. So our appearance at the Royal Albert Hall on 4 October was an example of that kind of respite and good feeling, as our families and friends were given use of the Royal Box. However, we learned soon after that rock concerts were banned for some time to come, because we’d chosen our visit to enter The Guinness Book of Records for being the loudest band in the world!
Away from these mixed emotions and moments, Newman Street kept the ‘Purple project’ ever rolling, as arrangements were made for another American tour, and for us to record a new album, Machine Head, at Montreux in Switzerland. Of course, I know that, from the mere mention of Montreux, those who are familiar with us and our work will know what’s next, so here’s my account of the making of a song that would define the band for ever and a day. And of course I’m talking about ‘Smoke on the Water’!
The town of Montreux is nestled at the foot of the mountains, along the shoreline of Lake Geneva, and the old Montreux Casino was its centrepiece – a building of great character and made entirely of wood. So it was here in the Casino that we planned the follow-up to Fireball, as we arrived the night before and checked into the Hotel Eden Palace au Lac nearby, leaving just enough time to catch the last show at the venue before it would be given over to our use.
Now, it happens that I’d not long recovered from hepatitis, contracted during the tour of the States, so I was still a bit wobbly. However, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were on stage for that last night, and they had Flo and Eddie with them. So, on 6 December 1971, the prospect of watching this show cheered me up no end, and when we arrived everything was going great guns.
Of course, in normal circumstances, it would never have been on our minds, or even of passing interest, that the Casino’s owner, Claude Nobs, was going to carry out some major improvements to the building during the ‘winter window’, when ‘everybody’ had gone skiing to Zermatt. And it would have been of even less interest to know that said works were to include some rewiring, as evident by the loose cables that ran along some of the cornices. None of this meant anything to me at the time, while, looking back, I realise we must have been in many buildings all over the world that were technically not 100 per cent. Therefore, what was about to happen in Montreux can only be spoken of with the benefit of hindsight – at least that’s how I see it.
During the show, I have this vague recollection of a guy of Mediterranean appearance walking in, but I thought nothing of it until, the next thing I knew, there was a flash of light followed by the sharp crack of a flare gun – and then the troubles began. It later emerged that the person I’d seen arriving had apparently parked his Rolls-Royce outside, and come in to simply make a ‘happening’, I suppose! Apparently, no evil was intended, but never in his wildest imagination could he have expected his action to set off the tragic sequence of events that followed, as a spark from his flare must have touched some exposed wiring around the covings, and then it was whoosh, as the whole lot went up like a firework display, quickly turning the Casino into a raging inferno, as the woodwork instantaneously combusted like kindling.
Zappa was brilliant, taking positive command of a situation that was rapidly turning to chaos around us. From his vantage point on stage, he directed and urged calm, as the audience began to leave, but there were corners of the Casino where the evacuation went badly wrong, including where some of the kids threw themselves through huge plate-glass windows. Many suffered cuts and other injuries, but Zappa stayed for as long as he possibly could, as the hall rapidly filled with acrid smoke – until even he had to leave, with us just ahead of him.
Strange things happen in such situations, and they can cause surprising reactions, including questioning how priorities are shuffled in a crisis. For example, Zoe suddenly realised she’d left her coat behind, as if that were important in the surrounding chaos; but, despite this, I became no different to her in the sense of decision making, because I went back into the building through the front entrance to recover it!
However, that illustration of how we rationalise and make choices, or don’t, isn’t why I mention the subject now, because what I came across inside the burning building was astonishing. Everyone was calling for Claude Nobs, because he was the man who knew all the answers, because he was in control, because he was … well, he was Montreux! Otherwise there was nothing to see: no exit signs, no stage, no kids! All that could be heard was the yelling and shrieking of frightened people, but with no sign of Claude, only smoke, and plenty of it, as people who saw me started shouting, ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ Others were still calling, ‘Where’s Claude?’
