Deep Purple really hated being compared to Black Sabbath: “Nothing’s worse”
As tremendous as Deep Purple were at their craft, there’s a school of thought that would perhaps suggest that they arrived a fraction too early to really make the impression that they had hoped for on the music industry.
Their arrival at the tail end of the 1960s came along at a time when hard rock was beginning to make its way into the spotlight, with Led Zeppelin arguably leading the charge in this field as the band who were able to find success on both sides of the Atlantic. While Deep Purple certainly made a good attempt at giving their contemporaries a run for their money, it can be argued that they were never quite held in the same regard.
There was something a little more progressive and experimental about Deep Purple’s early work that set them apart from what Led Zeppelin were doing on their earliest material, with the output of the latter only having become more prog-adjacent later on, and the slight simplification of the hard rock formula was what ultimately drew people towards what Led Zeppelin produced.
Then there were the heavier aspects of what Deep Purple were doing, but there was no such thing as heavy metal when they first started. This was both a blessing and a curse as far as the band ought to have been concerned; they were too heavy to be seen in the same genre field as some of the most similar bands emerging at the time, but no alternative grouping that they could make their own.
Besides, the fact that they had a classical background meant that they were unlikely to ever be fully taken in by the crowd who wanted something heavier, and despite having this edge to them, the fact that they were releasing records as collaborations with symphony orchestras wasn’t going to endear them to fans of more raucous riffs.
It’s fair to say that they could quite easily have been lumped into either party, but ended up straddling both boundaries for a little too long, and this was ultimately what irked guitarist Ritchie Blackmore about their place in the world of rock.
Blackmore wished for them to be set apart from everyone else, and complained about the fact that people were so eager to make comparisons between themselves and another famous band of the same era. During an interview with Rolling Stone, he called out listeners for their lazy way of likening them to another band who emerged slightly after them, and insisted that there was nothing that linked the two.
“Nothing’s worse than hearing someone say, ‘Deep Purple? Wow, man. They’re just like Black Sabbath, knocking out all the riffs’,” an incensed Blackmore argued to the magazine. “If people can’t comprehend the certain subtleties that we put into music, I’m afraid I haven’t the patience to explain to them.”
If you listen back, there are definitely some similarities between the two acts, but despite going on to share members later on in their careers, there’s no doubt that both bands were just as formidable as one another, and had enough unique traits to have made themselves stand out from the crowd.
