Deep Purple

A bit of history

How turbulent the story of the Deep Purple saga has been is well known, so much so that the band itself came to label the phases of its career and its lineup changes with “Marks”. The one that endures in collective memory as the historic lineup is known as Mark II, and it's the lineup behind the albums that world critics have judged to be masterpieces: “In Rock” (1970), “Machine Head” (1972) and the celebrated “Made In Japan” (also from 1972), universally considered one of the most significant live albums of all time.

A band that had actually started out in 1968 with rather well-mannered intentions, with “Shades Of Deep Purple” and “Book Of Taliesyn” embracing a fundamentally melodic repertoire — certainly with nods to blues, but also with an evident interest in what the Beach Boys, the Beatles (in particular, and by their own admission), the Bob Dylan of “Blonde On Blonde”, the Pink Floyd of Syd Barrett, Velvet Underground & Nico (and, in Italy, Le Stelle di Mario Schifano), Jimi Hendrix Experience, Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention, The Soft Machine and The Doors had been doing up to that point — turning the song form itself into a creative act tout court, coloured with harmonizations drawn from Eastern traditions, classical and jazz quotations, unexpected turns even within short-length tracks, highly refined sonorities, and erudite literary references.

In short… popular music was becoming a phenomenon of cultural, linguistic and formal expansion of unprecedented proportions. It was no longer conceived merely as music to dance to, but also as a vehicle for the “progressive” evolution of consciousness and mind. The language of the visual avant-gardes in Warhol's pop art and in the Fluxus movement (performance art understood as a free flow of consciousness merging different disciplines, but in a deliberately playful way, even through extreme actions) had also drawn close to the nascent rock'n'roll, which was becoming “serious business”.

All musicians of the era were called upon to develop an identity that stood out massively in both form and substance, on pain of being excluded from the great opportunity to enter the pantheon of a genre — “popular music” — which, thanks to the economic boom and the spread of cheap sound-reproduction devices (hi-fi, vinyl records, cassette tapes), had entered everyone's homes alongside the few state-run TV channels, the radio, and the clubs that had by then become hubs of cultural gathering.

There were certainly trends, but what was starting to matter were things like the content of a song's lyrics, and “knowing how to play/sing” in an unprecedented way. Record sleeve art was handled by internationally renowned artists (painters, photographers, graphic designers). Multidisciplinary happenings were organized to draw audiences into artistic events designed to be, above all, “an experience”. Low-cost festivals drew thousands of young people from all over the world to concerts lasting several days, with barely a few hours of silence — unless silence itself was conceptually built into the compositions. Everything was still to be invented, there was capital to invent it with, and people wanted it desperately.

Told today, all this sounds like a fairy tale, even a foolish one, yet it is history. What is far less fairy-tale-like is what was actually done with that opportunity. Some had the cultural tools to seize it, others had none at all, others still had a lot of catching up to do, and fast. In the immense cauldron of records released in that period, some found fortune immediately and kept it for a long time, some burned out young in a blaze of excess, some found success 20, 30, even 40 years later, and some were praised at the time only to be later disowned or drastically downgraded by history. Too many fell into the trap of formal exhibitionism, while others erred on the side of excessive austerity in their pursuit of credibility, with too few means to actually achieve it.

Amid all this, Deep Purple had few but good instincts, and knew how to make the most of them. At first, admittedly, they sounded rather naive to many ears, then pretentious when they chose to present themselves with a “Concerto for Group and Orchestra” credited to their keyboardist Jon Lord — a work that truly lacked enough substance, save for a handful of passages, to leave a mark except as an adventurous experiment. They could play, but not quite well enough to stand alongside musicians trained in classical or jazz, and they were certainly no “poets” when it came to writing lyrics. Nor were they exactly quick to grasp what the avant-gardes around them were really up to. Yet there were others nearby (Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly above all) who were meanwhile attempting to toughen up the blues sound in a highly electric, aggressive, high-impact direction, and at this Deep Purple were particularly good — probably better than most. They knew how to express themselves through sheer “sonic power”, through direct impact. Just a handful of chords, theirs, with a touch of sophistication in solo interplay drawn from classical-Baroque roots, pitting electric guitar against organ in duels, modal harmonizations, and granite-hard riffs often “borrowed” — and never returned — from lesser-known and/or “rival” bands, and from legends operating in fields far removed from rock (respectively, It's A Beautiful Day, Warpig, Astrud Gilberto and Gil Evans, and then Led Zeppelin, among many others).

