Here’s a very interesting and early interview with Roger Glover. It turns out they struggled with the same thing that we do today; the audience only wants to hear the oldest songs! It’s good that they eventually compiled many older songs over time. Roger talks about a possible career as a producer and that due to health challenges, he expected to have to throw in the towel as a touring musician in not many years. Well, we know how that turned out. I had to laugh a bit when I read that, but I’m happy for Roger. This and much more interesting stuff I hope will be discussed vigorously on the best website for fans of Deep Purple: https://www.thehighwaystar.com/
Read on!
Deep Purple celebrate year in LP chart
By Richard Green
“I`m very proud of `In Rock.` We knew it was going to sell because we`d done six months of concerts and we knew it would do well, but no one expected it to last this long.” The “this long” that Deep Purple`s bass guitarist, Roger Glover, refers to is the one year in the NME album chart that the phenomenal record has notched up this week. Still selling very strongly, “In Rock” has notched up British sales of close on 150,000 and has appeared in multitudinous other charts right round the world. For Deep Purple, it was, as other members of the group have explained in earlier interviews with me, a turning point for Deep Purple. “Nine months after it came out I was still playing it, but it`s beginning to wear off a bit now,” Roger added. “I`ve got the tapes of the new one now so I`m playing that. I don`t play the early ones because we`re more professional and it`s not worth listening to them. “The most important thing about the new one is to get it finished for America because we`re going there in July. It`s called `Fireball` and will be out in July, or August at the latest. The British one will be better because we`re putting `Strange Kind Of Woman` on the American one and there`ll be a completely new one on the British album. “We tried playing a little bit of it at the Roundhouse at the Camden Festival. We tried doing `Into The Fire` before `In Rock` was released and it didn`t go down that well. We did ‘No One Came’ at Camden and that didn’t go down well either because it didn’t have that magic, people weren’t used to it. They want to hear the old numbers.
“We have been criticised for not changing the stage act but people don’t want us to change. It’s a bit frustrating because you get very stale playing the same numbers. Another frustrating thing is you don’t get time to rehearse, we haven’t rehearsed since January — you come back from a tour and the last thing you want to do is rehearse.”
Roger was feeling very tired when he arrived to meet me. He had been in the recording studio working on the last track of ‘Fireball’ until six that morning and we had put our interview back by two-and-a-half hours in order that he could get more sleep.
At the best of times he isn’t the fittest of people and he finds that the rigours of touring are taking their toll health-wise. He has been doing a spot of producing lately, but there aren’t many blank days on the date sheet.
No time
“There isn’t time to do anything else but play with Deep Purple, it’s telling on all of us, on me in particular,” Roger pointed out. “We’re getting to the stage, once we’ve broken America, of taking things easier. There’s no point in killing yourself off, we could get to the stage where we can turn down work.”
Roger is very keen on producing and has been in the studio with a duo known as MacIver Hine. Two young men — Rupert Hine and David MacIver — are completing an album under Roger’s supervision for the forthcoming Purple Records company.
“Rupert sings and plays a bit of guitar and David writes the lyrics and plays a very nice guitar, beautiful slow picking things,” said Roger with enthusiasm. “Paul Buckmaster is doing the arrangements.
“I’ve known Rupert for six years and a year ago he and David were writing together but purely for amusement. I gave them advice because they were very introvert and consequently the songs tended to be very melodramatic or meandering.
“Two months later, I heard them again and they knocked me backwards. Their music is pretty indefinable… funky… I’m trying to get that slow Atlantic feel, a bit like Van Morrison. It’s unified enough to make a good album.
“Producing is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Producing is the next thing to being a musician for me. I’ve been pretty ill and I can’t see me lasting on the road for, at a conservative estimate, more than another three years, so obviously I must look to the future.
“It’s such a difference being a producer to being a musician. When you get people you know and respect coming up and asking you for advice it’s quite a mind-blower. I shan’t be a producer from now on, though, it’s just a one-off thing. But it stands you in good stead for the future.”
Though there is scarcely enough time to breathe, Roger would like to see Deep Purple in the recording studio.
