Scum on the water!

Warning. This post contains a link to the Daily Mail. Look away now if this upsets you.

Yes the scourge of, well, everything came up trumps with a detailed investigation/ rehash of a syndicated news item / cure for cancer (delete which is applicable) about the sad saga of Ian Gillan’s one time hotel which I raised here a couple of days ago, and Peter Cross sent me the full details.  It seems the place has been empty for some time and has been left unloved and unheated for four years now.  Nothing a good renovation cannot sort but if this was anywhere round here it would have been trashed by vandals by now. Sic transit gloria mundi as people once said while popping a silly hat on someone.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6227487/Old-home-Deep-Purple-lead-singer-Ian-Gillan-Wallingford-Oxfordshire-left-rot.html

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Hope springs…

I was trying to find Ian Gillan‘s old hotel complex the other day as someone wanted to visit, and looking at the web map sites the guitar shaped swimming pool appears to be still in situ; not quite viewable from space but almost!  But it seems the hotel itself might be struggling. It closed a couple of years ago, was reopened to offer deals for golfers using the near-by course, but has not been able to compete with online booking site discounting. There seems to be no operating website. Mike Galway says he saw some film of it on the BBC recently shot by someone who had sneaked inside (one of those empty building explorer types; I’m saying nothing). Not sure if he took his trunks or if there is water in the famous pool – it looks a bit green here.  If anyone lives around that way let us know.

 

 

More Memories

Looks like Ritchie Blackmore is going to give Rainbow another outing in 2019. Aleksey Kononow has just spotted this poster for a show in Germany in June, and other countries will be announced soon, including Spain we believe. They’re certainly getting their monies worth out of the old Rising artwork!

Glenn tour spoiler

Don’t read if you don’t want to know!  Thanks to people who have nodded me over the Glenn Hughes tour list (we’ve not been able to make this tour ourselves). Quite a good selection, although I might have expected one or two more Come Taste songs. As a tour it is what it is, I kind of prefer his regular solo shows when we get more of a mix and the Purple songs come as part of that, but maybe this makes more sense commercially. 1400 attended the show in Bristol according to our man on the gate with the clicker.

Stormbringer / Might Just Take Your Life / Sail Away / Gettin’ Tighter / You Keep on Moving / You Fool No One / High Ball Shooter (someone tells me this was just interpolated!) / You Fool No One (reprise) / Mistreated / Smoke on the Water / Georgia on My Mind. Encore: Highway Star / Burn

By my ready reckoner that’s five from Burn, two (or one and a few bars) from Stormbringer, two from Come Taste and two from Machine Head!

Pic of the decorated Orange amps and speakers by Jeff Breis. Glenn has just announced a second batch of shows for May next year, so they must have gone well:

Holmfirth Picturedrome – May 14th
Edinburgh Queens Hall – 15th
Birmingham O2 Institute – 17th
Norwich UEA – 18th
St Albans Arena – 20th
Salisbury City Hall – 21st
Liverpool O2 Academy – 23rd
Nottingham Rock City – 24th

Glenn on form

With Glenn just a few days off landing in the UK, reports from America suggest he is doing a great set. Vince travelled miles and caught the show in Providence RI the other evening and sent us the pic:

Glenn in fine form despite this being almost the last gig of North America tour. It was a small crowd (200+) and they upgraded anyone sat in the balcony, but still he gave it his all. So good to hear some of the tunes. Keyboardist and guitar not bad, well worth the trip and physical strife. I was worried the Purple tunes would tax Glenn but it was like 1975.
He certainly has extended inbetween song chats – a Bolin tribute before Gettin’ Tighter and the fact he is a citizen of the US now, etc. Glenn did feet it here and there, it is a taxing setlist, but he pulled it off with breaks and did plenty of Purple inspired screams to our delight. Other venues seem sold out so Providence may be odd one that was poorly attended, but great audience. Vince Chong, Canada.

UK dates are on our Diary Page (scroll down!) but some venues are sold out so check first.

Avast

It was international talk like a pirate day last week, so this album fits right in. Just a DTB public service announcement really, as this is being touted around as an Italian collector’s release in a ‘unique octagonal sleeve’ (long with similar titles from other bands). And it is quite smart, albeit seemingly mixing Mk 1 and Mk 2 up.  But it is 100% unofficial, with pirated studio tracks. It’s an easy way to lose £30 or so, unless of course you’re into this sort of thing!
Talking of vinyl, that dull compilation with the op-art cover issued earlier in the year has found itself into the current HMV vinyl sale, so will cost you only £29 now. But the large stocks of reduced albums do suggest that while the reissue vinyl bubble isn’t exactly bursting, some labels are way over producing as well as over-pricing. Hurry while stocks gather dust!
And having checked out the current colour vinyl reissues from Universal (trending last week in Leeds according to Tim Summers who took the snap below), they appear to have used someone suffering from colour blindness to co-ordinate this, as all the copies I’ve seen are red despite the cover blurb. The utterly useless idiots have LEFT THE TORN PRICE STICKER ON MACHINE HEAD AGAIN.  EMI did this on their last reissue, having bought a copy of the album second hand but been too bone idle to digitally clean the sticker off.

