Ian Gillan: The Autobiography of Deep Purple’s Singer

by Ian Gillan

  So I was on stage singing, and thinking, What’s going on back there? Finally, I put the mike down and headed off the stage, where I found B in tears. Having arrived at some kind of understanding of the situation, I said, ‘I am now going to kill him, probably with a very slow bullet called my right arm!’

  B’s reaction was, well, shall we say, brilliantly composed, as she said, ‘Don’t let it get to you. Just calm down and do a great show!’ And she said it many times: ‘Just do a great show!’ In fact, she was warning me with such power that she was actually threatening me. Bless her!

  I was soon back on stage with the band, and the show continued as the guitar player knocked the songs about, ending early, taking lumps out, and generally leaving me stranded whenever possible. At the end, Ian Paice flew some signed drum skins into the bemused audience, and shouted, ‘We owe you a hell of a lot!’

  I cannot begin to explain what Ritchie had in mind that night, whether he was aware of what was going on, or whether he was just hyper-mind-fucked and super-tense, as he can be. Could the sight of some people with cameras really have upset him that much, or was it premeditated for his own inexplicable reason? I’m told (through Darker Than Blue) that, around midnight, the ‘Badger’s Den’ door opened, and he was seen being led out by a girl holding a lead, with a dog collar round his neck! He was dressed in his long, black, leather coat, plus a witch’s hat, and his roadie’s witch mask, which was sometimes used by his assistant on stage! Well that’s what I’ve been told, and, if it’s true, it is also very sad.

  In many ways, I felt that until this moment, there were times when despite the tensions, the five of us were as near as could be to the spirit of Deep Purple, and yet, quite contrary to that, I remember writing in my notebook that ‘With Ritchie Blackmore, Deep Purple has no future.’

  Such is the frustration and dilemma behind, and within, the band’s chemistry that I always try to find answers, and will continue to do so until the end. So I shall always look back and think of the young guitar player who’d been on the road with Screaming Lord Sutch, and who’d put up with Gene Vincent. Then to the man who would later discover a fascination for the paranormal (not black magic, but communication with the spirits), who wanted to borrow Roger’s crucifix one night, and when it was refused, he axed the door down, to ask again! And then, of course, there’s that more populist side to Ritchie, which is about a musician who loves his football – and particularly when it’s played to his ‘rules of engagement’ – and the affection he has for animals, particularly his cats! And finally (for now) I suspect we’re all wondering where his interest in medieval music might be taking him, having been told that he’d like to have a house that fronts onto a cobbled street, and that his fascination for castles is undiminished and probably growing!

  A video called Come Hell or High Water was made from the NEC show, although without the incident included, and it showcases ‘Highway Star’, ‘Black Night, ‘Talk About Love’, ‘A Twist in the Tale’, ‘Perfect Strangers’, ‘Beethoven’, ‘Knocking at Your Back Door’, ‘Anyone’s Daughter’, ‘Child in Time’, ‘Anya’, ‘The Battle Rages On’, ‘Lazy’, ‘Space Truckin’’, ‘Woman from Tokyo’, ‘Paint it Black’ and ‘Smoke on the Water’.

  BMG also brought out an album produced by Pat Regan, with recordings from the Hanns–Martin–Schleve–Hall in the Stuttgart show (16 October) and the NEC performance of 9 November. The album went Gold and Platinum variously between 1995 and 2013, although I actually vetoed one of the releases from the NEC in 2007.

  Ritchie stayed with the band for the shows in Copenhagen, Denmark (12th), Stockholm, Sweden (13th) and Oslo, Norway (14th/15th), before making his final show with us at Helsingfors ishall (Helsinki Ice Hall), Helsinki, Finland, on the 17 November. It was all over.

  Every so often, a project comes along that is different, and a sometimes welcome distraction from the cut and thrust of situations like Deep Purple. And one such opportunity came about in June 1992, when Minos EMI and Phil Banfield arranged for me to go to Greece with B, to make a record with one of the major artists in that territory, Michalis Rakintzis. In fact, the idea first cropped up in February 1991, but other things prevented progress then, including (quite possibly) that I wanted to pass on it, because it’s not the sort of ‘thing’ I normally do. However, the artist has one platinum album to his name and two gold, so the label felt really enthusiastic about a collaboration; and a few months later I thought, Well, why not?

