slow start

Apologies for the slow start to DTB’s 2024…  Simon has been flat out supporting a book of bizarre album sleeves he’s curated; published late 2023 this generated so much publicity it was hard to keep up – you may have heard his dulcet tones on Radio 4, Radio 5 and Radio Market Harborough! (He’s even been doing illustrated talks too, the next one is in Huddersfield on April 26th at the literary festival.)  We will put a link at the end of this page if you want to see what it’s all about…

Anyway, to the t-shirt, which just came to my notice. A real piece of 80s nostalgia, sold at the 1983 Reading Festival when the Ian Gillan fronted Black Sabbath and Thin Lizzy ruled the event, though they look more like characters from The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers to us.  There is a growing market for retro rock shirts but not sure this one would drive bidders wild!

Moving quickly on, those of you in a post-turkey dinner daze watching The Great Pottery Throw Down can’t have failed to notice them using snippets of I’m So Glad and Hush; clearly someone in the production company is a fan reckons Steve Clare, though his bet that they will get on to the full MIJ Space Truckin’ by the final seems a bit of wishful thinking.  Meanwhile pirate comedy series ‘Our Flag Means Death’ has reappeared and series two finds Blackbeard quoting Whitesnake lyrics in the 4th episode. Treasurehunter? Don’t Break Me Hearties Again? The Deeparrrr the Love… 

On to Purple; lots of questions about the upcoming Machine Head 52nd (!) anniversary box set but hey, it’s not for us (nor apparently were Simon’s sleeve notes, scratched from the release!).  This is the fourth UK CD issue of the album, but beyond an audience recording of a live show (which will probably be dumped FOC on Spotify later) and a few tenuous guest remixes, there is Nothing New on it At All.  So unless you have a 5.1 audio system, £85 burning a hole in your pocket and can’t live without the atmos mix then I’m not sure what the point is.  When I feel the urge for a blast of the album, it is always Roger’s 25th anniversary remix, it really says it all. 

There are other archive items competing for your inflation raddled disposable income too.  First up is a reissue of David Coverdale‘s The Purple Album, which sort of begs the question how long does an album have to wait these days before it gets the multi track box treatment? The cover does NOT sport an “Eighth Anniversary” sticker!  Anyway, to lure DP collectors into HMV (if you can find the CD shelves hidden behind the Japanese soda cans and vinyl dolls in there any more), DC has added some home demos made during his time writing tracks for Stormbringer, plus the legendary Fabulosa Brothers 4 track demo which got him that first audition with DP. Tracks on that are Everybody’s Talkin’; Get Ready; Lonely Town, Lonely Street; and Dancing In The Street.  Not really sure this is the right place for material like that but there you go. If you were a fan of the 2015 album itself then you can look forward to the usual endless array of audio remixes, behind the scenes clips, promo videos and live tracks from the tour. There is a double album version on gold vinyl (the original peaked at 87 in the Billboard charts) and the bonus material comes on a multi disc set with a bluray.  Be sure to check as not all formats contain the extras.

Next up was an interesting Trapeze collection. The band have been poorly served by a mish-mash of live collections and studio reissues in recent years (topped by those needle drop Cherry Red horrors), but here comes a CD of tracks rescued by Tom Galley from Mel’s own archive which he asked him to curate. The press info surrounding it doesn’t exactly explain what’s what very well, but it does look to be out-takes from across their career, including finished tracks which were left in the can.  Some will feature Glenn and others date from after he departed to join Deep Purple.  It is marked up as Vol 1 which suggests more to follow.

Also worth a mention is a reworking of a song called Rose In Hell, originally released on the Moonstone Project album back in 2006. This new version features Ian Paice and Glenn Hughes, plus Adam Wakeman on hammond. Sounds like a potential supergroup in the making!  You can preview it here

The song will be on the third Turkish Delight album, on UK record label Escape. It will lead on to a reworking of Moonstone’s debut album, again with Ian Paice on board (using the very same cowbell he had in 1973 for the Burn sessions. That is the attention to detail you expect from Moonstone’s Matteo Filippini!).

Talking of Wakeman minor, he also stepped in on keys with Deep Purple when DP played a show in India on December 17th.  Don was taken poorly and had to pull out.  Still, be interesting to hear what he brought to the set.

Otherwise it’s now down to us all waiting for Purple’s next studio offering which apparently isn’t that far off.  Finally, those of you on the DTB emailing list will get book updates shortly!

Thanks to Michael Richards, Tim ‘the pirate’ Summers, Mark Maddock, Martin Ashberry and Matteo Filippini for help.

 The Art Of The Bizarre Vinyl Sleeve by Steve Goldman and Simon Robinson. If you’ve not seen what all the fuss is (banned by Instagram!) then zoom over to:

The Art Of The Bizarre Vinyl Sleeve

and of course there are two pages of Deep Purple related grot in there!

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.

Smoke stories

Some more new additions to our growing collection of stories with a Smoke On The Water theme on the site.  The store front in this photo is now thought to be a fake but several businesses in America have used the song title to front Cannabis businesses, and it has been used on some outlets, more are illustrated:  Smoke On The Water Stories page 4.  Do let us know of any more such links with the song you come across.

