THE LORD'S WORD

"This will be my last time in a band." - Jon Lord (Melody Maker, 5th May, 1979)
"Did I say that? The awful thing about being in bands is that guys like you can throw back at me things that I said ten years ago . . . or fourteen years ago in this case!"
Deep Purple are back on the road, with new product to promote - a CD called The Battle Rages On, and it's marketed through the unique selling point of a "25th Anniversary" logo. "Yes, it's funny really," muses Jon Lord (52). "It's just sneaked up on us. It seems like three minutes ago that we were playing the City Hall Sheffield in 1975. It's rather frightening. Yes . . . 25 years . . ."
He reels off potential venues: "Two or three in London, two nights at the Manchester Apollo, Birmingham NEC, I don't think the tour's absolutely written in stone yet, but you know, the usual places."
To Jon Lord this is usual. Deep Purple play the Birmingham NEC like you or I go down the lounge bar in the city centre. Jon Lord was in Deep Purple before ITV's first colour transmissions, before Neil Armstrong took his first small step onto the surface of the moon, and while the original Star Trek episodes were being screened for the first time. Deep Purple's debut gig in Trastrup Denmark took place just sixteen days after Martin Luther King's assassination. The Beatles were still a band, Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison were still alive, and I was trying to lose my virginity. Perhaps you weren't born yet.
In a Pop Soap Opera world of fleeting Eldorados, Deep Purple are rock 'n' roll's Coronation Street. Jokes about trading in psychedelics, debauchery and volume for Phyllosan, Grecian 2000 and tinnitus are as predictably regurgitated as a vindaloo after too many lagers, but they're still capable of inflicting a killer set. Jon Lord is a founder member of these pioneers of the dubious art of recycled riffology, the guy on the Hammond organ, the guy with the long dark hair and droopy moustache in all those yellowing 1970s press-cutting photos. And yes, after all the turbulence, splits, personnel changes and reformations, this time Deep Purple is back to its 24-Carat-Purple classic ". . . in rock" formation; Ian Gillan (vocals), Ritchie Blackmore (guitar), Jon Lord (organ), Roger Glover (bass) and Ian Paice (drums).
" 'The Battle Rages On' is the title track of the album, and some people would say, the way our band has been running, it's a well-chosen title," Lord jokes defensively, in a matey practised interview technique. "Basically this is the band that it should always be. It's easy to look back with hindsight and say you shouldn't have done this and you shouldn't have done that. But I just wish that this line-up had never drifted apart and that we'd stuck together. Life would have been so much easier. But still, life wasn't meant to be that easy. When we get together there's no problems. That's not the problem. The problem is when we're apart. Once we're together and working it's pretty good. There's too many good times stored up between the five of us to let it just drift apart in acrimony. That would be wrong. I'm really glad to see it back together again."
But surely, looking back across 25 years of Deep Purple history, is it possible to still get a buzz from playing?
"From recording - yes. A qualified 'yes'. But on stage - an unqualified yes. That's the way it happens for me. That two hours on stage. That's still without peer in my life. That's the brilliant moment. Playing is the highlight. The studio I find a little bit more tiresome, always have. I've never been a great studio musician. I don't mind if it can be done as quickly as possible, that's OK. But to go over and over and over something constantly searching for some kind of meaningless perfection, that drives me to distraction.
"We recorded the new album's backing tracks last summer. Then halfway through the recording we decided it had to be Ian Gillan on vocals again. He should never have left. But you know what we're like. So he came back in the autumn and we spent the remainder of that year and the first part of this year writing lyrics. The vocals were recorded in February in Florida and that's it - the baby is christened, and ready to bring joy into the world!"
And what about the other Purple graduates; those not included in the re-union? David Coverdale, for example, and his current album collaboration with Jimmy Page? Has Jon heard that?
"Yes I have. I've always made it a practise to try not to criticise other musicians too strongly, you know. Nobody tries to make a bad album. But I must say that I was disappointed with the Coverdale/Page album. I played it, and I'm going 'Come on, grab me, get me'. And it never quite did. I mean, there's some wonderful moments. Jimmy is a great guitarist. But I didn't feel that it really caught fire.
"The guy who was going to mix our album was doing the engineering and producing for them. So little bits and pieces filtered back to me. That it was taking longer than expected, and so on and so on. And as I say - I was a little disappointed with the end result. There are a couple of moments when my hair stood on end, and goose-bumps, you know? But David sounds like his voice needs a rest on some of the tracks. He sounds very, very hoarse. Maybe he should take some of the money he earned on that huge Whitesnake album, and just lay back for a while . . ."
Deep Purple were never a class act. In Olympic terms, as a rock band they were always one steroid short of the gold medal. But they were the Mount Rushmore of heavy rock.