The “Gillan voice”: singing as extended and powerful as the roar of a jet engine

It was precisely with their 1969 “Concerto for Group and Orchestra” that a certain Ian Gillan joined the band (maximum recorded range D2-D6, in 1979), a singer who also performed in musicals. Working from new ideas emerging in popular music (Yma Sumac), classical music and free jazz (Patty Waters), he was convinced one could sing “outside the register” as an “extended voice” (“New vocality in contemporary opera”, as world-famous mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian — herself the partner of composer Luciano Berio — had defined it), and a certain Tim Buckley was, at the time, beginning to work wonders along those very lines in America. He did so using two techniques borrowed from musical theatre: “belting” and “voicecraft”.

What is “belting”? It's a technique that allows a singer to perform, in full chest voice, notes that would normally be sung in the passaggio (falsetto included). This makes it possible to retain power and brightness even on the highest notes, but it's a technique that demands great physical effort, since its use requires actively engaging a large amount of the body's musculature, performing what is technically known as “anchoring”. It's no coincidence that this technique was used by Jesuit singers, who were taught to feel the lower notes rooted in the heel and sole of the foot, and the higher ones on the toes. By performing “sirens” with this technique and lowering the chin, singers could reach high, harmonically rich frequencies — but with real grace only given an adequate lowering of the larynx and softness of the arytenoids (as in the male alto singing of Peter Hammill, indistinguishable from a female voice) — something Gillan never possessed.

What is “voicecraft”? It's a technique built on a deep understanding of laryngeal use in singing, but one that does not treat phonation as a “global act”. It is often used to support “belting”, refining the possible shaping of the mouth, cheeks, nasal septum, jaw, eyes, eyebrows and forehead while singing, in order to achieve particular sonorities and a voice that is more “extended” and controlled in its phrasing. A technique originally used only in musical theatre and pop interpretation, but later also in Baroque singing. Mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has used it for years, drawing criticism from colleagues on the grounds that it does away with any real stagecraft involving the face (as well as chest and abdomen), which is instead led into rather bizarre positions, producing a vocality that is “poorly organic in its compartmentalized idealization of the body in relation to sound”. All of which sits in complete disagreement with typical Baroque technique, which rules out any kind of forcing applied to the voice and also rejects nineteenth-century operatic roles built around “the forceful tenor”. The same goes for Gisela Rohmert's Functional Method, which calls for singing strictly within one's register (with due exceptions for weak falsettos, flute-like tones, and hints of vocal “fry”), in perfect harmony with one's own vocal apparatus, without the slightest bodily tension (not even a toe or an eyebrow mistakenly engaged), in a total surrender where the sound — with extreme portamenti and great care given to harmonics — absorbs imperfections (pitch flaws, mucus on the vocal folds' edge) and seeks no perfect placement or intonation whatsoever.

By the time Gillan encountered these techniques, both were still in their infancy: it's fair, then, to consider him a genuine pioneer in the field. Just how technically aware he actually was in his singing, we cannot know. The English singer's natural register was that of a light baritone (today termed bass-baritone who refuses to sing bass), but he was clearly pushed to reach tenor-range frequencies with real power, though hardly with grace, and with a notably rich array of harmonics. What's more, showing little interest in low frequencies, the singer favoured the use of “reinforced falsetto”. With this technique, partly quoting Franco Fussi in “La Voce Artistica”: “The interarytenoid muscles are active, the glottal insufficiency triangle is no longer present, the sound is no longer veiled (poor in harmonics), and the glottal area closes completely with every vibratory cycle of the true vocal folds; a lowering of the laryngeal box occurs (through voluntary induction) which, by increasing harmonic phenomena and gaining resonance space, allows for the emission of a richer, rounder sound (the note produced achieves fullness through the use of the upper resonators, otherwise it would remain choked in the throat), in which, however, the characteristics of falsetto remain easily recognizable (understood as a sound not entirely comparable to a female voice)”. In reinforced falsetto, then, there is no “breathiness” (Giuliano Sangiorgi, Carmen Consoli, Moltheni); instead there is minimal airflow in vocal fold adduction, induced laryngeal lowering, and pronounced arytenoid tension.