Santa back in lapland

It seems Simon forgot to post the answer to the Santa Quiz, and some people are getting restless!  So now Santa is back home we can put everyone out of suspense; the hotel is question is where most of Deep Purple stayed while they rehearsed for their late 1972 British Tour nearby, where rehearsals for Machine Head also began.  We have asked if they have any booking diaries (before souvenir hunters descend) but the current owners say sadly not.  Still if that isn’t worth a blue plaque, we don’t know what is!  Mind you Simon was talking to Hanwell last year about doing the same for their building, so watch these spaces. And feel free to prompt.

Original post.  The Machine Head book publisher’s site.

 

 

 

Montreux ceremony

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!

Drawing skills

The researchers for the upcoming Machine Head book have put a call out for a couple of items in case anyone in DTBland can help…

[1] Has anyone got a good clean scan of the album review from America’s Creem magazine in 1972? It most likely appeared in the May or June issue but might have slipped to Oct or Nov (they have checked other issues).

[2] In a similar search they are trying to source a good clean scan of the single review from the Australian music magazine Go-Set, printed in the Oct 6th 1973 issue. A contact there has kindly sent all the issues from microfilm but this page is too faded to use.

[3] Lastly (for now!) but perhaps most crucial has anyone got sufficient CAD skills to convert Simon’s rough sketch plan (and measurements – imperial!) of the Grand Hotel corridor studio circa 1971 into a presentable diagram? This can be a plan view or perhaps a 3D view like you sometimes see on those TV house alteration programmes. This is a for the love of it task but you would get a nice fat credit in the book.  Simon: “I am afraid I gave away my drawing board many years ago, my Rotring pens are all seized up, and attempts to do this in the Adobe software I use have been awful!”

C’mon, let’s go…

If Galaxy Quest is one of your rainy Sunday film treats, you may enjoy the trailer/s for a new 2017 US Sci-fi parody series called The Orville.  You may even recognise one of the Machine Head classics used as the music for the first one!  Thanks to Karl-Heinz Baier for the heads up. Will certainly be waiting for a DVD release (unless of course BBC2 could find a gap in between perpetual repeats of Dad’s Army to squeeze it in?).

office cock up 45 years ago?

I know it’s Monday morning, but can we try and solve a conundrum?  Put simply, has anyone out there got a genuine U.S. Warner Brothers white label promotional copy of Machine Head?  Working on the discography for the upcoming book on the album and talking to collectors like Pericle in Italy, nobody seems to have seen one.  We know W.Bros did white labels for all the other Deep Purple albums in the Seventies up to Burn (for the last two they used regular Burbank Tree labels and overprinted the promo text.). These have a white label with the regular text details in black and the wording “Promotional use Only”.

Often the front sleeve also has a large rectangular sticker across with the track information and times (to make life easier for DJs). So unless someone has a copy like this for Machine Head, then it does raise the possibility that somebody just forgot to order up a run in time, which is what Pericle, who has been on the lookout for a copy for ages, thinks might explain the mystery. As he says, the only U.S. promo copies of Machine Head which turn up are the regular U.S. green label pressing but with a largish pink and black circular promo sticker on the back sleeve.  We do run a risk that by mentioning it here, if a few copies do exist they will suddenly climb in value, but Pericle reckons it’s a risk worth taking to get to the bottom of the mystery!

Below is a white label Warners did for Concerto when they took the release over. The Machine Head one would be similar. And possibly ever rarer!

Nouvelle Review

There is something fascinating about old newspaper archives and seeing how people got the news about important events. One of the avenues of research for the upcoming Machine Head book has been to see how they covered to story in the country, and this front page is from the Nouvelle Review. As this did not have a Sunday edition, the story is from the Monday after the fire (which happened 44 years ago today) and clearly it is still big news.  But not too big to squeeze some of the weekend sports stories off the front page! (And a reminder too of issues closer to home, with a brief report of an explosion in a Belfast restaurant as events there began to worsen.)  Coverage of the fire and the aftermath continued across page two and as late as May the following year the debate was still going on, and journalists were trying to get to the truth behind many of the rumours about the causes of the fire.  Read more about the book on the publisher’s sitehe

Up in Smoke

Work on the Machine Head book is proceeding, with Stephen corresponding with Jean Paul, who was at the Casino event the night the place went up.  And he clearly wasn’t afraid to get stuck in either.  This amazing photo we’ve seen before on this site, but we now know that is Jean himself on the right with Claude Nobs desperately trying to get one of the hoses round to tackle part of the blaze.  Jean was one of Claude’s best friends, and has been able to help us fill in some of his early career and  explain how the whole Montreux Super Pop and Jazz festival events came about.
During work on the book we’ve also found pictures of the blaze inside the casino roof which kicked the whole saga off (though you do wonder who would stop inside the hall to take such a picture…!), and a bewildered security guy on the stage with a megaphone trying to get people to take it seriously and leave.  The more I see of the event the more I’m amazed everyone got out safely.  Claude by the way reckoned the band only finished Smoke off for him as a thank-you tape given at a party before they left, and hadn’t intended it for the album….  We’re still trying to get the chronology sorted as photographer Didi Zill now thinks he snapped Ian writing the lyrics only a couple of days after the fire. As ever any info on the scene or events welcome!