LIVE albums come and live albums go but, more than half a century after its release, Deep Purple’s Made in Japan remains an undisputed classic of the genre.

Recorded by the band’s classic, ‘Mk II’ line-up - singer Ian Gillan, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, bassist Roger Glover, drummer Ian Paice and, on keyboards and Hammond organ, Jon Lord - the double album was recorded at exuberant concerts in Osaka and Tokyo in August 1972 and was subsequently released for the then-current price (£3.25) of a single album.

Made in Japan features powerful versions of seven songs - Highway Star, Child in Time, Smoke on the Water, The Mule, Strange Kind of Woman, Lazy, and Space Truckin’ (later versions came with a second CD with encores from the Japan concerts - Black Night, Speed King, and Lucille). The album’s peak UK chart position of number 16 doesn't really tell the full story; it sold really well for a long period of time and, even now, regularly wins accolades.

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Not for nothing did Rolling Stone magazine rank Made in Japan at number 32 in its list of the fifty greatest live albums of all time, back in 2015 (a readers’ poll in the same magazine, in 2012, put it at number six). Not for nothing did a rock journalist once declare: “There are moments on this record that have never been beaten in the history of rock music”. To listen to Made in Japan now is to be reminded not just of the band’s musical prowess but also of their prominence as a pioneering heavy rock act alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

Over their career Deep Purple have sold some 100 million albums and played live to more than 10 million people. And of course no profile of them is complete without a reference to the fact that, in the year they played in Japan, the Guinness Book of World Records labelled them "the loudest group in the world”.

Deep Purple have had numerous line-up changes over the decades - indeed, Gillan himself walked out in 1973, returned in 1984, was fired in 1989 and rejoined again a few years later - but, unlike Zeppelin and Sabbath, are still recording and touring. They’re “not just phoning in sub-par new albums and playing clubs but writing genuinely good stuff and selling out arenas”, as Record Collector magazine put it a couple of months ago.

The band today consists of Gillan, Glover, Paice, Don Airey on keyboards and guitarist Simon McBride. Jon Lord died in July 2012; Blackmore, after quitting Purple, founded the rock act Rainbow and, later, the “renaissance folk rock project”, Blackmore's Night.

Things have not always gone smoothly for Deep Purple, perhaps not surprisingly in a band that has been in operation for decades. There were well-documented tensions between Blackmore and Gillan. The band itself went on an eight-year-long hiatus between 1976 and 1984. And in Gillan's absences his place as lead singer has been taken by, first, David Coverdale and then Joe Lynn Turner. (Glover, for his part, has in the past produced such acts as Status Quo and Nazareth, the latter for their Seventies albums Razamanaz, Loud 'n' Proud and Rampant).

Deep Purple founder Jon Lord dies

Purple release a new album, ‘+1’, on July 19 and are currently on tour with a string of dates that includes concerts in North America with Yes. Purple play Glasgow’s OVO Hydro on Sunday, November 10 - all of 53 years since the earliest version of the band played Glasgow for the very first time, at Green’s Playhouse in March 1971.

Purple had released three albums in 1968-69 - Shades of Deep Purple, The Book of Taliesyn, and Deep Purple - when they were more of a psychedelic progressive rock band. Though the albums didn’t chart in the UK they did stir interest in the US, with a couple of singles selling well there and the band embarking on lengthy tours.

The turning-point arrived in 1969 when, with Blackmore, Paice and Lord, eager to develop the band's heavier sound, recruited Gillan and Glover from an outfit named Episode Six. (The DeepPurple50 website recounts that the embryonic Deep Purple, seeking a lead singer, had actually approached Gillan, but he declined, believing that he had a greater chance of success with Episode Six).

“When Roger and I joined in 1969”, Gillan said in an interview with Sunday Times Culture last weekend, “we shared one set of clothes between us, so we couldn’t go out at the same time. Roger didn't even own a pair of shoes. It was not unknown for me to steal a handful of dog biscuits to get through the day”.

Deep Purple, Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow

Gillan and Glover made their Deep Purple debut on Jon Lord’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra project before really getting into their groove on the subsequent albums that established Purple’s name: In Rock (1970), Fireball (1971) and - the album that really launched them - Machine Head (1972).

Machine Head, which, like Fireball, topped the British charts, went double platinum. It has recently been re-packaged as a triple-CD package that includes a recording of an April 1971 gig at the Montreux Jazz Festival, on Lake Geneva. The band would return to Montreux at the end of that year, as Gillan recalls.

“We had done a show there and were looking for somewhere to make our new album when Claude [Nobs, founder of the festival] suggested the [Montreux] Casino, so we went to Frank Zappa’s concert there to check it out”, he told Sunday Times Culture. “I was listening to Flo and Eddie, of the Turtles, doing these beautiful backing vocals when someone let off a flare gun and the place was in flames. Claude was a hero, pulling the kids out to safety”.

The band went on to record the album in the deserted corridors of a nearby hotel, Grand Hotel de Territet, but realised that they needed another song to complete it.

“We were being driven out of town by the police for making too much noise, so it was a last-minute thing”, recalled Gillan. “We came up with the riff during a soundcheck. It was only after seeing the crowd’s reaction to it that a guy from the [record] label cut a three-minute version and it became our biggest hit”. Blackmore’s guitar riff is one of the most celebrated (and instantly recognisable),in rock history, while the lyrics themselves immortalise Nobs, who died in January 2023: “Funky Claude was running in and out/pulling kids out the ground”.

As fate would have it, Deep Purple played the Montreux Jazz Festival for the tenth time in their career the other day. As the Daily Telegraph's critic put it, "What better place to hear one of the most famous riffs in rock ring out than on the shores of Lake Geneva?" The band, Poppie Platt added, "delivered a series of thudding bass, epic, stretched-out keyboard solos and trippy guitars, which made everyone present feel like they were witnessing music history in the making".

Deep Purple have over the decades had not just numerous line-up changes but also various lean periods, including a time in the mid-Nineties when, by Gillan’s own admission in that Sunday Times interview, “the band was dying, Ritchie lost interest and audiences were disappearing as a result”. With Zeppelin and Sabbath no more, it's good to have one of these late-sixties hard-rock pioneers still going strong.

Rocking the hard places

Recent Purple albums have largely been confined to the lower reaches of the charts, but no matter. They have refused to merely retread former glories but have continued to keep their sound fresh. As their website has it, the new album may embody the "essence and attitude of their 1970s incarnation" more than any other album in recent memory. 

https://deeppurple.com/