To this, Gillan adds an iron tension in the abdomen in the act of support and diaphragmatic bracing (as in certain Siberian traditions of throat singing), while still vibrating together with the vocal cords, along with the use of head resonators. All of this in order to achieve hysterical, extremely powerful screams that cover contralto, mezzo-soprano and soprano registers (I say "screamed" advisedly, because fundamentally, in this style of singing, Gillan is a contralto, a "male alto" and not a "male soprano" – as in the case of Tim and Jeff Buckley, to give a practical example – his was a "pushed" style of singing, and thus damaging in the long run), sustained across long vibrato phrases with a silvery tone that at times becomes "torn," not unlike what legends of Black vocal traditions such as Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Little Richard did in this field ("Lucille" was covered by Deep Purple, and not by chance).

This method, which he employed in “Jesus Christ Superstar” in the role of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, caused a sensation starting with the aforementioned “In Rock” and with the track “Child In Time” (largely lifted from It's a Beautiful Day), which as early as 1969 was already being performed live in the various renditions of the “Concerto” mentioned earlier, arousing great interest.

Having said all this, no criticism can be levelled at those who use or have used vocal techniques deemed unorthodox. Demetrio Stratos, Diamanda Galas, Lisa Gerrard (but also Kate Bush and Elizabeth Frazer), Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, Bobby McFerrin, Phil Minton, Jaap Blonk, Catherine Jauniaux, Dagmar Krause with the final incarnation of Art Bears, Roberto Laneri, Tran Quang Hai, John De Leo, Dalila Kayros, Coucou Sélavy, Katya Sanna, Romina Daniele, Sainkho Namtchylak, for example. And then Nicola Sedda and Georgia Brown, in this case Guinness World Records-chasers pursuing extension at all costs without paying too much attention to timbral quality. These, along with many others cited throughout this essay and among an incalculable host of names (considering only those who came out of the Rassegna di Musica Diversa Omaggio a Demetrio Stratos, one could fill an encyclopedia), are “vocal researchers par excellence,” attentive to every producible sound or in any case to an extremely broad range in terms of character and modal polymorphism (not just extension), because it is precisely these pioneers who open the door to new possibilities that are later introduced into pop music too, studied clinically (just like the sopranists Manzotti and Christofellis) and applied to contemporary classical music thanks to the work of phoniatricians and speech therapists who by now are experts in the field (and are often singers themselves), working in close contact with composers.

As for “pop,” look at – and go back and listen to – the cases in Italy of Mina and certain vertiginous phrasings of hers as a voice-instrument (“Black”-inflected in particular, most extreme between 1968 and 1980), Antonella Ruggiero, Giuni Russo (an absolute and inimitable master of extreme experimental singing applied to “light” pop music for a good part of her career), Mango, Petra Magoni and now Alberto Nemo. The same goes for an '80s pop phenomenon like Klaus Nomi and his male-soprano singing applied to an electro-pop sound that was only occasionally refined. In the realm of opera singing, see the experience of Laura Catrani and that of Cristina Zavalloni. And all this without even mentioning the masters of “growling.”

There exist “poetics” that lie outside “bel canto,” without which music and singing would have ground to a halt back in 1900 (and that is where they are slowly returning to), and as singers we would be left with nothing but automatons – automatons that, at a popular level at least, and even in opera, people still prefer over singers as little “trained” as Luciano Pavarotti or Maria Callas, who, as conductor Beatrice Venezi puts it, “today nobody would want, not even in a choir.”

Note: one of many legends has it that a fan of the band took it upon himself to record Gillan's voice as reproduced through the amplifiers and measure it in decibels, comparing it to the roar of a plane taking off. "Which of the frequencies that a plane produces during its various phases of takeoff?", one might ask. Considering that the roar of a plane, within the range of humanly audible frequencies, spans a range of harmonics going from below octave zero up to the ninth, one might as well say "congratulations to the amplifier brand" (largely Vox AC30 and Marshall Major). Another story tells of an injury to the vocal cords that occurred in 1973, after which a helicopter had to be called in to fly the singer out. It's up to you to sort fact from fiction: see “Child in Time” live, 1970.

From the '70s to “Perfect Strangers”

A granite-like sound could now be generated by the band without any fear of covering the vocal frequencies. A “hard” or, if you will, “heavy” sound, and thus “massive” and unabashedly noisy (just think of the thunderous, purely noise-based introduction of “Speed King” from “In Rock”). All that was needed was to add lyrics that spoke directly about sex, lives lived to excess, and to actually live those lives, amid alcohol and the drive for success, with no regard for any rules whatsoever, throw in a hefty dose of narcissism and competition even within the band itself, and there you have an explosive mixture, destined to last barely four years, but with an enormous impact and legacy on a global scale.

