Deep Purple. Two words that mean so much to so many. It’s been 13 years since DP—the DP, Gillan, Glover, Paice, Lord and Blackmore; Evans, Simper, Hughes, Bolin and Coverdale were mere historical twitches in the great cosmic scheme of things—fell apart. But even now, little kids who’ve lived less years on earth than Purple have put out albums have copied Blackmore’s guitar style, copped their parents’ albums, voted them Best Everything in readers’ polls and panted, prayed, beat their breasts for a reunion— we’re talking serious stuff here. Deep Purple are bigger than you, me, Dee Snider standing on Gene Simmons’s shoulders, a time, a place, themselves even; they’re part, no less, of the genetic make-up of western civilization; the

loudest band in the world according to Guiness, the most brilliant according to many sane people who were around in the heyday (Hey, they did have their moments! Some of the best cover songs of all time, plus Deep Purple In Rock, plus Machine Head, glorious! Though, I confess I’d tend to give that award to Zeppelin for emphasizing sex over splendid ostentation; DP’s was music that melted in your brain, not in your glands...) and they're back! Eternity does exist after all! Deep Purple are back up there with the gods, in that hallowed league of musical superduperness!

OK. I cannot lie. They’re actually down there in New Zealand, playing the first date of a reunion tour that will bring them your way early this year. They’ve just released an album, still in the mixing stages when I heard it, but the tracks I heard (the title one, “Perfect Strangers” is a classic) are fine indeed, taking up where the Mark Two Deep Purple left off in 74, a heavy foundation with majestically soaring arches, you remember the stuff.

“We all came in at different times,” Jon Lord, keyboard player, tells the table. “Paicey and I walked in—we’d booked a conference room in Greenwich, Connecticut overlooking the harbor and it was all nice. I was nervous, nervous as a kitten. And then Ian Gillan came in, whom I’d seen recently before that. Roger came in, whom I’d seen about two months before. And who was last? Yes, the man in black! And I hadn’t seen him for ten years—only onstage; I’d been to a Rainbow show but I didn’t go backstage afterwards, I don’t know why. And I was so pleased to see him. And when he walked into that room and suddenly these five people were together for the first time in 10 years, together, everyone just started smiling. And I think it was Ritchie who said, ‘Right then, let’s do it.’ ”

“About three or four years ago I said to Ian Gillan, ‘Let’s get together’—I think it was Christmas or the day after—and he said, ‘I can’t.’ We got drunk together and left it at that. I think I got Graham Bonnet in Rainbow at that point, and he did his thing. And now he’s gone away from his solo venture, I’m tired of my solo ventures, I just want to be part of a band.

For years there’s rumors—Rod Evans’s fake Purple getting cease-anddesisted, tales of Blackmore being sick of Rainbow, David Coverdale being sick of Jon Lord, all of them sick of never doing so well with their own bands as they had with Deep Purple, reports that they’d been offered two million apiece just for one-off tour—all of them denied over and over again. Then Ritchie Blackmore says “Let’s do it,” and that’s it, they’re doing it. Why now?

“I don’t know,” says the man in black, giving one of the enigmatic smiles that have made him and Mona Lisa very famous. “I could be very arrogant and say that we wanted to create another milestone in the history of rock! Or number two, we just put it back together again to annoy the press, basically. Give them something to bitch about. That really is our number one priority, to upset the critics.” (My number one priority, incidentally, was talking to Mr. B.—for Jon Lord, you’ll have to look to the second half of this opus, as we didn’t get to talk at length until the following night). “I held out sometimes because I was having a good time with Rainbow. But every now and again I’d go ‘Let’s do it,’ and when I did somebody else would be held up doing something else.” Jon Lord, who’d formed Ashton, Paice and Lord when Purple finally disbanded, was most recently in Whitesnake; Ian Paice was playing in Gary Moore’s band; Roger Glover was in Ritchie’s Rainbow having done session work with everyone from Judas Priest to Barbi Benton; and Ian Gillan had left his own band to sing with Black Sabbath.

