Deep Purple

Deep Purple’s third album is a photograph taken just before the band changed shape. The 1969 record still features the original Mark I line-up, with Rod Evans singing and Nick Simper on bass, yet the music is already becoming heavier, louder and more guitar-led. Within weeks of its release period, Evans and Simper would be replaced by Ian Gillan and Roger Glover, creating the Mark II formation that would make the band’s best-known hard-rock records.

Recorded between January and March 1969 at De Lane Lea Studios in London with producer Derek Lawrence, Deep Purple grew out of competing musical instincts. Jon Lord remained drawn towards fusing classical ideas with rock, while Ritchie Blackmore was emerging more strongly as a songwriter and pushing the guitar towards the foreground.

The result mixes progressive and psychedelic structures with a harder edge, less tidy than the band they would become but fascinating because those possibilities coexist rather than resolve.

The sessions unfolded around touring commitments and pressure from the band’s American label to find another concise hit after “Hush”. “Emmaretta” was written for that purpose and recorded in January, while “The Bird Has Flown” moved in a heavier and more experimental direction. By the time Deep Purple returned to the United States for another tour in April, their performances were already pushing towards greater volume and weight, even as problems at the nearly bankrupt Tetragrammaton label delayed the album’s manufacture.

Released in the US in June 1969 and later that year in the UK, Deep Purple was the least commercially successful of the three Mark I albums and attracted little critical attention at the time. Retrospective opinion has been kinder, particularly towards its stylistic range and ambitious arrangements. That makes sense. This is not yet the streamlined hard rock of “Smoke on the Water”; it is more revealing than that, a band arguing with itself in public and accidentally sketching the route towards its next identity.