Internal conflicts driven by ego-related reasons bordering on the childish, with members quitting the band via letters (as in Gillan's case) that went unanswered by the others. There were many lineup changes, bringing in virtuosos of instrument and voice (Glenn Hughes, David Coverdale, Tommy Bolin, Randy California and, later on, Steve Morse, Joe Satriani... among the most famous), until it became clear that that particular Mark II lineup was decidedly the best way to make money (Polydor offered the band two million dollars for an album bearing that winning brand name), and that it was probably better to set various grudges aside for one more album, or maybe a few more.

The Mark II lineup's return with 1984's “Perfect Strangers” was met with tremendous enthusiasm from audiences and led the English band to even more successful tours than in the past, with staggering sales, but to a far less unanimous critical reception. Metal fans (a genre that had by then reached its creative peak), and thus the “trade” press, didn't pay much attention to content or nuance; they simply wanted to hear a certain kind of sound, energy, technique and solid production (of the wall-of-sound variety) – all things present in this album to perfection, which fans hailed as “one of the greatest back-to-basics comeback albums of all time.” Those who were hoping for a comeback that wouldn't so calligraphically retrace what had been done in the early '70s, and yet the album showed an evident formal streamlining in an AOR (Adult Oriented Rock) direction, rejected the record outright. To a large extent, in fact, on this album Deep Purple do nothing more than retrace their own steps, stealing chord progressions and melodic lines from themselves (“Knocking At Your Back Door” – is it “Smoke On The Water” with a refrain lifted from Toto, or something else entirely?), thereby doing damage to the "substance," because the form on this record is beyond question. An exception is represented by the gorgeous harmonies of “Under The Gun,” dark and rich with modulations from minor to major key over an organ riff moving through chromatic intervals, beautiful choral interweavings, and dizzying or symphonic-sounding solos and phrasing from Blackmore, all charged with real narrative tension and interest.

All the members here were coming from other projects (Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Whitesnake, Gary Moore Band) that had made them more mature and thus capable of doing even better than in the past. Blackmore's technique had become far more interesting, handling widely spaced intervals without losing any of the flair he'd always prized in “speed of execution” across close-set, triplet-based intervals; not only that, he had gained in touch, tonal range, use of the whammy bar, elegance, and dramatic lyricism (“Wasted Sunset”) – things that his contemporary metal heroes (with whom he sometimes couldn't compete technically) often didn't even know existed.

Lord had introduced synth and mini-Moog sounds, over which he displayed great mastery, all without giving up his declared love for Baroque music (J. S. Bach) and for the sound of his Hammond, pushed to pure sonic distortion. Paice had recalibrated the sound of his drum skins toward higher-pitched timbres, a common practice at the time, and had also chosen to use rhythmically sophisticated breaks without over-indulging in blazing-fast drum rolls. Glover's bass had kept its solidity and at times taken on a funky drive.

Everyone had improved, then, except for one... the singer. While it's true that “extended voices” naturally undergo a loss of range with age (largely from around 40-50 years onward), if used correctly, in the absence of serious illness and with the support of phoniatric and speech-therapy aids, they can still achieve excellent results at least up to age 60, like the other members of the band, or perhaps even beyond – Gillan had shown no restraint whatsoever in his consumption of alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and in touring to the point of “surmenage” (overwork/burnout), and his voice (like that of Robert Plant, who was naturally a baritone with a lower register, and also Nina Hagen) had suffered considerably as a result, from a very young age, as early as 1973 (albeit with a return to even better form in 1979). On “Perfect Strangers” his singing is far, far too nasal. His use of an exaggerated tendency to open the sound “laterally,” with his mouth set in an ungainly smile-like shape but often with his chin thrust forward, had indeed allowed him to preserve a baritone register, even when pushed, but by now it had become quite acrid and artificial-sounding (later emulated in some way by Axl Rose, albeit with a far more extreme identity, where the nasalization became almost “witchy”).

