Deep Purple

• 1. Introduction

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  Deep Purple formed in London in 1968 with a concept borrowed not from rock and roll but from a carnival ride. The original organiser, a former Searchers drummer named Chris Curtis, envisioned a revolving "supergroup" where musicians would rotate in and out like passengers on a roundabout. Curtis named the project Roundabout, pitched it to a London businessman named Tony Edwards, and then promptly flamed out on LSD before a single note was recorded. What emerged from that chaotic origin was something far more enduring than Curtis ever imagined.

  By 1972 the band was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the loudest band on the planet. They would go on to sell over 100 million records worldwide. They survived more than a dozen line-up changes, a disbandment, a decade-long split, and the deaths of two members. The questions worth asking are not just how they got so loud, but how a band that could barely agree on anything managed to produce some of rock music's most recognisable songs, reshape an entire genre, and still be recording new material more than fifty years after a drummer's grandmother's favourite tune gave them their name.

• 2. From Roundabout to Rock

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  Jon Lord was Chris Curtis's flatmate and the first person recruited to the Roundabout project. Lord had trained in classical music and played in jazz and blues ensembles, most notably with the Artwoods, a band led by Art Wood, the brother of future Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. Lord was performing in a backing band for a vocal group called The Flower Pot Men when Curtis came calling, and he brought with him two colleagues: bassist Nick Simper, who had survived the 1966 car crash that killed rocker Johnny Kidd, and drummer Carlo Little.

  Simper suggested a guitarist named Ritchie Blackmore, whom Lord had never met. Blackmore was in Hamburg at the time, building a name as a session guitarist and having already played with the Outlaws, Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, and Neil Christian and the Crusaders. HEC Enterprises, the management company behind the project, flew him in for an audition and then persuaded him to leave Germany for good. Blackmore kept Simper but replaced Little with Bobby Woodman, a drummer who had previously played in Vince Taylor's Play-Boys under the name Bobbie Clarke.

  The five men moved into Deeves Hall, a country house in South Mimms, Hertfordshire, in March 1968. The house was outfitted with Marshall amplification and, at Lord's insistence, a Hammond C3 organ. Dozens of singers were auditioned, including Rod Stewart, before the group settled on Rod Evans of a club band called the Maze. Tagging along with Evans was his band's eighteen-year-old drummer Ian Paice, whom Blackmore had noticed on tour in Germany two years earlier. Both Evans and Paice won their auditions, completing the founding line-up.

  The name change came during a brief Scandinavian tour in April 1968, when Blackmore suggested renaming the band after his grandmother's favourite song, "Deep Purple" by Peter DeRose. The group had pinned names to a board; second place went to "Concrete God", which they decided was too harsh. "Orpheus" and "Sugarlump" also got votes. Deep Purple it was.

• 3. The Mark I Sound and Its Limits

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  In May 1968, the band entered Pye Studios at Marble Arch in London to cut their debut album, Shades of Deep Purple. The record came out in America in July on Tetragrammaton Records and in Britain in September on EMI. Blackmore would later claim the group started out wanting to be a "Vanilla Fudge clone", and the influence was audible. A cover of Joe South's "Hush" gave them genuine chart traction in North America, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 2 in Canada, which pushed the album to No. 24 on Billboard's pop albums chart.

  Booked to support Cream on the US leg of the Goodbye tour, Deep Purple released a second album, The Book of Taliesyn, in North America in October 1968. It contained a cover of Neil Diamond's "Kentucky Woman" that cracked the Top 40 in both the US and Canada, though overall album sales were softer. Neither record made much impression at home in the UK. During that same American tour the band made appearances on Playboy After Dark and The Dating Game, the latter featuring Lord as an on-screen contestant.

  A third album, simply titled Deep Purple, was recorded by early 1969. Its track "April" featured strings and woodwind, reflecting Lord's classical influences including Bach and Rimsky-Korsakov. The album's North American label, Tetragrammaton, delayed its release, promoted it poorly, and then went out of business shortly after it appeared in late June 1969. The album finished well outside the Billboard Top 100. Tetragrammaton's assets eventually passed to Warner Bros. Records.