And then I was outside again, and soon learned what had happened to him. It seems he’d gone to the kitchens, which were underground, realising that some of the kids must have gone through doors that could only have led them that way, until they became trapped in smoke-filled spaces, the whereabouts of which only he knew. One by one, or in small groups, Claude led the youngsters to safety, repeating the journey until he was satisfied that nobody remained, while outside, and to my surprise, I realised I still held Zoe’s coat.
We all came out to Montreux
On the Lake Geneva shoreline
To make records with a mobile
We didn’t have much time
Frank Zappa and the Mothers
Were at the best place around
But some stupid with a flare gun
Burned the place to the ground
As for Claude, well, he’s the ‘Funky Claude… pulling kids out the ground’ in the song’s second verse.
The emergency services don’t need spectators when they have their work to do, so we drifted back to the hotel, where we met up in the restaurant for a few drinks and a meal, and from there to watch the Casino burn, flames high in the sky, smoke billowing. Some thought the brightness and intensity was caused by the downdraught from the mountains, but, whatever the reasons might have been, the flames did lean majestically towards the lake, as the smoke drifted across quiet water.
Two or three days later, Roger said he’d had a dream and had woken up sweating, saying the words, ‘Smoke on the water’. He’d written them down and suggested to me that we write a song about the disaster. It just so happened that another mind was working along similar lines, and Ritchie had already found the riff that would soon become the classic rock intro to how Roger and my lyric would recall how events at the Casino had unfolded. Twenty-one years later I travelled to Montreux to hand over a Harp Rock Plaque for fixing to the wall of either the Casino or the hotel where the song was written, and Claude was present for the occasion. Quite where it finally ends up, we shall see, but I gather Claude’s annual concerts are now held at a new venue called the Stravinsky Auditorium!
With our recording venue suddenly taken from us, rapid action was necessary, and, taking time out from the mopping-up operations and his own problems, Claude managed to relocate us into the vacant Grand Hotel Suisse Majestic, along with the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording studio that we’d hired. The hotel was also being refurbished, but they said we could still use it, and Martin Birch arrived to set things up. He parked the mobile outside, and went in to convert a corridor, which had a T-shape layout, into a studio. He put the drums on the T itself; the guitars and organ were positioned at one end (facing into a cupboard filled with mattresses); and he then told us that, to get to the truck, we had to go through the kitchen, then through a bathroom, out onto a balcony (in the freezing cold), and return to the hotel via another bathroom, until we arrived at where we were parked up. The situation called upon a lot of creative management, but Martin was brilliant in this kind of work, and, one way or another, he adapted the place into something we could use. A little while later, ‘Smoke on the Water’ was ready to become the legendary story we all know about, while the album, Machine Head, was also completed, and would become a huge success.
It was around this time that the management came up with the idea that we should set up our own record label, and so we convened for another of those chats where, once again, I didn’t like the idea. The concept was to set up ‘Purple Records’, and, a bit later, ‘Oyster’, about which Tony had already been in talks with Warner Bros. But during this time I also remembered one of Bill Reid’s little talks, which touched on the possibility of conflict of interest. Well, of course, I wasn’t the businessman in the organisation, but it annoyed me to see the gradual erosion by outsiders into what I saw as our interests as musicians. The management just seemed to want to do more and more things themselves, having started with the agency coming in-house, before the same happened with the promotion. Of course, they’d already had the publishing for some while, and now we were to become a record label? So I asked them how well and correctly they thought they could manage us when they had the whole thing sewn up like that. I mean, how do you negotiate the best deal for your artist, when you’re negotiating with yourself? It seemed so obvious, but the old divide-and-rule act went into top gear, and Purple Records was formed to deal with Machine Head in the UK. The album topped the charts for three weeks, helped by a major TV advertising campaign (April 1972), and later made No. 7 in America.
As for the new label, of course it had gone ahead despite my protests, and, although I was offered shares, I refused. Still, there was no time to get bogged down with all the pros and cons, including whether I should have taken the shares, because we were off to America, where we played three shows in New York, Virginia and Chicago, and it was in Chicago where it all nearly ended for me at the airport on 6 November, when I turned yellow and slid down a post.
