‘Highway Star’: The Deep Purple song that started speed metal
In every classic rock fan’s life comes the Deep Purple phase.
Without question, this will happen at around 12 or 13 because there might not be a band more purpose-built for preteen boys than Ian Gillan and Ritchie Blackmoor’s hard rock miscreants.
Truly, they’re just the right band for just the right time. Heavy enough to be your first real taste of the dark stuff, but not so heavy to put anyone off. Legit enough to earn your first approving nod from an elder rock fan, but lame enough to be quickly moved on from.
Most of all, they’re a band whose lyrical concepts are built for 13-year-old boys and those who never really stopped having the mindset of one. It might seem strange to talk about the lyrics of one of the great guitar bands of their time, but they are in there, buried deep in the mix, and teenagers are exactly the kind of people to go in and try to find them. What they’ll find is that Deep Purple songs are about bounty hunters, space truckers, demons, and girls.
Most of all, though, they’ll find a quite frankly alarming amount of Deep Purple songs are about cars, and how cool cars are when they go really, really fast. Including arguably their most famous song that won’t get you kicked out of a guitar shop for testing out its riff, ‘Stairway to Heaven‘ style. ‘Highway Star’ is a wonderfully brainless slice of headbanging cheese built around a riff so simple it sounds like the band wrote it in the time it takes to listen to it, which is what happened.
The story changes in each telling, but the version of the story bassist Roger Glover told Guitar Magazine was that the band were being interviewed on their tour bus on their way to a gig in Portsmouth. Said journo asked how the band wrote songs, Ritchie said “Like this!” and began chugging away on a G chord on the nearest guitar. Gillan started howling out the first lyrics he could think of, and before they’d got to the next rest stop, they had ‘Highway Star’.
How did Deep Purple influence heavy metal?
When the band reached Portsmouth, they realised they had what they’d spent the last couple of writing sessions trying to find. A replacement for opening number ‘Speed King’, which they’d been getting sick of. The newly written ‘Highway Star’ found its way into the setlist that very same night, and after its overwhelming reception, the band cottoned on that they hadn’t just stumbled upon a new opening song, they’d stumbled on one of their best.
The track became a single and would go down as not only one of their most popular and beloved songs, but also one of their most influential. You see, at the time, heavy metal was still a fairly nascent genre. Everyone was still taking after Black Sabbath, and if you wanted to be really heavy, you had to be slow and grinding with it. Sabbath themselves had tried to up the speedometer two years earlier with ‘Paranoid‘, but that was still a mid-tempo chug.
‘Highway Star’ is fast. Really fast. Which checks out, as the song’s about a supercar, so you might as well go like the clappers when you’re singing about it. It was among the first songs to test out what would happen if you took heavy instrumentals and played them with a high-energy rock ‘n’ roll style. Whisper it, but one might wonder whether Lemmy was watching on from his post in Hawkwind, taking notes for his next project.
He wouldn’t be the only one. All the leading lights of thrash and speed metal point not just to Deep Purple but to this song in particular for showing just how fast heavy music could get. Metallica especially are Deep Purple obsessives who’ve covered their ‘When a Blind Man Cries’ for a tribute album. By putting their foot down, Deep Purple all but invented one of the most notorious and dangerous forms of heavy metal around, and perhaps those 13-year-old boys were onto something after all.