Not only that, his big falsetto had by now shrunk by almost an octave and, above all, had become dirty and lacking in power, often relying on a great deal of breath in the emission to the point of becoming “screaming” (“Under The Gun”) yet completely lacking in real vocal substance (in contrast to the harmonic fullness in this regard of a Mike Patton). In just one track (“Hungry Daze”) there is a search for lower, grittier sounds, roughened up by the use of vocal fry as well, which turn out to be genuinely interesting and worthy of a possible new stylistic signature to build on, but sadly this was never pursued. There is, however, one track in which he manages to work the phrasing in a truly interesting way, and that is the title track, which we will discuss, insofar as this is precisely a song in which the “quotation” of Led Zeppelin's “Kashmir” becomes rather prominent at times, though handled without tipping over into outright plagiarism – an idea that no longer exists today in an age of “legitimized citationism” (masking an inability to create anything new), but which back then caused irritation among listeners and legal trouble for those who indulged in it.

“Perfect Strangers/Under The Gun” – A New Form

The title track is in the key of D minor, moving into F major – its relative major – for the chorus. It's in 4/4, but the guitar riff that appears as a "bridge/variation" after the first chorus holds a surprise, alternating with a bar of 5/4. Ahead of the distorted Hammond intro that directly recalls some of the band's early-70s classics (the 1972 live version of "Space Truckin'" above all, though here in a more epic key) and the vocals that once again dwell on the same high G and A notes in a pushed baritone, the song already introduces something new by 00'48. The descending run of notes from G to E, almost like an Arabic melisma, directly recalls the Led Zeppelin song mentioned earlier (Plant in general, really – one could equally cite "Achilles Last Stand"). From 1'02 onwards this becomes increasingly obvious, and from 1'09 to 1'17, save for the difference in timbre, the ascending syncopated pattern of E/F/G/A leading into the word "past", doubled via overdub and drenched in gallons of reverb with a Middle Eastern-style slide down into lower frequencies, is pure Zeppelin trademark in everything but tone.

The verse sequence recurs a second time, and between 1'51 and 1'54, on "all your life", there's a chromatic grace note (Bb) in the vocal that recalls Plant in more than just a stylistic sense. The shift into major key from 2'01, however, is a delightful touch, revisiting some pop solutions typical of the era, with lovely, graceful backing vocals that drop the nasal quality in favour of a vocal delivery not unlike Jon Anderson of Yes in that period (AOR), sitting in his mid-range. At 2'15 the minor-key modulation resurfaces in full, bringing back the granite-hard guitar riff mentioned several times already. Magnificent, without question, despite the repeated citationism, here cast in an epic-doom key. Stuff that set a precedent regardless. It's amusing that over the same riff, as if to underline its lineage, Gillan goes back to singing with Arabic-tinged vocalizations. The track falls back into a verse with no significant variation in form or substance (aside from a doubled bar and a quick guitar lick/phrase). Same goes for the chorus and the repeat of the riff (this time ad libitum and fading out), over which, alongside a couple of "Gillan-esque" vocalizations, Lord layers a synthesizer solo built on Arabic-style scales in the upper register, and highly evocative. Throughout, Paice's martial drumming, with masterful accents that subtly disrupt the perceived "regularity" of the track, sounds as though it could have been played by the late Bonham, but with the roundness of tone considerably reduced in favour of a more clattering, metallic sound. All of it moving at a tempo the score itself defines as "mysterious".

The lyrics abandon the raw immediacy of earlier days in favour of an "epic" narrative:

Sto restituendo la eco di un punto nel tempo

E brillano volti lontani

Mille guerrieri che ho conosciuto

E ridendo quando appaiono gli spiriti

Tutta la tua vita

Ombre di un altro giorno

goes the second verse, in the manner favoured by Iron Maiden, yet while telling of a love story now over, as the chorus makes clear, it also hints at a new chapter for the band:

E se mi senti parlare al vento, devi capire,

dobbiamo restare perfetti sconosciuti

So what, then, is "Perfect Strangers" as a song? A perfect, concise pastiche of 70s and 80s hard rock, capturing for entire generations what the genre as a whole (not just Deep Purple) represented before metal's more extreme drift.

There is, however, a track on the album that stands entirely on its own, rather as hinted at in the opening notes of this piece, called "Under The Gun". Passed over almost entirely in silence and given no consideration whatsoever by fans or critics, the song gathers together every element that made the Purple of old great, without leaning on other people's ideas to modernise their image, and even manages to say something new within hard rock thanks to the genuineness of its creation and to a remarkably refined, if not always immediate, songwriting. The opening chord, for instance, an E minor that, through the use of a minor second (natural F), evokes less a sense of "instability" than the idea of a dark, aggressive attack typical of the genre, well supported besides by Lord's distorted Hammond. That same chord resolves, but not quickly, leaving the impression of a granite-hard, "unpleasant" ostinato to anyone unfamiliar with early-20th-century harmony (more or less everyone), passing through F and then G.

