FIVE FACES OF DEEP PURPLE
Ian Gillan is sanguine about many things, so it’s no surprise he’s not getting too stressed about the impact the global pandemic has had on his band. Their twenty-first album, Whoosh!, was originally due to be released in the early summer, when the band were supposed to be on the road. But global events meant the album has been put back to August and the tour rescheduled for October 2021.
“These things happen, there’s no point getting worked up about it,” says the man who once claimed that he never had any ambition and was content instead to drift through life with a stupid grin on his face. “It’s an old maxim: musicians don’t get paid for making music, they get paid for waiting around. So we’re quite used to it.”
He’s not being flippant. The singer and his bandmates – drummer Ian Paice, bassist Roger Glover, guitarist Steve Morse and keyboard player Don Airey – all seem of the same mind when they call in over the next few days from the various points of the world where they’re currently enjoying what should hopefully be the final stages of lockdown (Gillan is in glamorous Lyme Regis).
But then nothing about Whoosh! is as expected, not least its existence. Purple’s previous album, 2017’s InFinite, was teed up as being their final one, the launch pad for a tour christened The Long Goodbye. InFinite and its predecessor, 2013’s Now What?!, represented an unexpected late-career hot streak for the last of hard rock’s original holy trinity still standing: albums that combined stateliness and playfulness in a way that only a band of Purple’s stature can manage. Produced, like its two predecessors, by Bob Ezrin, Whoosh! continues in that vein.
When somebody suggests you make a new Deep Purple album, do you think: “Oh God, not again?”
No, no, no. Quite the reverse. We went through a time years ago when everyone seemed under the weather for whatever reason, then everyone felt a bit better and the energy came back, When that’s there, you’ve just got to find an outlet for it.
Whoosh! is like the last two Purple records in that it sounds like a bunch of mates having a good time.
Absolutely right. Everything is done together. We write the songs together, we arrange them together, we record them together. Hopefully that joy and immediacy comes across. You can’t recreate it artificially.
There are some funny lyrics on it. In No Need To Shout, you sing: ‘You stand there on you soapbox without fear, chanting like a demented auctioneer.’
It’s a broad pop at politicians.
“I think we lost the plot for a while, especially after [1984 comeback album].”Ian Gillan