I’d been getting more and more ill as the touring went on, and had been throwing up frequently, a situation I’d put down to the tension of going on stage, and the fact that perhaps I was drinking too much. It was just that I seemed to need the alcohol to keep me in control. So I was waiting for my bags to come through when this appalling sensation came over me, a bit like leaping out of bed too quickly; and then I couldn’t hear or see too well, or articulate to people who were moving very slowly around me, staring. Finally, it was our tour manager Colin Hart’s voice that came through, saying, ‘Don’t worry, Ian, we’re getting you to hospital. You’ve gone a strange colour!’
When I came to, a doctor told me I was very ill, and diagnosed hepatitis. I tried to explain I needed to be on stage that night, but, when he told me I was close to dying, I took that to mean he didn’t think my intention was likely! Still, at least Zoe, with whom I was at constant war, was with me, and so I told her to organise some tickets home. She said there was no way I could travel, and, when I looked in the mirror, I understood what she meant. I was yellow all over, including my eyes!
As I recall, some minion from the record company kept looking in, but nobody came from management. I was poisoned to hell, and lost and lonely. The hospital people were very kind and attentive, and I was kept on a strict diet of boiled fish and water. Any dairy product was guaranteed to kill me within the day, and the same went for fatty foods. Otherwise, there was this black guy who always seemed to be walking around on his knees, and he kept coming over to inject me, usually at around four o’clock in the morning! Why always 4 a.m.? Could they not see I was upset enough? And why wouldn’t he stand up! Of course, it wasn’t until my senses returned that I realised he was a dwarf, just doing his job.
After five days or so, I discharged myself, but the guy from the record company said there was no way they’d let me on a plane, looking the colour I still was, and being so ill. He said there would be a riot among the passengers if I turned up, but my mind was set on home, and so I got dressed, covered myself with a scarf, and we flew out of Chicago.
I have no memory of the journey at all, and vaguely recall the doctor coming to see me at Hyde House. Having access to wonderful English papers and crossword puzzles, which I love, was a great treat. In fact, just having time was an indescribable joy! The tour was obviously cancelled at a cost of about $200, 000 to the band, whatever that meant, but, then, what was it I said earlier about priorities? For me, this was a time for peace and gentle recovery, so, after a few days, I got someone to take me to the sawmill, where we selected some planks of Japanese oak, which I had planed; and with that done I made a table, which I cherish to this day.
Recovering from illness gave me the chance to look at life and try to find some kind of focus, as, along with the other guys, I went into solo projects, including producing an album for a band called Jerusalem, as well as developing a children’s musical, called Cher Kazoo. We were still Deep Purple, with a major schedule ahead of us, but the cracks were also there, both with the management and each other.
Of course, the main issue within the band had become the failure of Ritchie and me to relate to each other, so, with our entrenched differences about our relationship with the fans, we now found ourselves dealing with his fixed belief in the pre-eminence of the lead guitar within the band, which didn’t square with how I saw things as its singer! Of course I know that confrontation between singers and lead guitarists is almost commonplace, particularly within successful bands, and I’ll admit to often being unyielding and pig-headed. It’s just that I wanted to deliver Purple at its best, and we didn’t seem to be doing that; although, in fairness, I suspect Ritchie would say the same, such that we just saw things dogmatically differently! As for the management, and to some extent the band, I was already seen as troublesome within the set-up, and, since Ritchie was the more forceful of the two of us, he was better able to catch John and Tony’s attention. In a sentence, I was the problem!