Chas Hodges RIP

Another Deep Purple connection severed with the news of Chas Hodges’ death. It has been interesting to read the details of his long career, and let’s face it it’s hard not to have enjoyed some of his hits with Chas and Dave which always bring a smile when they’re on the radio, and made him a household name. In the early days of delving into Deep Purple’s history, discovering The Outlaws and tracking down their singles was mandatory, mainly to hear what the fledgling guitar work of Ritchie Blackmore was like rather than Chas’s bass playing I must confess (though he was apparently one of the first in the UK to own an electric bass).

It was always a red letter day when we found a new picture of the four piece for the collection (that’s Chas on the right in this vintage shot, and Gillan drummer to be Mick Underwood in front of course). The famous clip of him and the band in Live It Up is worth a look if you’ve not seen it, Chas on a twelve string.

https://binged.it/2QOPPOx

Chas would later join a more progressive rock / country outfit in 1970 called Heads Hands & Feet, who actually supported Deep Purple at some shows in the UK in early 1971. Roger wasn’t well one night, and Chas deputised as the show had already begun. He also turned up on that great all-star rock blues jam session Green Bullfrog the same year to cement his place in the Purple family tree.
The Guardian have done a good obituary and I can do worse than link to that.

Eighty minutes max.

Deep Purple‘s current American tour set list seems to have settled down. It’s always hard to rely 100% on initial reports as not everyone is familiar with the newer titles Stateside (one had them playing three Infinite tracks!) but the following seems to be what they’re doing:

Highway Star / Pictures of Home / Bloodsucker / Strange Kind of Woman / Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming (not played on the first night but added thereafter) / Uncommon Man / Lazy / Knocking at Your Back Door / Perfect Strangers / Space Truckin’ / Smoke on the Water. Hush (encore)

So five tracks off Machine Head and nothing off the current album. But this is what happened on their last U.S. trip, as they could feel the atmosphere dropped when they tried new stuff, so we should not be too surprised. European fans can feel a bit smug but it’s a bit of a shame for dedicated fans who do know the new stuff, maybe they ought to do a couple of advertised solo shows for them with the new material? The Deep Purple set is around 80 minutes, with support Judas Priest doing around 75 mins. There is an opening band, Temperance Movement. Dates are on our gig diary. Thanks to Tim Summers and others. Do let us know if you spot any changes. SR.

Make room…

It is the silly season after all. Since 2000, Machine Head (which is on my mind as I am working hard to wrap up the new book!) has been reissued on vinyl by Rhino, EMI, Back to Black, Universal and Warners, in a choice of clear, black or purple vinyl. And those are just the ones I know about.  So please forgive me if I can’t get too excited by this and the accompanying set of similarly coloured vinyl reissues of that part of the Deep Purple catalogue which Universal now control. And I own 25 copies of Machine Head, so must be their target market! What saner heads must think I can only guess.

Anyhow, if you missed them before, here’s your chance again.  Of course they’re remastered, although one suspects this just means a new master has been cut rather than anything more substantial (and I’m not certain remastering technology has developed that much in the three years since the last one!). And sure this work will have been done at Abbey Road, but only because that’s where the tapes are stored and copied. And yes they’re in a nice shade of purple, but then again so was the Machine Head reissue six years ago.  It is also limited, not really a big surprise as most reissue vinyl is these days. The sales people calculate the likely market and profit, an appropriate number are pressed, and then the run is closed.  It does seem to me major labels are quickly killing off this market; does the world need a reissue on vinyl of the first Now That’s What I Call Music LP?  Because there is one. I spotted it in Sainsbury’s last week.

Of course the set looks nice in the pack shot (let’s hope the sleeve scanner has remembered to remove the Record & Tape Exchange price stickers this time too!), but sadly they would just get squeezed onto our shelf, spine out. Maybe my £126 would be better spent on some more shelving.  

Any variations here? Well they’ve added the Mk 4 label to Last Concert, which also seems to have been pressed in black and purple vinyl (check the inner bag below where someone has forgotten the Photoshop mask)!  But you can pick up a nice original import press for only a few dollars more.  Or there is a very spiffing original first press minty looking copy of In Rock down at my local second hand shop. At least there is some history behind that.

Sunglasses after dark

For those with long memories, The Javelins release their long awaited (almost twenty five years!) follow-up / difficult second album in late August through Ear Music. This is another 16 track romp through the music of the Fifties and early Sixties. Once again it has been overseen by Steve Morris and features Don Airey guesting on piano. The band remain as they were in 1963: Ian Gillan; Gordon Fairminer (Lead Guitar); Tony Tacon (Rhythm Guitar); Tony Whitfield (Bass Guitar); Keith Roach (Drums).
It was cut in Germany at Chameleon Studios in Hamburg during March. CD and vinyl editions are due.
There is an official audio stream of the lead track Do You Live Me on YouTube:

The first album recorded in Liverpool was issued by RPM back in 1994…