  During the 1969 American tour, Lord and Blackmore met with Paice to agree that Evans and Simper no longer fit the heavier direction they wanted to pursue. Paice later summarised the situation plainly: "A change had to come. If they hadn't left, the band would have totally disintegrated." Evans, Simper recalled, already had one foot out the door, his attention fixed on Hollywood and on becoming an actor. Simper and Evans went on to co-found the bands Warhorse and Captain Beyond respectively.

• 4. Machine Head and the Making of a Classic

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  The Mark II line-up's first public appearance as a fully formed unit was at Hanwell Community Centre in West London in the summer of 1969. Finding a vocalist had required navigating a tangle of contracts and loyalties: Blackmore's first choice was Terry Reid, but Reid was bound to producer Mickie Most and pursuing a solo career. The band turned to Ian Gillan from Episode Six. Gillan came with a condition: bassist Roger Glover had to join too. According to Nick Simper, "Gillan would join only with Roger Glover." Glover's inclusion effectively ended Episode Six, leaving the band's drummer Mick Underwood with a guilt that lingered for nearly a decade.

  The formal debut of Mark II came not with a hard rock record but with an orchestral collaboration. In September 1969, Lord's Concerto for Group and Orchestra was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Malcolm Arnold. Gillan and Blackmore both resented the band being branded as "a group who played with orchestras", but Lord recalled that at the end of the performance, the mood lifted: "you could have put the five smiles together and spanned the Thames."

  The album that defined what the band actually wanted to be arrived in 1970: Deep Purple in Rock reached No. 4 in the UK, and its non-album single "Black Night" hit No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart. Fireball followed in the summer of 1971 at No. 1. Then, in early December 1971, the band travelled to Montreux, Switzerland, intending to record at the casino there using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. A man fired a flare gun into the ceiling during a Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention concert. The casino burned down.

  The band ended up recording most of Machine Head in a corridor at the empty Grand Hotel de Territet. The music track for "Smoke on the Water" was captured at a vacant theatre called The Pavillon before police arrived and told them to stop. Blackmore later described the scene to BBC Radio 2: "The police were banging on the door. We knew it was the police, but we had such a good sound in this hall. We were waking up all the neighbours for about five miles in Montreux, because it was echo-ing through the mountains. I was just getting the last part of the riff down, we'd just finished it, when the police burst in and said 'you've got to stop'. We had the track down."

  Released in late March 1972, Machine Head reached No. 1 in the UK and No. 7 in the US. A Japan tour that August produced the double live album Made in Japan, originally intended as a Japan-only release, which quickly reached platinum status in five countries. A Rolling Stone readers' poll in 2012 ranked it the sixth best live album of all time.

• 5. Spin-offs, Splits, and Survivorship

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  Tensions inside Mark II ran high by 1973. The band was exhausted, management was pushing them to finish albums and tour without rest, and the friction between Gillan and Blackmore had become unsustainable. Gillan quit after their second Japan tour that summer; Glover was then dismissed at Blackmore's insistence. Lord later called it "the biggest shame in rock and roll; God knows what we would have done over the next three or four years. We were writing so well."

  New vocalist David Coverdale came from Saltburn in north-east England, chosen primarily because Blackmore liked his blues-tinged voice. Glenn Hughes, formerly of Trapeze, joined on bass and shared vocal duties. Paul Rodgers of Free had been the first choice for the vocal slot, but Rodgers had just started Bad Company. Rodgers recalled: "They did ask, and I spoke to all of them at length about the possibility. I didn't do it because I was very much into the idea of forming Bad Company."

  Mark III's debut, Burn, reached No. 3 in the UK and No. 9 in the US in early 1974. The California Jam festival that April, at Ontario Motor Speedway in southern California, drew over 300,000 fans. During the set Blackmore doused his amplifiers with petrol and set them on fire, blowing a hole in the stage. The second Mark III album, Stormbringer, brought in more funk and soul, which Blackmore publicly derided as "shoeshine music." In March 1975, after a show in Stuttgart-Boblingen, Blackmore told his bandmates in a room at the Arabella Hotel in Munich that he was quitting.

