HMV have issued a number of special edition vinyl represses this year again (you may recall the marble vinyl In Rock from last time) to mark the BBC supported National Album Day. The one which may be of interest is a coloured vinyl issue of Rainbow Rising in their shops now (not online). My thanks to Russ Berger for the heads up via Mark Maddock.
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
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.
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.
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.
Montreux 4th July 2018 – Plaque Unveiling Ceremony at the Former Grand Hotel.
Tim Summers has managed to pen us a few words about the event itself, for more see the two posts below…
With the proceedings due to kick off at 11 am, we hopped off the train at Territet with about 25 minutes to go and strolled across the street to the building itself. We struggled to recognise it at first due to it being covered in scaffolding; one reason for having the plaque located round at the unobstructed rear entrance – actually this made sense as this was where the mobile studio was parked – and it meant that we could hear the speeches (and not get run over!) shielded from the relatively busy road to the front.
As we arrived tables of food and drinks were being set up opposite the rear entrance, and a copy of Machine Head stood on a podium to the side, with a picture of the mobile studio parked there some 40-odd years previously on the wall at the other side. The good folk of Montreux made us feel very welcome, and we chatted with just the occasional craning of the neck to peer down the road to see if there was any sign of any Purple people arriving. Roger had promised to attend together with “whoever else he could drag along”. As 11 am approached, a sleek looking people carrier was sighted at the bottom of the slope; it drove up to the car park barrier and the doors opened – Roger was first out, followed by Ian Gillan and Paicey. They ambled up the road in the style of a royal walkabout, stopping to shake hands and chat with people in the assembled throng (of probably around 100 people).
Once at the top they went inside the foyer (which was open) and we followed them in – it was kind of awe-inspiring to be in such an historically significant building. They were happy to chat, pose for photos and sign anything thrust in front of them, and after a little while we ventured back out into the sunshine for the unveiling. There were speeches, including one from Paicey, who said that this was the first time he’d been back to the building since he finished work on the Machine Head album. He actually explained in terms I could understand the necessity of all that climbing out of windows/across balconies business too.
The plaque is a nice thing – not the sort of blue metal affair I was imagining, but rather a laser-etched glass creation, with a (surprisingly effective) button to back-illuminate it on command. As well as including a contemporary picture of the band from the time of recording the album, the plaque details the significance of the album and building too. I spoke to its Italian creator, and he said that he wanted to make something special for a band as important as Deep Purple.
Montreux itself is quite an amazing place, and it really comes alive for the annual music festival. Later in the day Roger did a sort of Q&A about the significance of it all, the fire and the recording of the album, and we spotted him again later just walking down the street (probably returning from the soundcheck for that night’s gig). Paicey summed up the sort of intertwined nature of the band and place in his closing remarks about the recording of Machine Head here: “Looking back on our career, probably one of the the most important 3 weeks of our lives”. –Tim Summers (thanks to Keith Sharp and Ian Edwards for the photographs).
Below, Keith’s picture of the plaque in situ. The text is a bit clunky but you should have seen it before we re-wrote it! It was supposed to have the album title and name off the sleeve too, not sure where those went… But a very swish item which does the band proud.
Couple of photographs from the July 4th Montreux event, kindly sent by Claude’s friend Jean Paul. Jean worked with Claude during the Machine Head sessions, and is on the right in the photo with Roger.
The photo below is from outside the former hotel foyer, and shows Gillan and Glover busy signing sleeves. Yvon Welt on the right of this photo has been instrumental in helping get the plaque put up, which you can see on the wall behind Ian. From today anyone visiting can at least be sure they are at the right building and the ceremony got lots of coverage in the Swiss press and further afield. More information to follow!
Deep Purple have announced another batch of concerts. They are kicking off in the third week of August in the USA, Cincinnati on the 21st and running right through to the very end of September. Tickets are on sale from today. The band then head over to Japan for five shows. Nothing listed for Tokyo yet but there is some leeway for them to add a show there. In total this means the group are doing around 50 shows in the year, which does suggest they are easing off the workload a little.
The American shows are in partnership with Judas Priest.
The diary page (see menu on right) is now updated, and our thanks to Lutz Reinart, Greg Tarlinton and Tom Dixon for the extra information.
Deep Purple return to play the Montreux Jazz Festival again this year, and appear on July 4th. They are headlining the Stravinski Auditorium (with support band). They last played here in 2016. My thanks to Lutz, Tom, Bo, Denis and everyone who sent me the update this week! Below, nice snap of fans waiting for an earlier show there, by Tiny Rager. One of those barriers would look good across the drive…
It looks like Glenn Hughes is preparing to do some of his Deep Purple tribute shows in the UK at last. The set is part of the Steelhouse Festival (in Ebbw Vale) in July. It’s a three-dayer, and Glenn is headlining on the Saturday night (28th July). We would imagine the other shows will be fitted in around this time, and look forward to catching one of these.
Touchingly the festival promoters have spoken about their first sight of the original band being via the California Jam video – on Betamax! “When we were growing up in Ebbw Vale, absorbing all the rock music we could, listening to records handed down by older siblings and saving up our own pennies for a Saturday afternoon binge at the local ‘Record Centre’, a game-changing piece of hi-tech entertainment hardware started to appear in houses all across the land – the video recorder had arrived and brought with it the possibility of seeing our heroes in glorious moving technicolour as well as hearing them. Our local video rental outlet had a copy of Deep Purple’s filmed appearance at Cal-Jam, 1974, a live concert so legendary and so exotic that it may as well have taken place on Mars. It proved to be a more popular rental in Ebbw Vale than ‘Friday the 13th’, ‘Any Which Way But Loose’ and ‘Jaws’…!”
Thanks to Tim Summers, Chris Hewlett
 | simon robinson on In Concert |
| simon robinson on Rock and candy |
| simon robinson on C5 show not about bargain… |
| simon robinson on C5 show not about bargain… |
| simon robinson on Ian Paice home visit |
Darker Than Blue RSS
darker than blue 