“I got slightly sentimental”: Deep Purple’s two favourite venues to play
When you’ve been going for as long as Deep Purple have, it’s easy to get jaded at the state of the rock and roll world.
They know the meaning of being on the road better than most. It is far from the glitz and the glamour that you see on stage; it’s cramped dressing rooms, rubbish food, and stopping in the back of beyond in the middle of the night when the tour bus runs out of petrol. That’s enough to make getting to even the most prized venues barely seem worth it.
But then, there are still some that are bound to stop you in your tracks. The ones with a size, a magnitude, a history so inimitable that it still makes you go, ‘Shit, we’ve really made it’, even half a century down the line. Those are things you can never let go of, and they are places which bassist Roger Glover particularly holds dear.
The Royal Albert Hall is naturally the first place which springs to mind, given that Deep Purple made history there in 1969 by creating their live album, Concerto for Group and Orchestra, alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, establishing the connection between rock and classical music that had not been fully realised then, and they became the first band to make it happen.
But don’t get this twisted: Deep Purple’s return there in November, as the climax of their UK tour, is not about to turn into some emotional cry-fest. As Glover put it himself, in his new interview with Far Out, “There are a few special places around the world, and that’s definitely up there, for sure. Thinking about it, you go, ‘Oh, the Albert Hall’, but when you get there, it’s just a gig”.
It’s probably a good thing to be diplomatic about it, as he pointed out: “I think we’ve been there more times doing things like the Sunshine Jam, or Jon Lord’s Memorial, or stuff like that. That’s when it gets emotional, but this is going to be just a gig. Just another Albert Hall gig. No sweat.” Calm and collected must be his middle names.
“Well, yes, we can’t get too sentimental about it,” he conceded, before the tough nut cracked open a little, “Actually, we did a gig in the hall in Osaka, where we recorded Made in Japan. As I went to the soundcheck, and I looked out, I got slightly sentimental about it, what we did then, as it was a very important album, and here we were flying by the seat of our pants, really. But it did something good, and I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘Wow, that’s so long ago, and it’s so important’. I remember it very well.”
It’s notable that the two seemingly most important venues over the vastness of Deep Purple’s career are places where they have made some kind of live music history. One was bridging new ground between supposedly polarising genres, and the other was a step in a new direction for the band themselves, as they took stock of the power of their sound and vision all over the world.
Sure, they’re going to be professional about it; they’re not going to make things unnecessarily sentimental or over-dramatic. They’ve been trained to play shows since the ‘60s, and that’s exactly what they’ll continue to do, but somewhere deep inside, when they pull up in front of the Royal Albert Hall or the Festival Hall in Osaka, the butterflies are still going to be there. That’s when you know there’s magic.
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