Latest Release
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- 19 JUL 2024
- 13 Songs
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Essential Albums
- Released in 1972, Deep Purple’s Machine Head launched “Smoke on the Water”—and, in doing so, helped create the blueprint for early heavy metal. The song echoes the British blues of Cream and Jimi Hendrix that Deep Purple grew out of, but also reflects hard rock’s turn toward slower tempos and more brutish deliveries. The lyrcs—inspired by the band’s witness to a casino fire in Montreux, Switzerland—are as repertorial as classic folk, and the harmonies are straight-up psychedelia. And where Led Zeppelin injected blues with elements of fantasy, and Black Sabbath made it sound doomy and occult, “Smoke on the Water” plays it with a sense of historical continuity—the next step in an intergenerational relay race. The members of Deep Purple didn’t want to reinvent the wheel; they just wanted to soup up the engine. It’d be easier to call “Smoke” singular if the rest of Machine Head didn’t follow in step. By the early 1970s, the band had managed to massage their more long-winded pretenses—see the truth-in-advertising of 1969’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra—into a sound that was classic and meaty, but just elevated enough to feel sharp. Deep Purple could make rippers that quoted Bach (“Highway Star”), and could get proggy without sacrificing a good riff or two (“Space Truckin’”). This was a band that never let their own artistic curiosities get in their way of being performers—an old-fashioned attitude that took a back seat as the excesses of the 1970s ballooned. Machine Head was recorded at Montreux’s Grand Hotel, where the group members played in a corridor off the lobby with a recording van parked outside the main entrance. The walk from their performance area to the van was so long—on account of having to detour around the equipment and sound-insulation material—that the bandmates eventually gave up listening to playback of the recordings, and just judged their takes by the raw performance. And if that isn’t a lean and mean recording method, then what is?
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Artist Playlists
- This mighty group are as heavy and rocking as Stonehenge.
Singles & EPs
About Deep Purple
Deep Purple emerged from the psychedelic ’60s to help build the hard-rock temple from the ground up, paving the way for heavy metal in the process. They formed in Hertfordshire in 1968, with a style far removed from the sound that would make them famous. Guitar hero Ritchie Blackmore, keyboardist Jon Lord, singer Rod Evans, bassist Nick Simper and drummer Ian Paice crafted a heady psych sound with proto-prog touches on their 1968 debut album, Shades of Deep Purple, and the two LPs that followed, scoring a big U.S. hit with a cover of the Joe South-penned “Hush”. But 1970 brought fateful changes. Ian Gillan and Roger Glover replaced Evans and Simper, respectively, and Deep Purple moved toward streamlined hard rock showcasing Gillan’s wailing vocals, Blackmore’s indelible riffs and Lord’s roiling, distorted organ tones. Over the next few years, they turned out milestones such as “Black Knight”, “Woman from Tokyo”, “Highway Star” and, most famously, every guitar student’s first riff, “Smoke On the Water”—classic-rock staples that would ensure the band’s immortality and inspire generations of musicians. Defections in the mid ’70s brought new vocalist (and future Whitesnake singer) David Coverdale, bassist Glenn Hughes, guitarist Tommy Bolin and a bluesier feel before the band split in ’76. A reunion of the classic lineup created a Purple renaissance in 1984 with the Perfect Strangers album and remained mostly intact through the early ’90s. Dixie Dregs guitarist Steve Morse became a mainstay after Blackmore’s next departure, and Lord’s 2012 passing brought Don Airey aboard, the band chugging on into the 2020s still full of fire.
- ORIGIN
- Hertford, England
- FORMED
- 1968
- GENRE
- Hard Rock