The Thrill Is Gone

William Shatner- The Blues

For those who recall the very strange hit album (Seeking Major Tom from 2011), with William Shatner dressed as an astronaut on the cover (was he an influence on Whoosh?) the great man has gone and made another one, this time talking the blues. As before the carrot is a decent list of guest musicians to offset the vocals and again as before Ritchie Blackmore has joined them to play on B B King’s The Thrill Is Gone. So far it seems to be a US release only but is being touted as an import too, due October. Curiously he does look a bit like IG is some publicity pics as well! Thanks to Trekkie Tim Summers for the info.

Trainspotting

Mark Besley has joined the DTB trainspotters society with this snap by his wife taken at Trowbridge Station as she whooshed by… (that’s whooshed by as in privatised rail speak for not going very fast!).

Meanwhile John McEvoy was checking out the rivals to Sainsbury’s (see post below) and saw that Tesco are price matching them on Whoosh, but have sat in in amongst a zillion greatest hits collections, clearly not aware that it is in fact new material.

Meanwhile Simon did wonder if Edel had been throwing money at the Tour de France – “I saw a Whoosh logo on some of the shirts the other day, but it turns out to be the name of an electric bike brand in the UK!” Mind you their logo makes DPs cover look positively inspired… Simon’s just had an email subject matter ‘Purple Chopper” too: “I was afraid to look but it turned out to be a fab original purple Chopper bike Steve Clare had seen in his local antique shop and was trying to crowbar into the Machine Head book.”

Kickstarter

Greg Tarlinton has added this to the current batch of DP magazine covers, over in Australia. Steve chats about the recording of the new album and how he used to build guitars! Cover date June 2020.

Greg also adds that the magazine web site has a number of DP features dotted around their website if you can navigate around the pages. He’s done us a helpful list, hope all the links work properly (the software people have messed with the options so struggling a bit!):

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/deep_purples_ian_gillan_talks_how_he_feels_about_smoke_on_the_water_in_2020_explains_odd_lyric_lines.html

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/deep_purple_bassist_reacts_to_dimebag_darrells_smoke_on_the_water_remark_explains_why_band_wanted_to_decline_rock_hall_induction.html

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/ian_gillan_recalls_deep_purple_becoming_incredibly_wealthy_at_young_age__how_it_affected_them.html

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/every_deep_purple_album_could_be_their_last_bassist_roger_glover_says.html

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/deep_purples_ian_paice_shares_opinion_on_click_tracks__electronic_drums_talks_bass_drums.html

Topping

Simon spotted Deep Purple in his local Sainbury’s chart rack at number 10, bravely doing battle with a cheapo Doris Day Collection at number 9! Meantime, David Browne – who has sort of slipped into the role of charting the rise and rise of Whoosh for us (and future historians!) – says the list of top ten entries has grown over the past week (see below).

#1 Germany

#1 Finland

#1 Belgium (Wallonia)

#1 Scotland

#1 Austria

#1 Switzerland

#2 Poland

#2 Czech Republic

#3 Hungary

#3 Sweden

#3 Norway

#4 UK (highest chart entry in 46 years)

#4 Japan (International)

#6 Italy

#7 Belgium (Flanders)

#7 Netherlands

#8 France

#8 Denmark

#13 Australia

The one which is puzzling him and us is the US Billboard chart. But if you look at what they call their Top Album Sales (which they describe as “a pure album sales chart” and mixes all genres) then Whoosh comes straight in at No. 11 (just below ‘Now 75!’). They will find it tough going as it is one of SIX new entries. As for how it compares with previous reunion albums? Scroll down.

David also thought to look back at reunion album positions in Billboard and this charts a real u-turn now, with positions dropping steadily to Battle, and then creeping back up. He also points out that the last Deep Purple album to get higher than #11 in the US album sales chart was (according to the old DP discography!) : Burn #9, which mimics the position in Britain.