If you were at school in 1972 and Captain Beefheart or Led Zeppelin were too difficult or just too plain weird, then a Deep Purple album looked good with your tie-dye t-shirt and loon pants. They had the added pop bonus of solid metal chart hits too, ideal for miming to - 'Black Night', 'Strange Kind Of Woman' or 'Fireball'. You know them, they're lodged in your subconscious. Vic Reeves mined the vogue for tacky 70's revamp by covering 'Black Night' on his album. Human League's Phil Oakey was an accessory - producing the track in a passable tribute to the Purple original. If you had long permed hair and were in a 'progressive' rock band in 1974 but couldn't play like Clapton or Page, you could always bash out a passable 'Smoke On The Water'. Hell, everyone did it. Some people still are.
Deep Purple in Rock is still, for many, the classic statement. "It's one of those bench-mark albums isn't it, for that time", Jon agrees. "That along with Led Zeppelin II, I suppose, and perhaps a couple of others, they sort of define the early 70's, don't they? I'm very proud of that album. I mean, it was white-hot. There were no harsh problems with that album at all, it fell out of the band. Like 'Highway Star' was written in five minutes on a bus, in the back of the bus going down to Plymouth. It was really a wonderful, lyrical, marvellous time".
Actually, 'Highway Star' is on Machine Head, and not . . . . in Rock. Yet there was more to Deep Purple than just turgid riffs. Lord prefers the term rock 'n' roll to describe what they do, as distinct from 'heavy metal' anyway.
And they have track records extending back into the sixties, that even now - to neatly coincide with the quarter-century merchandising hoopla - are being re-issued on CDs with enticing group names like The Outlaws (Ritchie Blackmore), Episode Six (Ian Gillan and Roger Glover), and The Artwoods (Jon Lord). "Yes, I understand these thing are coming out," says Jon. "Good Lord, the things they do to the poor unsuspecting public. It's really strange to have your professional life come out again for scrutiny on CD in this way."
Jon Lord even played back-up with cabaret instant-hippies The Flowerpot Men. "I try to keep that out of my CV," he laughs. 'Let's Go To San Francisco' was never one of my favourite songs. But I got a very strong grounding in rock 'n' roll when I started to play with Ritchie. So I was very lucky, because I have quite a few influences to play with."
Deep Purple in Rock remains Jon's favourite: "Either that - or maybe Made in Japan, because that's the band playing absolutely on the top of its form. I don't think I've every played as well as I did on those nights in Japan. I listen back and I think 'Christ, is that me?'. Excuse me immodesty, but it's tough to choose a favourite 'cos I love 'em all. They're all great. There's bits on very single one of them that encapsulates a certain time of my life for me. I'm very proud of the things we've done. I've had a great career. I've been very lucky".
The final Purple split came in July 1976, and until the first reformation in November 1984 Jon Lord played as part of David Coverdale's Whitesnake.
"A great fun band. We were playing in the middle of a time when everyone was out buying punk, and what were they called . . . the New Romantics or something? All those kinds of early Midge Ure kind of bands. And right in the grip of the teeth of that we were the top-selling concert-ticket band in Europe. And we were playing a sort of modern R...B!"
The biggest Whitesnake album, Love Hunter, came in a lurid sleeve portraying a naked woman straddling a hugely phallic serpent, the kind of neolithic sexual imagery suddenly shoved into even sharper caricature by the prevailing anti-sexist mood of the New Wave.
"David's lyrics? Yes - he liked to write that way, didn't he? I must admit the rest of the band used to be a little worried about David's lyrics," he chortles. "We felt like saying 'can't you . . . you know? Occasionally he wrote some wonderful glorious rock 'n' roll poetry which he got into some of his songs. I mean the opening lines of 'Here I Go Again', they are great - "I don't where I'm going but I sure know where I've been" - that's a classic opening line. So I have a lot of time for his ability as a writer, except when he used to get into that 'Slide it in; double-entendre sex bit. David's double-entendres were more like single entendres!"
Heavy Metal is a ham-fisted clichéd stylised style populated by more living dinosaurian relics than Jurassic Park, but even here, over twenty-five years, there's been radical evolutions in various directions, Death-Metal, Speed-Metal, Thrash, Pop-Metal. What about Deep Purple's contemporary opposition?
"I hear some good things. I hear some things that make me cringe. But that's the same in any music isn't it? I can't possible make a sweeping statement and say 'I like that kind of music without any reservations'.
"I went to see Metallica last year, I think they're supposed to be one of the credible bands. They're brilliant . . . at what they do. I met the guys and they were very pleasant. They played a superb show and they did a couple of Purple numbers as a tribute to us, which was very nice. Superb stuff. But it's not . . . it's not . . . it's not what I would choose to go and listen to. If you want high-power stadium Heavy Metal they're very exciting. But at the same time, I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool fan."
So, finally, what's it like to be described as the inventor of all this global metal mayhem?
"Someone once said to me 'your band are the Fathers of Heavy Metal'," he relates with evident amusement. "And I said 'that child is not mine!!!'".