Over a few beers at a pub in Stowe (Vermont) a few years later, Ritchie would admit to never having been praised as a child, and that his best could always be bettered. Well, perhaps this was at the heart of so much that would motivate him, and I’ve often tried to work it all out, including to question whether his journey through the music business itself might also lie at the root of his eccentricity. He’d had, by any stretch of the imagination, an incredible apprenticeship, going back to when he was sixteen, and playing with ‘Screaming’ (Lord Sutch), when he had to put up with the singer climbing out of a coffin and coming at him with a dagger, while Ritchie, the guitar player, had to play to his master’s bidding in a loincloth. And then (as already hinted at) being hired to back artists like Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent can’t have been easy, and I know Vincent put him through hell, as, in front of a packed house, the singer would tell the audience that he’d just ‘penned this little number, and it goes like this…’ So, while everybody’s thinking ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, and Ritchie’s given him an E chord, Gene would eye the guitar player for Ritchie to cue him in again. Occasionally the communication breakdown would continue for some time, until it dawned on Ritchie that this was one of those nights when Gene had been on the whisky bottle, and was therefore unable to remember what the ‘little number’ he’d ‘just penned’ was called, and perhaps how it also went! As a final slap in the face, the singer would end up going to his agent, Don Arden, to complain that the guitarist was trying to screw things up for him, and that the crowd didn’t like the way he dressed.
As for Machine Head, well it must have justified every single penny put into the new Purple label that I was so hostile to. We’d made it with about two weeks’ notice, and although I was still in recovery, and under doctor’s orders, it was our biggest album, with classics like ‘Highway Star’, ‘Space Truckin’’, ‘Never Before’, ‘Maybe I’m a Leo’, ‘Lazy’, ‘Pictures of Home’ and, of course, ‘Smoke on the Water’. It sold 3 million copies very quickly, made Deep Purple one of the biggest-selling bands in the world and, as with so much of our work, it’s been selling year in and year out, having also been remastered and reissued, as has been the case with other albums. Touring was typically arranged to coincide with the album, and we were spared another trip to the States, when Ritchie became ill with hepatitis. Still, it was only a brief respite, and we were soon rescheduled, and on our way to play non-stop, as the itinerary shows:
Not long into the itinerary, the whole thing started to become another massive struggle, and we reacted badly. So there was the time when Ritchie didn’t arrive in reception one morning, although Colin Hart had woken him in good time for our departure. Of course, we were well used to the guitarist doing things like this, but Colin went upstairs to gee him up, only to find him in floods of tears in the corridor.
It’s difficult to put any real spark into this part of my life, because there was so little joy around. We were firmly stuck on a treadmill, trudging from venue to venue, while the ultimate crash must have surely been on the way – except that nobody seemed to notice or care. Where was the smile, where was the glint in the eye, where was the spirit? Indeed where was the rock ’n’ roll? I’d have swapped all the money, the first-class hotels, the limos, the personal helpers and rock-’n’-roll perks for just one gig in some club or pub!
Thankfully, I found an unlikely saviour through meeting Buddy Miles, with whose band we toured, and in whose company there were many fine moments of nonsense and escapism, often at his expense. On many an occasion, Ritchie and I would behave like little kids, hiding behind pillars at the airport, waiting for Buddy to waddle through. He was a man of large bottom, with splayed-out knees, because his thighs were so fat, and, whenever he’d pass us by, we’d be cranking out a few bars of ‘Them Changes’, but done in a very irreverent way, so that Buddy would swing round, going, ‘Who’s zat? What’s zat?’ before giving up trying to source it, and moving on to check onto his flight.
Also with Buddy, I had my first introduction to the other world’s peccadilloes, and it happened at one of the hotels where we arrived early, after three connecting flights. It was a Holiday Inn type of place, and we turned up before noon. I went straight to my room, but simply couldn’t get off to sleep, until, somewhere across the corridor, I became aware of the sound of Buddy and his band, doing what they seemed to do all the time, which was party! In fact they partied all day and all night, and the whole tour continued like that, both on stage and off! They showed no nerves at all, no pre-show butterflies – they just locked into their American groove, and stayed that way!
So, with sleep looking to be impossible, I decided to go across to where the music was playing, wearing just a pair of jeans, no shirt, and barefoot. I whacked the door open, to be greeted by these wonderful smells coming out of the room. On the bed were these two chicks making love to each other, while this guy played his ’bone, as others just sat around talking and smoking joints. And then there was Buddy, lying out on a bed, all fat and hairy, and talking music. It was constant jive talk, which I didn’t begin to understand, but they were all cracking up and having a great time, until Buddy saw me and said, ‘What’s up, boy?’ I told him I couldn’t sleep.
