Adelaide
Deep Purple
Adelaide Entertainment Centre
April 19, 1999.
Murray Bramwell

1968 was a very good year for big, loud bombastic British rock bands. And they came in a number of wanted colours. Pink Floyd, Moody Blue, Black Sabbath – and Deep Purple. Now celebrating thirty years in the biz and playing in Adelaide for the first time in fifteen, the prototype heavy music outfit delivers trademark hits to a crowd enthralled by these legends of riff and thump. The fans have come from all over. Young dudes born after the golden age of headbanging, old dudes in for some aural viagra, and there are wives, girlfriends, families, suburbanites, battlers -anyone who has ever heard and never quite forgotten Machine Head, Fireball and other Deep Purple classic vinyl.

Dating back to the days when bands were groups, the Deep Purple lineup is amazingly close to the Mt Rushmore cover of the 1970 album, In Rock. Ritche Blackmore has gone, banished back over the rainbow in the early 90s, but lead singer Ian Gillan, bassist Roger Glover, drummer Ian Paice and keyboard player Jon Lord are all still in the saddle. They’ve been in and out of many bands, including rival firm Black Sabbath, Whitesnake, and various solo ventures, but along with now-established regular Steve Morse on guitar, Deep Purple is back in the pink with an anniversary album, last year’s studio release, Abandon, and a whole lot of touring going on.

On stage at the Entertainment Centre the band opens as they intend to continue. Rapid fire guitar from Morse, Gillan’s high pitched grainy vocals, slabs of Hammond from Jon Lord and relentless thud from  Glover and Paice. Ted the Mechanic is the opener and the band clears the pipes. The baton changes from Morse to Lord and back to Gillan while the whole thing bounces on Glover’s bendy bass. They sound like the legion of garage bands they inspired when Deep Purple first invented this stuff, or rather, found a way of cranking it up to eleven.

The show is heavy on sound and light on trimmings. Gillan starts out in a military tunic with golden buttons and silk epaulettes but soon discards that for an XL t-shirt which makes him look like, what he is, a genial host at a barbie. Glover in headscarf, Paice in shades and headband and Morse in leather waistcoat are all telegraphing the same semiotic, things may change but heavy metal is immutable. Jon Lord in gunfighter black, his grey hair tied in a bob, wears lenses like two dark pennies. At nearly fifty eight he is chairman of the keyboard, producing riffs and fills that even Wagner would be ashamed of, but the punters love it.

They play some recent material – Almost Human and Watching the Sky but, inevitably, it is those songs, or shall we say, chord changes, that have been very good to them over the years, that everyone has come to hear. Strange Kind of Woman, Woman from Tokyo, a strobey version of Fireball and Lazy all hit the mark. Then the band goes off to have a cup of cocoa leaving Morse to play an extended demonstration of his effects pedals, a medley from Hendrix, Clapton and Page and, now that the old perps have waddled back onstage, segues into Smoke on the Water.

Perfect Strangers is in good form, with the most interesting lighting design in an otherwise unilluminating evening, but Speed King gets so much solo interruptus that you’ve almost forgotten where they came in. Sometimes the band, in showing they can do anything, make you wish they’d just do something.

The encores are full tilt though. Black Night is straight up rock. Jon Lord has finished doing the Sabre Dance and Fur Elise and various other Liberace show stoppers and the sound is solid and heart-stoppingly loud. So, after Highway Star, with the fans blissed out and the band having done an honest and entertaining night’s toil, it seems that, short of infarction or spontaneous combustion, there is nowhere else to go but home.

“Heads bang on heavy night out” The Australian, April 21, 1999, p.14.