DEEP PURPLE COVERING TRACKS
Considering Deep Purple initially built their career around covering other people’s songs, the band has proven remarkably resistant to cover versions across the half century since then.
The band’s first four singles, in 1968-1969, were all other people’s material — Joe South’s “Hush,” Neil Diamond’s “Kentucky Woman,” Spector/Barry/ Greenwich’s “River Deep - Mountain High” and The Beatles’ “Help”; their first three albums added Donovan (“Laléna”), Cook/Greenaway (“Hallelujah”), Billy Roberts (“Hey Joe”), Skip James (“I’m So Glad”) and another Beatles number, “We Can Work It Out,” to the catalog.
Since that time, however, Purple have not only resisted the temptation to turn to outside writers (at least on record), they have positively eschewed it, with only 1988’s 20th anniversary remake of “Hush” to break the embargo.
Strange times, however, can inspire strange bedfellows, and so it is, for their 21st studio album Turning to Crime, Purple also turn the clock back to inspect again their roots.
Not that they looked at it like that themselves.
Little more than a year has passed since their last album, Whoosh!, was released to approving reviews and excited fans, and under normal circumstances the band would have been on the road ever since.
As drummer Ian Paice explains, “Live work is where it’s at. The studio can be fun, and you do it because you need to be making new stuff for your own entertainment as well as the audiences. But live work is the focus. Unfortunately, that’s not been possible, so we have been working out how to do other things.
“We are musicians, and what we do is make music. Sitting on your arse at home doing absolutely nothing just seemed so pointless and futile. So we have the advantage of the tech we all take for granted now, we don’t physically have to be in the same room to
