: Steve Pilkington
: Deep Purple& Rainbow 1968-1979 Every Album, Every Song
: Sonicbond Publishing
: 9781789524994
: 1
: CHF 8.80
:
: Musik
: English
: 144
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

Few would deny that Deep Purple were one of the most influential and popular heavy rock bands to emerge from the melting pot of the late 1960s. They went through several line-up changes and stylistic shifts before splitting up for the first time in the mid-1970s. Talismanic guitarist Ritchie Blackmore carried the spirit on when he formed Rainbow after leaving Purple in 1975, particularly through his partnership with legendary singer Ronnie James Dio. Deep Purple reformed some years later, of course, but many consider this original, sometimes turbulent, decade to be their most significant.
In this updated new edition, Steve Pilkington puts his focus on the period from Shades Of Deep Purple in 1968 through to the first dissolution of the band after Come Taste The Band in 1976, via such classics as Machine Head and In Rock. He also discusses the first four Rainbow studio albums, including the classic Rainbow Rising and the hit-laden Down To Earth album in 1979, taking a look at every song from every album in detail. He also discusses live recordings, plus DVD and video releases. Critical! opinion rubs shoulders with facts, trivia and anecdotes, making this alternative history the most exhaustive guide to the two bands' music yet produced.


Steve Pilkington is a music journalist, editor and broadcaster. He was Editor in Chief for the Classic Rock Society Magazine Rock Society and is now co-administrator of the rock website Velvet Thunder as well as presenting a weekly internet radio show called A Saucerful Of Prog. He has recently published. His books include On Tracks on Iron Maiden, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, plus Supertramp - Crime Of The Century, Rock Classics, all for Sonicbond, and he has also written the official biography of legendary guitarist Gordon Giltrap. He lives in Wigan, Lancashire, UK.
Chapter1

Shades Of Deep Purple


Personnel:

Rod Evans: vocals

Ritchie Blackmore: guitars

Jon Lord: keyboards

Nick Simper: bass guitar

Ian Paice: drums and percussion

Record label: Parlophone (UK), Tetragrammaton (US)

Recorded in May 1968, produced by Derek Lawrence.

UK release date: September 1968.

US release date: July 1968.

Highest chart places: UK: did not chart, USA: 24

Running time: 43:27

Album Facts

The album was recorded in May 1968, after the band returned from a Scandinavian tour under the name Roundabout. They changed their name to Deep Purple on the suggestion of Ritchie Blackmore, whose grandmother was reportedly very keen on the song of the same name – an easy-listening staple dating back to the 1930s. They completed the recording in a mere three days at Pye Studios in London, with production duties handled by Derek Lawrence, who went on to great success, with his stint as the man behind the production desk for the first three Wishbone Ash albums of particular note. The album gained immediate traction in the United States, largely on the back of the success of the first single ‘Hush’, but by contrast went largely unheralded in their native UK, where it was only finally granted a release in September of that year. The US record label was Tetragrammaton, whose intriguing name refers to the four-letter Hebrew biblical name of God, from which the words Yahweh and Jehovah are derived. The label was actually co-owned by the comedian Bill Cosby. In the UK, the album came out on the Parlophone label, the EMI subsidiary which had released the early Beatles work.

Containing a roughly equal mix of covers and original material, the album is an enjoyable yet tentative musical step. Unlike the debut releases of Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath, which would offer fully realised blueprints for their musical direction,Shades Of Deep Purple showed a band taking the first move in the direction which they would perfect some time later. In this regard, their early work mirrors that of Yes, for example, whose first two albums likewise saw them hinting, albeit extremely well, at the template they would go on to make their own.

Album Cover

The album cover photograph is fairly typical of the time, with the band appearing rather stiffly in fashionable outfits purchased for them at the notable London boutique, the ‘Mr Fish Emporium’, where they did the photo shoot.

Incidentally, and possibly of coincidental naming, the owner and fashion designer, Michael Fish, was the man behind the infamous ‘kipper tie’! He did not, however, have any connection to the UK weatherman, famed for failing to spot an incoming disastrous hurricane in 1987. The same shot was used for both the American and British covers, but in different formats; while the US version had the shot repeated several times in squares on the front cover, both colour and monochrome, the UK release went for a much simpler design, with the one big shot f