“Our present average is one album and two singles a year, it could be two albums and three singles a year,” he revealed. “I think we should record more. One big criticism I’ve got of the group is that we should put more product, more good product, on the market.”
Maybe Deep Purple don’t spend as much time as Roger would find desirable in the studio, but plenty of other people are only too keen to record them. With the dexterity of a member of the Magic Circle, I transformed my vodka and lemonade into a copy of “H Bomb,” the Purple bootleg which is selling strongly both here and on the Continent.
Roger took hold of it, looked at the cover and the inside labels which didn’t list the tracks and exclaimed: “I view bootlegs with mild amusement. It’s nice to be considered of the calibre where people will take the trouble to do it and I like to find out how much they make out of it and how it’s turned out. I don’t mind it that much.
“If you’re going to be part of society you have to play to its rules, that’s just not what’s happening and the reason I’m against it. I bought a Deep Purple bootleg in Germany and it cost me a fiver, so they’re making money out of me.
“You can stop the big time operators because they have to have huge pressing plants and distributors and you can get an injunction, but you can’t stop the small operators. I heard a Led Zeppelin bootleg that was so bad it cheered me up, I realised other groups have their off nights as well!”
He put the album on the turntable and the unmistakable strains of “Black Knight” reached our shell-like ears.
“It’s a bit fast,” Roger mused. “You see, on stage you tend to do things a bit faster than for a record, the occasion tends to excite you a little. This is the old arrangement, we don’t do it any more. This was probably recorded in Aachen last March or April at an open-air concert. Actually, for a bootleg it’s not bad quality, there’s reasonable balance.”
Little Ian’s drum solo on “Paint It Black” blasted out of the speakers and Roger listened to it intently for a while, making the odd comment about recording quality and Ian’s stamina. We joked about the comparison between the bootleg and “Fireball” and mention of the latter brought the subject back to the States.
“We just don’t mean that much in America, that’s why we’ve got to go over there,” Roger explained. “‘Hush’ was probably just luck, it was a new record company and there was a big push. Apart from selling a few records it didn’t do the group a lot of good at all.
“A hit single there brands you as a teenybopper group and what they got was a hairy group. If we can do America we’ve done the world practically.”
World travellers that they are, Deep Purple come up against it now and then, and Roger told me what happened during a recent Continental tour. It was enough to put anyone off the idea of joining a group.
“We did two weeks in Germany, four dates in Italy and one in Zurich,” he recalled. “While we were in Rome one of our roadies’ father’s died so we flew him home and that left one for the gear and one for us. After Italy we flew to Zurich but the big ends went on the lorry carrying the gear and the roadie was stuck in a village with very little money and not one solitary person spoke English.
“He phoned all the lorry rental firms but they put the phone down because he didn’t speak Italian. He got through to the Zurich Hilton but couldn’t reach us and we found out we didn’t have the gear on the day of the concert.
“We tried every avenue of getting the gear there but everything was closed. Eventually we got the small amps and guitars on an executive jet and borrowed the rest to go on stage for seven thousand people.
“It was awful and we said ‘In future — no gear – no gig.’ A week later, we did a gig in Luxembourg and the roadies got picked up in Italy where they were arrested for being suspected of causing an accident. There was a 12-hour delay and they couldn’t get to the gig in time so Deep Purple hired a plane for £1,200 to fly the gear from Milan — that was just a personal expense.
Breakdowns
“It was a good gig but, talk about nervous breakdowns… we can give you a few. In Berlin, one of our roadies, Ron, was changing a fuse and got an electric shock and nearly died, he was in a really bad state.”
Having suitably depressed himself, Roger had another Scotch and Coke, to help feel a bit better and I asked if, all the problems apart, he was basically pleased with the way his career was progressing.
“Yes, on the whole, I am,” he replied with the glimmer of a smile. “Before I joined the band I was studying interior design but I didn’t really enjoy it and I became a very unsuccessful musician for a very long time, it’s only been the last few years that’s turned me on.
“I’ve never regretted what I’ve done… you only really look back on the good times. I think any faith Deep Purple had in me was blind faith and I’m very grateful to them for what they’ve done for me.”
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