Deep Purple

The title and cover already say a lot about the content of this record. The artwork depicts a Mount Rushmore lookalike, where, carved into the stone instead of the faces of the four American presidents, are the heads of the (then) young musicians, complete with their long manes of hair. Definitely a statement of intent, because with this record Deep Purple decisively carve their name into the memory of countless rockers. Here the band pool all their musical knowledge (keyboardist Jon Lord and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore in particular boast a remarkable classical background) and hurl it headlong into their scorching amplifiers: the result is an authentically "stony" music, brash and aggressive in sound, majestic and thunderous, achieved by mixing blues roots with splashes of symphonic echoes. What's more, the band has recently been revamped: solid bassist Roger Glover and singer Ian Gillan have joined; the latter is an English lad with incredible gifts - a powerful, fresh voice, enviable range, as well as being a brilliant, theatrical performer. And it's also thanks to these two new additions that the group makes its fateful leap in quality.

The turntable's needle settles on the gleaming vinyl and after a few moments a deafening racket blasts out of the stereo speakers: guitars and keyboards "wail" in delirious chaos, then the sudden calm of a light organ, and finally it takes off at full speed: "Speed King" is one of those tracks that I believe best embodies the concept of "rock"; snappy and irreverent, it yanks the listener out of their chair and gifts them an invincible charge: flat-out from start to finish. Next comes the dirty, scorching blues of "Bloodsucker", with Blackmore and Lord's elegant solos intertwining: Deep Purple know how to "hit hard" like few others, but they always retain a remarkable taste for refined melody (and this, for this writer, is above all where their greatness lies). Side one closes with the hugely famous "Child In Time": a blues ballad in constant crescendo thanks to the vocal and instrumental progressions that made it famous, in which the band launches into long soloing sections; energy and wattage by the shovelful, but plenty of class too.

No sooner has the record been flipped over than it's off again with the simple, direct riff of "Flight Of The Rat", an airy, quintessentially hard rock track that gives every musician a chance to shine with consistently well-crafted solo passages. "Into The Fire" and "Living Wreck" are perhaps the less inspired tracks, but they slip by pleasantly enough. It all closes in grand style with "Hard Lovin' Man": a track with psychedelic leanings and decidedly experimental, yet played with prodigious fury, so much so that many 80s thrash-metal bands must have drawn more than a little inspiration from it.

In conclusion, this is a manifesto record for hard rock; perfectly balanced between raw sound and meticulously crafted arrangements, it is, for this writer, Deep Purple's masterpiece. Granted, here we don't find the more mystical experimentation of Led Zeppelin or the intriguing dark soul of early Black Sabbath; what we do find, however, is the pursuit of a music capable of making the toughness and fun of rock'n'roll coexist with the grandiloquence of classical music (so much so that part of the press at the time - this being 1970 - filed "Deep Purple In Rock" under the burgeoning progressive movement). A must-have.

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29/10/2006