“I’m immensely proud of this album. It might well turn out to be the best Deep Purple album to date.” -Jon Lord

“I think I will always be cynical to the end, and a loner, and I enjoy my solitude; but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be part of a band as a unit. I like to be alone. Where a lot of people think of that as, ‘well he’s obviously pissed off at something, he’s gone off in a corner and he’s brooding.’ I just like to be alone. No matter who I was with. My mother knows that very well.”

Does she know anything about rumors that they were offered two million apiece to reform? “I thought that might come up! I’d heard that too. It’s not true as far as I know, but someone might be keeping it from me. Somebody might be having four and I’m not having bugger all!” Or the rumors that he’s taken over the band, sent them off to health farms to shape up so it wouldn’t degenerate into a ‘Spinal Tap’ affair?

“When I first got back together with the rest of the lads, I knew the music would always be there, but there were obviously a few things that had to be slightly changed or changed dramatically. It was, well lads, if we’re going to get back together we can’t all turn out like five old men, we have to get down and discipline ourselves a little bit. ‘Discipline’ is the important word, I think. I like to lead a semidisciplined life. Rock ’n’ roll is not wining and dining and drinking. You can’t go onstage looking like a fat elephant—or you can; Leslie West has proved that.”

Although Blackmore’s in the unique position of being the only DP member leading his own band immediately before the reunion—Blackmore’s Rainbow as opposed to Glover’s, or Lord’s Whitesnake for example—he’s no more an equal partner than the others, he says. “Everybody is as important as he next person; five very strong musicians. I write the foundation of a song and the construction and the riffs, Roger will put in some of the refinements, some of the lyrics, and he’s very important on the production side.” He produced the reunion album, for chrissakes. “That’s far too tedious for me, I can’t stand pushing phasers for 16 hours a day.”

In the old days, five people used to get credited for one song, but “that’s changed. Writing-wise it’s always been basically, three people and it’s still those same three people. Writing credits are very difficult; everybody wants to be a writer. Sometimes someone might think they’ve written something just by turning up to a rehearsal of that particular song. The music is what really counts.”

Did it have to be this particular line-up? “Yes. Because in my book the most creative we ever were, the most identity we ever established, was with this exact line-up. Obviously it could have been any line-up because they would have all been there quick enough, no matter what they say. But it was established years ago that this had to be it. There is an identity that this Purple has that I didn’t find with all the other members of Rainbow. I left Deep Purple because I thought I wanted to go a different way, I wanted to experiment with all different musicians and do a similar type of music because I thought the band in general was becoming lazy at the time—in ’74 they were creeping and experimented with my own stuff, but after seven or eight years of doing that I’ve got it out of my system. And I think they’ve done the same thing. There’s still a great, I won’t say spark, because it’s a great flame within the Purple line-up that we have. There is a chemistry within these five people, some sort of rhythm; if’s a pulse; and it does work.”

So how come it didn’t before? Why were they all at each other’s throats back then, and why’s it different now?

“I suppose we’re more sensible. Because we’re all older—contrary to what the press may say, we’re actually older! And we haven’t mellowed at all, it’s funny, but I’ll listen more to the next person and I think they might listen more to me, being Weird Ritchie, will say, ‘I think I will be more tolerant of people.’ because I was very intolerant way back, incredibly angry, and I would take it out on whoever was around me. And that didn’t help when you’re in a band and trying to work as a team.”

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Was he positive or wary when they got back together? “A bit of both. There were days when I was very wary and I said no, this is not going to work. And there were other days, once we actually started playing, then I knew it was going to work. Before that I wasn’t quite sure, as I hadn’t heard them for so long.”

He didn’t keep up with what the other exDP-ers were doing at all, he swears. “I never heard one thing Ian did with Black Sabbath,” though he did tune in accidentally to a French radio station that was playing Gillan’s solo stuff one day “and it sounded very good.” He heard a couple of Whitesnake tracks, but that’s it, "I just wasn’t interested. I was into medieval music, I wasn’t really into rock ’n’ roll. I love to play rock ’n’ roll, but the only bands I ever listened to were Ozzy Osbourne—he was good—and Ronnie Dio’s band. I just listen to classical. I had no idea what they were going to be like; I kept my fingers crossed. We were taking a chance—I hadn’t spoken to them for so long they could have been into drugs really heavily, anything could happen. But it didn’t. It all worked out really well, so far.”