‘Well, maybe you should take a tote of this,’ he said, and proceeded to roll a joint, which he passed to me. In fact it was my first joint, and so I took a puff, and then another, then one more, but then I became aware that all these hands were reaching out, and I realised, for the first time in my life, that you were supposed to pass it round! Meanwhile, Buddy was rolling another spliff (I’m learning the jargon!), and this one was quite large. He handed it over, saying, ‘Take this back to your bed, boy; that’ll send you off to sleep.’
We had a show that night, so I drifted back to my room, somehow contemplating the fact that, apart from one experience with a hubble-bubble in Beirut, this was the first time I’d actually touched anything certain people might not have approved of. I turned on the TV, stretched out and lit the joint. Well, I certainly slept all right, and had an incredible dream, which I remember in the finest detail.
I was lying in a field in the wilderness, when this Amazonian-looking woman approached me. She was about six foot tall, lean and quite small-breasted. However, the strange thing about her was that her sex was not between her legs, but on the pubic mound. She had no body hair, and these two swollen lips protruded vertically, inviting what was now my fierce erection. I got up from the grass and walked slowly towards her. My being then entered her, as I became aware of other women who looked the same. The experience would be a constantly recurring dream of immense sexuality and dignity, although, when I became conscious, my condition was extremely painful, and I had to play four shows with a hard-on. Except my alarm went off, and reality kicked in!
We’d released a single in March called ‘Never Before’ (‘When a Blind Man Cries’), and returned to the UK in early summer to find it had ‘stiffed’. So a meeting was called at the office to review things, and look at the accounts with Bill. When it was over, I asked what had gone wrong with the promotion of the single, and somehow the atmosphere suddenly became a bit hostile, until John said, ‘It was nothing to do with the promotion, Ian. It was just a duff record that nobody wanted to hear or play.’
I said, ‘Well, John, as I see it, there was no promotion, and people didn’t even know it was out. It was a very low-key campaign.’
John then began to wind himself up, beginning with, ‘There were full-page ads in all the music press, but of course you wouldn’t know about that because you’ve been in America!’
Now it just so happened that Audrey had been keeping all the back numbers of the Melody Maker, NME and so forth, and I’d run through them all before the meeting. So I challenged him with, ‘That’s not true, John,’ and he must have realised that I’d caught him with his pants down. It was all very embarrassing, as he got up, sweating, and with eyes blazing with hatred. In fact I thought he was going to deck me, but instead he shouted, ‘Gillan, you always were a supercilious bastard,’ to which I replied, ‘Well, if you’re going to be formal, John, it’s Mr Gillan,’ before I took my leave to the sound of orchestrated mutterings.
I later looked at a set of profit-and-loss accounts for the year end 1972, but the figures didn’t really help much. Our collective royalties were £63, 760. 64, and income from the European and American tours came to £155, 951. 13, making a total of nearly £220, 000. If I’d queried anything, I might have asked about the £6. 73 postage that year, but things were stressed out enough, without my pushing my luck any further!
Back to the music, and, as the year progressed, the scale of gigs increased, putting us back into that now familiar routine, which Paicey described as ‘blurred together into one long stream, each one indistinguishable from the last’. He was right, and it brought back the time when Ritchie came away from an internal flight in America, where, having chatted with the boxer Joe Frazier, he promptly went down with hepatitis, for which the supremely fit and powerful fighter could not have been held responsible! However, because of cancellations from when I’d been ill, every effort was made to work through this schedule, and we tried to use Al Cooper, who I thought was fine, but he called in sick soon after and we had to cast the net again. Randy California stepped in for the gig in Quebec City, and we included ‘When a Blind Man Cries’ that night. Randy also played slide during ‘Child in Time’, and the audience went crazy. So, naturally enough, Randy was fired directly after the show, after which the remainder of the Canadian dates were shelved.