  On 10 June 1992, B and I flew out, and were put up at the Hilton Hotel for the first night, and then moved to a suite at the Grand Chalet Hotel. The next day we went to the Sierra Studios in Athens, and recorded an album, with me singing on three tracks: ‘Getaway’, ‘My Heart Remains the Same’ and ‘I Think I Know’ (‘Getaway’ was also released as a single).

  Later on, I did three shows with Michalis at Thessaloniki, Patras and Athens, and the promoters gave it their all in terms of advertising, TV and radio. It was really Michalis’s gig, but I went on stage with him for ‘Getaway’, ‘Smoke on the Water’, ‘When a Blind Man Cries’, ‘Black Night’ and ‘Woman from Tokyo’.

  They had ping-pong balls made with our names on them for throwing into the audience, and the whole experience was great. Michalis Rakintzis loves rock ’n’ roll!

  A particular highlight of the visit was the occasion we did a video on an island somewhere, and it meant a hectic two to three days working with a producer whose name eludes me for the moment. However, what I do remember is that the man was so incredibly bossy, to the extent he must have thought he was Cecil B. deMille by the way he went about his work. I mean, he was even bossing Michalis around, shouting, ‘Stand there, stand there,’ as we struggled on a rooftop location in the wilting sun. And all the time it was, ‘You, you, you, move over there. You, wait. You, stand still!’

  It was horrendous, and there were moments when I thought, This is fucking ridiculous, and I’ve had enough of this crap. So, after the first shoot, I drifted off to find a moment of sanity, and wandered into a store, where my eyes fell on a replica Colt .38 – with bullets! And then I thought, I am going to kill that director with this, and joyfully handed over the money, making sure the bullets were blanks but also wishing to be assured that the confrontation would be noisy enough to bring him down to earth a bit – or clip his wings, if you prefer!

  Back on our rooftop location, I concealed the weapon within the black clothing we had to wear, while he had us prancing around like prats, in touch with the gods and all that nonsense, until finally we came to a dramatic bit, a sort of tableau scene, where there was much posing to be done.

  Now, I truly appreciate what the guy was trying to do, but right now he was so up my fucking nose that I had to sometimes remind myself that they were giving us a great time, and I was being well paid. Unfortunately, it always came back to the fact that he was still pissing me off, and then, to make things worse, I just hated watching him shove my new mate, Michalis, around. Left with no option, I decided, ‘Enough is enough’ and I am now going to shoot this director, execute him publicly on camera! But I changed my mind, and it’s hard to really know why. So let’s just agree he’d better not upset me like that again!

  CHAPTER 15

  Ritchie’s leaving Deep Purple was critical, and we had to decide whether to carry on or not. There were major discussions, as we explored various ideas, until finally Mr Udo, our Japanese promoter of many years’ standing, suggested the America-based, Joe Satriani. So Roger called him up to see if he might be interested, and, as luck would have it, he’d just finished working in the studio, and, yes, he was interested. We sent him a tape from the Stuttgart show – one where Ritchie had stopped playing for a while – and one of the questions Joe asked was whether we wanted him to do the same – stop playing for a while! He told us he couldn’t approach the project as anything permanent, seeing it more as helping us out, and so he joined the Japanese leg of the tour, arriving a few days before the first show at Nagoya on 2
December 1993.

  Joe’s background and credentials are too numerous to mention here, so suffice it to say that the man who came to help us out has an impressive catalogue of albums, which have secured him a series of Grammy Award nominations for best rock and (differently) best pop performances; while, as an aside, his interest, through music, in science fiction and the theoretical dimensions of space and life beyond suggested that he and I might even have something in common outside of Deep Purple.

  Joe was born in New York in 1956 and his career spans being a guitar teacher, a composer, producer, songwriter and of course performer, whose associations are many, including with Alice Cooper, Eric Johnson, Steve Vai (whom he once tutored) and Sammy Hagar. However, as we’d soon come to appreciate, and as mentioned at the very beginning (see Prologue), Joe is also a perfect gentleman, and our time together would be delightful.