  Blackmore went on to form Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio of Elf. American guitarist Tommy Bolin replaced him. Bolin's drug addiction increasingly compromised his playing during the Come Taste the Band tour. The last show was on the 15th of March 1976 at the Liverpool Empire Theatre. Coverdale walked offstage in tears to hand in his resignation and was told there was no band left to resign from. On the 4th of December 1976, after a show in Miami supporting Jeff Beck, Bolin was found unconscious and could not be revived. He was 25 years old. The official cause of death was multiple-drug intoxication.

  After the split, a fraudulent touring version of Deep Purple surfaced in 1980, featuring Rod Evans as its only connection to the original band. The legitimate members sued and won; Evans was ordered to pay US$672,000 in damages for using the band name without permission.

• 6. The Long Road to the Hall of Fame

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  The Mark II reunion in April 1984 was the full classic line-up: Lord, Paice, Blackmore, Gillan, and Glover. The comeback album, Perfect Strangers, was recorded in Vermont and released in October 1984, reaching No. 5 in the UK and No. 17 in the US. The 1985 reunion tour out-grossed every other artist in the US except Bruce Springsteen. The UK homecoming headlined the 1985 Knebworth Fayre in June, where 80,000 fans stood in torrential rain and six inches of mud.

  The band's relationship with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame became a drawn-out saga that irritated fans, fellow musicians, and the band members themselves. Deep Purple had been eligible for nomination since 1993 but did not receive one until 2012. Despite finishing second in the public fan ballot, which drew over half a million votes, the committee did not induct them. Metallica's Lars Ulrich pleaded publicly in a 2014 Rolling Stone interview: "I'm not going to get into the politics or all that stuff, but I got two words to say: 'Deep Purple'. That's all I have to say: Deep Purple. Seriously, people, Deep Purple. Two simple words in the English language... 'Deep Purple'! Did I say that already?" Roger Glover reported that one juror had dismissed the band as "one-hit wonders."

  After three nominations in three years and a Rolling Stone readers' poll in April 2015 that put them at the top of the list of acts deserving induction, the Hall finally announced in December 2015 that Deep Purple would be part of the 2016 class. The Hall's statement said their absence had been "a gaping hole which must now be filled" and grouped them alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath as "the Holy Trinity of hard rock and metal bands."

  The induction ceremony took place on the 8th of April 2016. Jon Lord, who had died in London on the 16th of July 2012 at age 71, had his award accepted by his wife Vickie. Ritchie Blackmore did not attend, citing a message from the current band's management. Rod Evans, who had disappeared from the music scene for more than three decades, also did not appear. The five current members opened with "Highway Star", then played tribute to Lord with "Hush" and closed with "Smoke on the Water." Ian Paice remains the only member who has been present for every era of the band, and Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Drummers ranked him at number 21, with the magazine stating that without him "there would be no heavy metal drumming."

• 7. Staying Power

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  Steve Morse, who joined in August 1994 from Dixie Dregs and Kansas, stayed for twenty-eight years, making the Mark VIII line-up the longest-lasting in the band's history. He left in July 2022 to care for his wife after her cancer diagnosis. His replacement, Simon McBride, formerly of Sweet Savage, was made an official member that September.

  The breadth of the band's influence can be measured in the roster of artists who cite them directly: Iron Maiden's Steve Harris traced his band's heaviness to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Eddie Van Halen named "Burn" one of his favourite guitar riffs ever. Till Lindemann, vocalist of Rammstein, identified Stormbringer as the first record he ever owned. Metallica's Lars Ulrich called Made in Japan his all-time favourite album. Brian May described Blackmore as "a trail blazer and technically incredible - unpredictable in every possible way."

  In May 2019, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors gave the band the Ivor Novello Award for International Achievement. In a November 2025 interview with Uncut, Ian Gillan disclosed that he had only thirty percent vision left and opened up about the possibility of retiring: "I think if I lose my energy I'm going to stop. I don't want to be an embarrassment to anyone. We're not far off that." He later walked the comment back, saying the band had no immediate plans to stop.

  Their 24th studio album, Splat!, is scheduled for release on the 3rd of July 2026. During a Japan tour in April 2026, the band were received by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, herself a drummer and a fan of the band since childhood. Takaichi presented Ian Paice with a pair of Japanese-made drumsticks, telling him: "You are my god."