Why Deep Purple tried to blockade their own 1970 breakthrough: “We were anti-contrivance”
One of the cruellest ironies in music is that you can spend months, even years, painstakingly perfecting every detail of a song, only for it to still fall short of something Deep Purple came up with in the early 1970s while drunk and running on almost no sleep.
Now a staple of every self-respected dad rock record collection in the world, Deep Purple were once the bold, subversive harbingers of hard rock revolution, and it was the band’s famed ‘Mark II’ line-up that first struck upon that sound. Transforming from the 1960s hippiedom of their early days certainly came with its growing pains but, in the tradition of virtually every half-decent rock band, the transition was eased along by copious nights spent in the local boozer.
Even during the creation of Deep Purple’s ultimate masterpiece, In Rock, which firmly cemented the group among the greatest of the early 1970s, as well as becoming a milestone in rock and roll’s development from being singles-based to LP-focused, the band members often found their inspiration in the bottom of pint glasses. In fact, the album’s stand-out track, and the biggest commercial hit Deep Purple ever amassed, owed itself solely to that Dutch courage.
Revisiting the recording process of In Rock during a 2011 edition of Uncut, the band members recalled that their record label demanded a single, yet to be convinced of the commercial values of being an LP-only rock band. However, the album was already finished, and the band’s creative resources were rapidly running dry so, after a fruitless day in the studio trying to write a single, they retired to The Newton Arms, a legendary pub in Holburn, London.
After drinking the kinds of copious amounts of alcohol you would expect a hard rock band to get through, Deep Purple returned, stumbling and slurring, to the recording studio, and laid down ‘Black Night’.
With Ritchie Blackmore borrowing a riff from Ricky Nelson’s ‘Summertime’, and the rest of the band largely improvising around that, the band recorded the single in a drunken malaise and, by all accounts, didn’t expect it to see the light of day in any major way.
Nevertheless, the band’s management and record label saw ‘Black Night’ as a natural single release. “We said, ‘You can’t release that, we were pissed,’” bassist Roger Glover reportedly declared. Ian Gillan tended to agree, opposing the idea of becoming a ‘singles band’ in any capacity.
“I don’t think we were anti-commercial. But we were anti-contrivance,” the vocalist shared. “And, like Zeppelin, we found dignity through the music we were playing. It wasn’t slung together by a producer and a publisher.”
Adding, “We decided we were going to take hold of our music and let it evolve organically.”
In the end, though, those producers and publishers turned out to be correct; ‘Black Night’ was released as a single in June of 1970, and it went on to peak at number two in the UK singles charts, becoming the band’s all-time best-selling single and a firm fan-favourite in the process. Not bad for a song recorded in the wake of a particularly heavy pub session.
