“We were pissed”: How Deep Purple turned a drunken jam into a 1970 classic
“It’s hard rock now. If it’s not dramatic or exciting, it doesn’t belong on this album.” Such was the general ethos of Deep Purple‘s “Mark II”, their second phase that saw the introduction of vocalist Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover.
Spoken by Ritchie Blackmore (and paraphrased by Glover to Uncut), “hard rock” would be the guiding light that defined In Rock, their 1970 sophomore album and the first to include Gillan and Glover. With its Mount Rushmore-inspired album cover, In Rock was Deep Purple’s proto-metal breakthrough, and with its success came a hectic touring schedule and the expectation of more.
As expected with the demands of a recording band, Deep Purple’s management wanted a new single to follow-up the success of In Rock, an idea that the band initially rejected. They reasoned that they were an “albums band,” not a “singles band”; management opted to refer to the song as a “lead track”. In turn, a session at De Lane Lea studios in London was booked.
Deep Purple arrived with no ideas for their next song and, from morning to night, they still had nothing. To clear their heads, they resolved to go to the pub. “Round the corner was a nice, happy little boozer called the Newton Arms, so we drank far more than was good for us,” drummer Ian Paice recounted to Uncut, “not paralytic, but certainly losing touch with reality. Then we went back to the studio.”
Properly inebriated, Deep Purple re-entered the studio with only a glimpse of a plan. Blackmore and Glover entered first: Blackmore played the main riff, largely inspired by Ricky Nelson’s ‘Summertime’. “Well, I’ve never heard it, let’s do it anyway,” Glover recalled himself deciding, and the band continued on.
“Well, we weren’t thinking too clearly at this stage of the game,” Paice remembered, “so we thought, ‘That sounds all right…’ So we started on that.” By about one in the morning, the music was complete and, named after a song by the American country-soul singer Arthur Alexander, they had decided on the rough version of what became ‘Black Night’.
“We were having a laugh, because we thought the whole thing was a waste of time now,” Glover explained, “so we wrote the most banal lyrics we could. We just banged it out. I went to bed that night thinking, ‘That’ll be some obscure B-side or something.’”
What Deep Purple ended up writing in their drunken state resembles something of someone lost and trying to find their way back, and the “black night” becomes something sinister, “a long way from home”. As Gillan repeatedly sings, “Maybe I’ll find on the way down the line / That I’m free, free to be me,” Deep Purple manage to make an optimistic tale out of their so-called “banal” lyrics.
The band’s management, meanwhile, absolutely loved the song and, even as Glover warned, “You can’t release that, we were pissed,” they carried on with ‘Black Night’, and its release would see Deep Purple achieve their highest-charting UK single, peaking at number two. They even appeared on Top of the Pops in support of the record – but left their guitars unplugged, silently punctuating their performance.
Where the creation of ‘Black Night’ itself was the result of a drunken haze, it was, in a strange way, a testament to Deep Purple’s overarching vision: hard rock that was dramatic and exciting. Something about ‘Black Night’ seems to bottle all of those energies and mash them together; maybe it’s Blackmore’s riffs, or Paice’s drum fills, or an accidentally-perfect balancing of all of the elements.
“The simplicity and the inspiration of it are the important thing,” Paice described of ‘Black Night’, concluding, “The lyric was simple, the riff was catchy. The drumming was ridiculous. You can’t plan it. That moment of creativity had to be like that – it was that moment in time…”