A show in Germany without Ritchie went down quite well, even though we had previously offered refunds to the fans. However, most of them stayed but, unfortunately, many also stayed on after the show had ended and we’d gone. They smashed the place to smithereens, which made the authorities take our next gig (at full band strength) quite seriously. In fact, they brought in the army, which made me think, ‘Is all of this necessary, so five guys can do a concert?’ After that the half-mile journey back to the hotel took two hours, which reminded me of the adage: ‘You know you’ve made it when you get stuck in your own traffic jam!’
Someone came on stage at Lüdenscheid and announced we’d be coming back shortly to do another set, and, when we didn’t, the crowd wrecked our gear, leaving John and Tony to successfully sue the city authorities for damages. All good stuff, you might think, but, in truth, I was beginning to find Deep Purple a machine over which I basically had no control, the more so because our label was expanding to take in other artists, and Roger was also showing an increasing interest (and skill) in the production side of things. He’d already cut his teeth on the album Razamanaz, which he produced for Nazareth, but, despite the now busier office with its new people to look after, and the fact that Ritchie had not yet recovered, we were soon on our way back to America, before returning to Europe for more gigs and recording Who Do We Think We Are, which we made in Rome and Frankfurt in 1972, using the Stones’ mobile again. Including ‘Woman from Tokyo’, ‘Mary Long’ (my thoughts about the TV-clean-up campaigner Mary Whitehouse and the Christian social reformer and anti-porn campaigner Lord Longford) and ‘Smooth Dancer’, with its different thoughts on Ritchie, this was an unhappy album in the making, because Ritchie and I had basically had enough of each other.
I often wonder whether the managers could have saved the inevitable from happening, by just calling a halt to the schedule and saying, ‘OK, lads, let’s take a break for a few months.’ But they didn’t, and so the day came when I sat down to write that famous letter to Tony Edwards. We were doing a short tour of America, and I was at the Imperial Hotel in Dayton, Ohio, whose notepaper had printed at the top, ‘Where Every Guest is King’. It was a nice touch, although I didn’t feel very ‘kingly’ at that moment, as I wrote:
Dear Tony,
Thank you for your telegram. Perhaps in my letter to you the word ‘affiliation’ misled you. I must now make clear that my doubts be in the direction of my own desires to perform as an artist. I am so depressed with my occupation at the moment, as well as the circumstances and attitudes I have to work with that I felt it necessary to put on record my intentions to leave the group on 30th June 1973. This decision is not impulsive, but made after at least six months of thought. I am certainly not thinking of moving to any other companies for management etc. It is simply that if, after three months’ complete break, I decide to continue in the business, I shall find a new way of expressing my ideas, or at least a more varied way. I suppose I could sum up by saying that I think DP has become a stagnant, boring machine far removed from the fresh, innovative group it once was. I think this was inevitable and that we should quit while we are ahead. Another advantage to deciding upon a date at least six months in advance, is that nobody will be able to take unfair advantage of the situation. You must admit that this is almost a probability were matters to follow an unguided course. I have almost formulated a basic pattern for the future and I shall obviously make you aware of my intentions when I reach London.
Yours sincerely
Ian
So, when I met John and Tony, they said, ‘Well, are you really leaving, then?’ And, when I started to explain that I couldn’t take any more, that I needed a break, John asked, ‘How long can you stay?’ So I told him I wasn’t going to just walk out on them, that I’d stay long enough to see commitments honoured, and so on. They said they had just had the tour to Japan confirmed, and could I stay for that? I said, ‘OK,’ and that was it.
Not once was it suggested, ‘Do you want to reconsider when you’ve had a rest?’ or ‘Is there some way we can approach this differently?’ My God, I must have been an obnoxious, unapproachable creature for the end to come about like this. OK, so I know I’d been capable of arrogance, and the word ‘supercilious’ had been used from time to time, but it was only my way of looking after myself. That I had the confidence to speak my mind didn’t surely mean I was a loathsome prima donna. Could these people not see that not only had I lost respect for them, but that I’d also lost respect for myself? Could they not see that I’d spent months willing them to accept that this great band was in a decline of its own making? I mean, for heaven’s sake, each member of the band had learned from his own experience about facing up to moments when it’s time to call a halt, when the magic fades. I’d faced that situation with the Moonshiners, the Javelins, Episode Six and Wainwright’s Gentlemen, but here there was no reflection, no self-analysis, just ‘How long can you stay?’