  So we had a couple of rehearsals booked, and he walked in to play faultlessly – first time. He’d absorbed and learned every detail from the Stuttgart tape, to the extent that those watching from behind the studio window had set themselves up as judges, such as you’d find in an ice-skating or dance competition. So, as the rehearsal progressed, and we glanced back, we saw the smiling Mr Udo, Colin Hart and the crew holding up cards with scores of 9. 9 and higher! With our challenge in crisis turning out to be a breeze, it was time for one last song, and what else to do but ‘Smoke on the Water’? Somebody said, ‘Oh, we don’t have to do that, do we?’ but Joe said, ‘I’d kinda like to do it.’

  ‘OK,’ we said, which provoked the wonderful reply, ‘Gee,’ I never thought I’d get to play “Smoke on the Water” with Deep Purple!’

  So we kicked off at Nagoya, without the presence of Ritchie, and played ‘Highway Star’, ‘Ramshackle Man’, ‘Black Night’, ‘Maybe I’m a Leo’, ‘Twist of the Tale’, ‘Perfect Strangers’, ‘Pictures of Home’ (Jon solo), ‘Knocking at Your Back Door’, ‘Anyone’s Daughter’, ‘Child in Time’, ‘Anya’, ‘The Battle Rages On’, ‘When a Blind Man Cries’, ‘Lazy’ and ‘Space Truckin’’, with ‘Hush’, ‘Speed King’ and ‘Smoke on the Water’ for encores.

  December 1993

  2nd Nagoya Rainbow Hall

  3rd Castle Hall, Osaka

  5th Yokohama Gym, Yokohama

  6th/7th Nippon Budokan, Tokyo

  8th Olympic Pool, Tokyo

  May 1994

  27th Den Bosch, Holland

  28th Seidensticker Halle, Bielefeld, Germany

  29th Eissporthalle Kassel, Germany

  31st Flanders Expo, Gent, Belgium.

  June

  3rd Waldbüuhne, Berlin, Germany

  4th Esbjerg Rock Festival, Denmark

  5th Eissporthalle, Halle, Germany

  7th Dortmund, Germany

  8th Alsterdorfer Sporthalle, Hamburg, Germany

  10th Sweden Rock Festival, Karlshamn, Sweden

  And so the tour continued into Goteborg, Sweden (11th), Bielefeld, Germany (13th), Kassel and Passau, also Germany (14th/15th), into Belgium, back to Germany, down to Italy (Lonigo, 21st and Genova (Genoa), 22nd), up to Holland for a show at Den Bosch, across to Switzerland (St. Gallen, 26th), and into Spain for shows at Barcelona and Madrid (29th/30th), before wrapping up that part of the schedule in July:

  July

  1st Burgos, Spain

  2nd Gijón, Spain

  5th Kapfenberg, Austria

  6th Bayreuth, Germany

  Well all good things must come to an end, as they say, and the time had arrived for Joe to get back to his own projects. He had always been very open about his position, that it was a stopgap measure, and, apart from his fantastic contribution as a band member, he also played a crucial part in helping us to regain our confidence, and realise there was life after Ritchie. However, it was also time for us to sit down and look for someone permanent, and so, to kick-start that, we took a poll as to who wanted whom, and Steve Morse was on everybody’s list.

  Steve’s a bit younger than the rest of us – born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1954, he cites his influences as Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton; although, in the first round of his musical development, his CV tells that he actually studied classical and jazz guitar at Miami University. Still, by 1975 Steve had formed the Dixie Dregs with bass player Andy West, and the band they put together made several albums through different line-ups and toured, performing jazz, country rock, hard rock, plus fusion and progressive material, until, in 1985, he formed the Steve Morse Band, ahead of joining Kansas. Along the way, fans voted him Best Guitarist for five years in a row in Guitar Player, while before joining us in Deep Purple, he swopped his career as a musician for that of an airline pilot – as we musicians so often do…!

  So everything looked great, Steve was ready to commit, and we were about to enjoy another of those glorious moments, of the kind we had with Joe Satriani, when he nearly didn’t get to play ‘Smoke’. In the case of Steve, we reached the end of the suitability and talking stages, which meant it was our turn to ask if he also had any questions he wanted to put to us, and there was one.

  ‘Is there any dress code?’ to which we said, ‘Wear whatever you like!’