Titles which do not appear didn’t make it into the Top 200 chart at all, so a huge chunk of the catalogue is missing.

Staggers pronounces.

“DEEP PURPLE have reached a stage of mastership that is unprecedented in the history of rock music. No doubt, this is a legendary album and will once be counted among the classics of rock music…” KNAC Rock Radio website review. While back in the UK: “How depressing that in their seventies Deep Purple are much, much better at arena rawk than, say, Kasabian…” Yes, even the sad old Spectator Magazine gets all grudging in their praise. So, without wishing to sideline TMS statistician Andy_Zaltzman, here is the current state of play.

Whoosh is now Deep Purple’s highest charting studio album in 46 years… since “Burn” in 1974.

Number 1 Physical Artist Album sales / no: 4 Main Chart
Number 1 Top 100 albums (excepting streaming sales)
Number 1 Independent Album
Number 1 Rock and Metal
Number 1 Scottish Albums (don’t let Nicola know!)

And “Whoosh!” has reached the Top 10 in a 12 countries worldwide – with more apparently to come.

1 Germany

1 Finland

1 Belgium (Wallonia)

1 Scotland

2 Czech Republic

3 Sweden

3 Norway

4 UK (highest chart entry in 46 years)

4 Japan (International)

6 Italy

7 Belgium (Flanders)

7 Netherlands

8 France

Thanks to Adrian Tredinnick their UK publicist for the info, he had this thank-you message off the band:
“Your energy, professionalism and devotion to the cause has been building throughout the ‘Now What’ and ‘Infinite’ campaigns and all that has paid off with this explosion of effort that we have been watching and admiring whilst doing our phoners for the latest album. Who would have thought that – this late in our career – we would have been having such an experience? It is quite incredible.“

These large billboards have been turning up on the transit systems across Germany, thanks to Pericle for the snap. Find room in your den for that!

Thanks also to David Browne for his help who tells me the album has just tipped up in the Billboard chart at 161. “Whoosh! is at #20 in the Billboard US Rock charts, behind no less than 13 compilation albums…. The Beatles, Elton John, Queen, The Eagles, Journey etc, and 4 re-releases: including, of course, Rumours.” Reminds me of those far off days when Led Zeppelin were kept off the number one album spot by the Top Of The Pops covers collections!

Factoid time • Amazingly it will be FIFTY YEARS since Deep Purple first got to number one in Germany in October 1970 with you know what. I can’t see sales in this day and age holding out for another eight weeks there but that is still quite a close anniversary.
One album listener has asked “have any other DP devotees experienced an audio ‘glitch’ at 2′ 22″ in ‘Dancing In My Sleep’ on the audiobook version?” I’ve only heard the digital wav files and didn’t notice anything, but do let us know.

A – board

This is the in-store poster for the album, or in this case outside the store on an a-board in Tampere in Finland. One assumes it vanished soon after! Roger Glover has confirmed that IG got the title idea from the sublime comedy show Fawlty Towers, specifically Basil’s line where he is musing on the shortness of a human lifetime: “Whoosh…. there it goes mate…”. David Browne points out that IG has remembered the quote wrongly. So, the album should have been called “Zzzoom!”

Gillanswift

I appreciate the UK has been rapidly losing it’s status as the European music centre for some time (my most played albums this last couple of years have been Norwegian and German, so I can hardly gripe) but it’s nice to get a reminder of the old days with a headline like this on the Official UK chart stats front page the other day, spotted by Martin Ashberry! It’s not unusual to have Purple topping the rock or metal chart ghettos from time to time, but this one did raise a bit of a cheer. So off to do my bit in the indie record shop as soon as I can, just to see the moaning from all the Swifties out there…

“I simply couldn’t decide which version to get, so in the end I bought all eight!” says Taylor Swift on a shopping trip this week.

Martin Birch. RIP.