I admit now that I did not want to leave Deep Purple. I just didn’t like the way things were going, and it was as simple as that. I didn’t like the way the guys were worried about their futures, their lack of confidence, or the way they were looking retrogressively at the music we’d made two to three years before. Above all else, I didn’t know what I was looking for, and nobody had asked me. I was dying of frustration and nobody cared.
It doesn’t matter how famous or successful you are, each one of us needs an arm around us sometimes. It’s something I needed, and I didn’t receive it in any form. My relationship with Zoe was unsuccessful, and I was faced with finishing Who Do We Think We Are plus a long period of touring, in isolation. We no longer seemed to be mates, and it all conspired to cause the album to be deferred.
The atmosphere in Rome was very bad, with the guitarist deciding not to be around the house when we were there – or should when I say when I was there? – and it must have cost the record company a fortune. We gave them ‘Rat Bat Blues’, ‘Place in Line’, ‘Our Lady’, ‘Mary Long’, ‘Super Trouper’, ‘Woman from Tokyo’ and ‘Smooth Dancer’, where I admit taking my anger out on Ritchie in particular, and doing so in the only way I knew best: hidden in the lyric, and with references to black suede, which is his favourite clothing. Unfortunately, I don’t think he saw the subtlety, which made me even more angry!
So, as we struggled to produce that piece of vinyl, I know I wasn’t the only one with thoughts of change in mind, and I believe Ritchie was cooking something up with Paicey and Phil Lynott. Paul Rodger’s name was also thought to be in the frame somewhere, but, as Deep Purple, we struggled through another hefty programme, which was of such intensity that it’s hard to believe things were ending.
Now it was only place names: Southampton on 13 September; Leicester the next night; Brighton after that; and on through to November, where we criss-crossed America and Canada into December, before starting all over in the New Year!
Who Do We Think We Are was released in the States at the end of 1972, and came out in the UK in March 1973. It reached Nos. 15 and 4 respectively in the charts, which situation must have posed the cruellest of dilemmas for the management in Newman Street, because the irony of all that was happening meant that while ‘the greatest band in the world’ was falling apart at the seams, its cashflow potential was bigger than ever!
Despite efforts to keep the fact that I was leaving under wraps, the media and fans picked up on what was going on, and we toured to a bad press and increasing hostility. Some of it was justified, but other situations were plain ridiculous, such as when we refused to go on an outdoors stage and play during a thunderstorm in New York. That event (with ZZ Top) caused fans to wreck our gear, so we couldn’t play Atlanta the next night, and one journal said of that farce, ‘Deep Purple unwilling to die in order to sing a song!’
We arrived for the closing Japanese tour in August 1972, and played Hiroshima, Nagoya and two shows at Osaka. The concerts were recorded live for the Made in Japan (double) album, which would be another huge success, and included ‘Highway Star’, ‘Child in Time’, ‘Smoke on the Water’, ‘The Mule’, ‘Strange Kind of Woman’, ‘Lazy’ and ‘Space Truckin’’. Made in Japan reached No. 16 in the UK in January 1973 and No. 6 in America during April, reinforcing our world standing, and with Who Do We Think We Are selling at the same time.
As most fans know, I’ve never personally been happy about live albums, and would prefer to leave that side of things to the bootleggers. The thrill of the moment, and all it implies, means you have to physically be at the show to catch the ‘live vibe’, but I know and accept I’m in a minority on this one.
I was leaving Deep Purple voluntarily, and Roger was also about to go, although he didn’t yet know it! However, when the final concert was over, I kept my farewell to a simple ‘Goodnight’, and allowed myself to be swamped with relief as I flew home – without a cloud on the horizon!