For its part, the vocal line traces a descending scale from A to E (with the first note repeated), giving it a character not unrelated to the writing of Aleksandr Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872/1915) rather than to any actual Middle Eastern modes (it's worth reminding fans of Area International POPular Group just how well attention to the Middle East in music had already been absorbed and transformed within classical music for at least 100 years, and within rock from across the Alps since at least the late 60s). The harmony's fallback into D brings on a frenetic "rock boogie". Gillan's voice, kept here in a high register but never unpleasant, entirely projected through the upper resonators without forcing, yet aggressive in timbre and at times hoarse, at the 1'15 mark hits a repeated B before dropping with absolute precision onto F and E, via a diminished fourth interval that's hard to conceive of in rock without a classical background (Blackmore, who is credited as co-writer of the track? Or perhaps Jon Lord, who isn't listed as a writer more for reasons of legal wrangling than for any real question over the song's true authorship?). Once again the backing vocals carry a progressive and AOR pedigree (Yes was mentioned earlier, and not by chance), but the whole track is in fact a kind of summa of everything Deep Purple were able to express through their fusion of prog and blues-derived hard rock, "translated by white musicians" into a bastardised, more aggressive formula.

At minute 1'47 comes Blackmore's solo, favouring a dirty tone here without sacrificing an epic feel. At minute 2'17 there's a kind of apotheosis, with a primordial "blast beat" (rapid-fire drumming, later common in extreme metal but anticipated decades earlier in jazz by Tony Williams with Miles Davis, for instance, used as a filler - that is, a bridge inserted within a transitional phrase to mark the end or beginning of a musician's solo) from Paice, laid over a fragmented rhythmic texture. It's a hugely significant moment for the era, at a time when Mayhem didn't yet exist but who would later draw directly on passages like this one to forge their own signature sound. It's no coincidence that this is also where Gillan lets out a primordial "scream", blending false (heavily compressed) and true vocal registers on a high B, delivered as a kind of descending slide/glissando/portamento. Crowning it all, the BPM halves and a guitar "solo" begins with a late-classical/romantic symphonic character, evoking in its movement the beloved Vivaldi and Bach, but in its actual outcome the Russian composers - Modest Petrovič Mussorgsky and his particular brand of triumphalism, above all. The song then picks back up with verse, chorus and a final closing guitar "solo" in fade out, even more inspired and among the finest of Blackmore's entire career.

It's worth noting how the stereo mix on the track makes exceptional use of panning (the bouncing of sounds from one channel to the other), handled superbly by the album's producer, Roger Glover.

And the lyrics? They certainly didn't win the band many friends among "christian rock" devotees... Returning to pacifist themes already expressed in the past in a "macho" yet "sensitive" way, they read:

We're told to die or take this land,

stupid bastards and religious fanatics,

so safe inside their castle fortresses.

They turn away like a mother crying under the gun.

When brave men fall under crimson skies

there's a sadness reflected in a soldier's eyes.

The tears will dry for those I kill.

Don't remember their names anymore, but someone will,

it's the only way to win.

Fuck the fools who think it's glorious,

Who gives a damn about people like us, under the gun

Perhaps not a literary masterpiece, but certainly a distillation of the thinking and attitude of the era. Beyond what was already expressed in the much-cited "Child In Time", where there was a "blind man shooting at the world in front of a child's eyes, watching the line drawn between good and evil, the good and the bad", one is also reminded of "The Knife" by Genesis and "R.I.P." by Banco del Mutuo Soccorso.

So what does “Under The Gun” actually tell us? Certainly not that music's value is fixed at the moment of its release, deciding once and for all whether it's good or bad – very often a retrospective look can turn up huge surprises, and that's precisely the value of music criticism (the rediscovery of Bach during Romanticism, or of Gesualdo da Venosa in the mid-twentieth century, after centuries of being “forgotten”) as much as of the study of music itself, in all its genres and from every corner of the world.

And the album as a whole, what's it like? Good or bad? It's history, whether we like it or not.

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