Or should I say Martin Birchtree, Enginearole, as he was memorably credited on one Machine Head tape reel…

1970 was a cracking year to be let loose in the record shops, seeing how far my pocket money would go. I bought Deep Purple In Rock of course (Engineer on Hard Lovin’ Man? Martin Birch) but did explore other bands, and one of the first singles I picked up was Fleetwood Mac’s Green Manalishi. Engineer? Martin Birch.
A mate at school then brought Thank Christ For The Bomb along to play a track from one day (in form assembly of all places) by The Groundhogs (to be outdone by Split later that year, an astonishing audio experience). Engineer? Martin Birch. Another lad was raving about the track Phoenix by a new band called Wishbone Ash. Engineer? Martin Birch.
And that was just 1970.
What I’m trying to say is that Martin’s name has been on my radar most of my music buying life. And the same happened with the next generation of rock fans as his credit began to appear on a raft of post-Deep Purple projects like Whitesnake, Rainbow and PAL. The following wave of heavy metal again drew on Martin’s skills, in particular Iron Maiden (though by now he was credited as Producer, Engineer, Mixer, Tape Op and Technician!). After which he hung up the earphones in his early 40s and left the business.
Despite that early retirement, the extensive list of studio projects he got through is remarkable when you start to look carefully through it, albeit for many Deep Purple fans it is Machine Head which will be the one he is probably most remembered for. I and a few others have literally been going over every felt pen mark on the album’s tape boxes this last week or so to try and glean the tiniest bit of new information from them for the upcoming biography. Indeed it is with a heavy heart that I will close the file on my laptop where I had begun a list of niggling questions I was hoping to put to him shortly (Derek Lawrence called him up last year on my behalf – they’d kept in touch, explained what we wanted, and got an OK to call, on the proviso to “tell him I’m very unlikely to remember anything very much!”).
The sixth member of Deep Purple? It’s a soubriquet which he certainly deserved thanks to his handling the rest of Deep Purple’s classic era (and in a couple of cases even beyond).
It’s unusual for studio personnel to become as well known as the musicians they work for, but judging from the astonishing coverage Martin Birch’s passing (at just 71) has generated among the papers and news sites today, as well as rock fans, we’re not the only ones for whom his work has resonated so strongly.

Number 5

Somebody found a cache of low numbers in HMV Stoke on Friday, and snagged number 5 of their limited edition vinyl release of the album for Mark Maddock! There is also a clear vinyl edition knocking about but we have not been able to confirm a blue pressing heard about in North America, so send us a snap if you have this.

Who needs NMEs?

The NME played out it’s last few years as a freebie given away in shops and the like, and the music press as we grew up with (and devoured) in the 70s and 80s has now disappeared. The NME was finally sold off to some gents in Singapore – they clearly couldn’t afford a football club – and exists only as a web brand now. But a few of of us may be reminded of the NME’s acerbic and memorable approach to new albums by this mad headline from their website today spotted by David Browne. Back in the 1974 the band and management were actually so incensed by the NME tearing the Burn album apart that they ran a clever full page ad in the NME the following week printing all the great reviews from the other papers together. Perhaps we all took our music a lot more seriously back then.

As David says, there are several back handed compliments in the review, which is otherwise full of snippets cribbed from unchecked web sources, and it’s nothing toworry about given the astonishing press the LP has been getting this week. It’s so nice to see your favourite band getting this kind of coverage and you have to feel pleased for them.

But looking at the “trending” menu above the NME headline does show me how far behind I now am. I’ve never seen The Walking Dead, no idea who Phoebe Bridgers is, never hashtagged anything, not heard of Megan Thee Stallion or ever wanted to go to Glastonbury while the festival was on. Or been stuck in traffic on the M4 to Slough for that matter. Life goes on. Maybe Leonie has hit the nail right on the head, and I’m totally missing the point! While I ponder this, I shall retreat to my cave with Infinite and let it all whoosh by. Simon