Has he ever woken up in a sweat thinking Jesus, I’ve done my best to be a good guitar player all my life, and they just want me to fall back on Deep Purple?

“I’m the type of person—I’m too angry, too critical of myself ever to fall back on something. There are some nights I do that onstage— when I’m playing France usually!—but no. I felt there were so many people who respected what I did with Rainbow.”

So what does he most expect to get out of being back in Purple? “It would be a thrill to have it accepted without all the bullshit of They’re too old,’ old news. My favorite artist is Bach, who’s 300 years old. Music and women should never be dated.”

HERE IT IS, all you organ aficionados who’ve been flitting through the pages. THE JON LORD BIT. Lord’s every bit the “gentleman, such a nice guy” that old sparring partner Blackmore describes, enthusiastic about the album, the tour, the reunion in general. When I asked him what he wanted to get out of being back in DP he said, “immediate satisfaction and possibly a brilliant way of finishing my career as a rock musician.” Finishing? If DP doesn’t work out, that’s it? “I think so. I’ve discovered that being out of Deep Purple is not as much fun as being in it, so that’s why I’m convinced this is not going to falter after a year.” They’ve actually signed a multi-album deal. “But if it did, I don’t really think I’d have the motivation to do anything else. Therefore I’ve got to work at it. Because I’ve found that all I really want to do in life is play the kind of organ and keyboards that I’m allowed to play, I can play, in Deep Purple; and other bands for me just don’t make it.

"With the benefit of time, I think we know why the fighting started” that broke them up, he says. “And it was induced by just too much work. We were worked out of our brains, used as a license to print money by some people, although we were initially willing victims, obviously. But we should have put our collective foots down to stop the bandwagon. In ’72, we spent 43,44 weeks on the road in America alone, and we certainly won't get through the whole thing without any arguments—I’d be almost disappointed if we did; we're five individual people with very strong personal ideas, so there’s going to be tension. But I’m not too worried. See, the whole reason for us getting back together again is a desire to do it, and so having accepted that basic standpoint it would be stupid of us to start rocking the boat by coming on at each other like gangbusters.

When you read reports of the pitch battles in the old Purple, you have to wonder why they want to risk going throught it again. Lord and Blackmore, for example, were supposed to have hated each other’s guts.

“No, we never hated. But we were never close friends, never will be—we’re chalk and cheese. But I like him a lot, and I think he likes me enough to tolerate me, and we started the damn band all those years ago so we’ve got something in common. Ours has always been a slightly uneasy relationship; the things I like are a lot different to what Ritchie likes—not necessarily music, but the way I live my life is totally different from the way Ritchie does. We did go head-to-head a couple of times, no fisticuffs but lousy, rotten arguments. But I was talking to Ritchie last night about it; I see absolutely no reason why we should ever be like that again. The passages of time does help, you know, in getting rid of those, because you can look back and see the larger scale of things, you’re not deep inside it anymore.”

The reformed Deep Purple is a “real band,” a pretty longterm band (“I see no reason why it shouldn’t do three or four albums and three or four tours minimum”) and not a nostalgia band, Jon emphasizes. "It’s not a nostalgia trip, it's five guys who used to play together, who still enjoy playing together, and wanting to play together again. If that’s the definition of nostalgia then I’m all for it! We’re not living in the past. We’ve learned from the past, and what we’ve learned we’ll use in the present. I understand why people say that, but I don’t think they’ve thought it through. I would hope they give us the benefit of the doubt by listening to it rather than damning it out of hand. One thing I read was 'I see Deep Purple have finally made up their minds to get back together, hohum.’ Someone else said ‘They must have finally run out of money’—that’s an obvious one. OK, have the digs, this band is big enough to take it. But I’m immensely proud of this album. In my book, it might well turn out to be the best Deep Purple album ever.” ^