  After three days of rehearsal, our first tour with Steve began in Mexico City, where we played on 23 November; and after that we went to Monterey, California (26th), where my attention was drawn to a notice on the door of my hotel room; and ‘Rule 3’, which said, ‘It is strictly forbidden to bring into the hotel (a) guns, (b) animals, (c) musicians.’ Oh, well, perhaps they thought we were bankers, because we did the show, were allowed to stay over, and travelled to Corpus Christi (Texas) for the following night. From the very beginning, Steve entered into the spirit of the band, and so we soon started to think about our next album for BMG, which would be called Purpendicular.

  However, before that, I had another project I’d been planning to visit for some time, and it would be to record an album with the band with whom I’d first earned a performance fee in 1963 – the Javelins. For me this idea was like some ‘unfinished business’ which had been festering from time to time, until the gods conspired to enable closure in 1992, when after a Purple show in Oslo (Norway), somebody handed me a business card that read, ‘Gordon Fairminer – Architect’. Well of course Gordon was a Javelin, so, needless to say we met up, and I discovered that my old mate from 1963 was now married to this beautiful girl, and they had two kids. So we had a few beers, and started reminiscing, thinking it a bit sad that there were no recorded moments of a band that was great in its time, and which I still think of that way, fifty-plus years on!

  Remember, at that time there were no such things as cassette recorders, only Grundig or Phillips machines, which served their users more for dictation of letters and so forth. In other words, they were not good enough to record through properly, and so, at our wonderful meeting in Oslo, Gordon and I toyed with the idea of finding a hall somewhere, getting the old band together for a weekend, and just putting a couple of tracks down, so we could each have a copy to take home.

  Well of course the idea developed from that, and after several months of tracking down the rest of the band, we ended up at Parr Street Studio in Liverpool for a weekend, where we first agreed on what we’d record from our set list of ‘yesteryear’, which meant they’d all be covers, reflecting our influences at the time (they’ve not changed much). I’d already called on Steve Morris to invite his help on the performance and production side of things, and so everyone turned up on the Friday night, we set the gear up, and went to the pub for a few drinks. We got up in the morning, recorded, went for something to eat, and then it was back to the pub for a few more drinks. Sunday somehow arrived, and the routine of the previous day was repeated, which left Monday for some tidying-up, and on Tuesday we were done. All the songs were performed in the same original keys and the tempo as before, and were (of necessity) delivered ‘bare to the bone’ and therefore ‘authentic’, as of the period.

  In due course Steve sent
the tape down, and I sent copies to the rest of the guys:Tony Tacon (rhythm guitar), Gordon (of course), Keith Roach (drums) and Tony (Tubby) Whitfield of the sad bass guitar crash! Career-wise, the new project had brought together a printer, a production manager, an architect, a cab driver and a singer, while, for just a few days, we’d been the Javelins again – or was it Jess Thunder and the Javelins?

  In the meantime Simon Robinson had got to hear about the recording, and expressed his interest in releasing it on his RPM Records label. So I handed the tape to him and, as usual, he did a great job putting it in the shops – and it’s been selling ever since!

  The record, called simply The Javelins, includes old R&B favourites, such as ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Poison Ivy’, ‘Blue Monday’, ‘Let’s Dance’, ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ and ‘Money’. The whole experience was so great, that I’m resolved to do another reunion, hopefully sooner than another fifty years away, and some work has already been done towards that end. However, I don’t want the lads to know about the plan, in case they start thinking too much about it. Heaven forbid they should turn up over-rehearsed, because they never did!

  Back to Deep Purple, then, and we now knew for sure that we’d found the right guitar player in Steve Morse, and I was now in a particular frame of mind for our next album, Purpendicular. There were a lot of things I wanted to write about, including experiences on the trip I did from Corpus Christi to Los Angeles with Al Dutton, during which time I’d be able to (and did) have the freedom to just get in a car with my buddy, and for us to follow our noses. It’s something I’d not done since I was a kid, while the ‘tour window’ in terms of downtime was too tight to go home, which I would have done had there been, say, a fortnight available. So the idea had justification on its side, and there was, in any case, work I wanted to do in LA, where I planned to spend time with Pat Regan on my solo project Dreamcatcher, as well as building on early thoughts for Purpendicular.