sacrifices onstage.’ This kept people off their back for a while, but not for long. When Ozzy left the group in 1977, worn out from drunkenness and a recent death in his family, the Sabs ploughed on with another singer. Then another, and another. Altogether, if we come right up to date, they’ve had nine different singers, not to mention several bass players and drummers. Only Tony has remained at the helm throughout, keeping the Sabbath fires burning. And for that, surely, we have to salute him.
The third band in this Holy Trinity, Deep Purple, have had so many members that I can’t be bothered to name them, and that’s before we get to all the offshoot bands like Rainbow, Whitesnake and Dio. The Purps were a middle-class group, there were five of them, and one of those played the organ. I never liked them – they had an organ. The Purps didn’t set out to be Heavy Metal (they originally consisted of just the old drummer from the Searchers, and then he found a keyboard player to give him a hand), but after a while they couldn’t help themselves. The man in charge of Deep Purple was the legendary ‘Man in Black’, Ritchie Blackmore (not Johnny Cash). He was a great guitar player, but a guy with issues, and a legendarily short fuse.
The Purps named their fourth album Concerto for Group and Orchestra. It was singer Ian Gillan’s first with the band, and hardly an auspicious start. It was recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and it came with Movements. Odd as it sounds, it was only after this ambitious call-to-arms that they really got into gear and produced the body of work that gets connoisseurs into such a froth.
In Rock, Machine Head, Fireball, Made in Japan: don’t those names raise the hairs on the back of your neck? These are true foundation blocks of the catacombs of rock. Every second-hand record shop and record fair is virtually obliged to have a set of these albums somewhere within its midst, each for sale at a stone-cold 50 pence. Their sleeve designs should be etched on to your retinas. Which is the one that replaces the American presidents’ faces of Mount Rushmore with the Purps themselves? I raise an eyebrow at you if you don’t know this one. (In Rock.)
The Purps’ sound was actually very traditional. Ian Gillan was a true blue, straight down the line, classic Metal singer, and he had a decent set of pipes on him, but there was none of the spark, none of the pace-setting characterised by the blazing Zep or the grinding Sabs. The Purps were good guys; they could be depended on to churn out the tunes, crank up the juice, dust down their chops, crank up their chops, and dust down the juice, but they never had a dimension all of their own. On a good night, Blackmore and organist Jon Lord would ‘duel’, sometimes for up to 20 minutes, and the loser would get their amps blown up by the road crew afterwards. Not really.
The Purps’ most notorious moment came as they recorded their seminal Machine Head album in Switzerland. The band observed Montreux casino burn down during a Frank Zappa concert and the smoke from the fire drifting over the lake inspired one of the most famous Metal songs ever, ‘Smoke on the Water’. The riff is basic and dead easy to play and the whole thing goes on way too long, but to this day ‘Smoke’ remains the most played air guitar track in the history of rock. Not the whole song, just the opening bit, the good bit.
Blackmore and Gillan never really hit it off, though, and after this run of classic albums Gillan left the group to form his own band, which he called Gillan. The Purps replaced him with David Coverdale, who was soon to leave to form Whitesnake, but Blackmore remained unsatisfied and so left himself to form Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio, who then fell out with Blackmore and left to join Black Sabbath for a while and then form his own band, which he called Dio. Blackmore called in Graham Bonnet, but he didn’t last long and was replaced by Joe Lynn Turner, who, although getting on better with Blackmore than his predecessors, was less of a hit with the record-buying public. Their sales tumbled. In the meantime, Gillan had disbanded his own band, thinking Blackmore was about to recall the Purps, but he wasn’t, so Gillan joined Black Sabbath for a while instead. Only then did Blackmore phone him up, and, at last, in 1984, the Purps were back.
Then they did this merry-go-round all over again, and then probably one more time after that.
Ritchie Blackmore is currently performing a mixture of folk and medieval music, playing the mandolin dressed up as a druid with a pointy black hat and a moustache with his wife in an outfit called Blackmore’s Night.
They’re doing quite well.
The Purps are touring the world without him.
Here are some notes on a few more big 70s bands that crossed my path.
Uriah Heep – The Heep. Led by the interminable Mick Box. Got through scores of drummers. Début album was called Very ’eavy, Very ’umble. All nearly died of an electric shock onstage in Dallas in ’76. First Metal band to play in Moscow. Still going. Which album should you buy? Still ’eavy, Still Proud: Two Decades of Uriah Heep.
Thin Lizzy – Invented the classic ‘twin lead guitar’ sound that I mistakenly considered Iron Maiden better at.
Budgie – This posse of Welsh stalwarts emerged from humble boogie-woogie roots. Their album covers featured images of budgerigars dressed up in different outfits. Most notably a budgie dressed up in full Nazi Gestapo gear, and another with a squadron of fighter budgies dive-bombing enemy emplacements. Which album? Squawk.
Nazareth – Scottish. Rumbling. Big in Canada. Which album? Rampant.
The Groundhogs – A trio. Invented Grunge. Greasy and moustachioed. Intermittently brilliant. Album? Split.
Mountain – Leslie West their leader was incredibly fat. Their song ‘Nantucket Sleighride’ became the theme music for television’s World in Action. That’s all I know.
Dumpys Rusty Nuts – didn’t start until the 80s.
Jethro Tull – No.
THE FIVE HORSEMEN OF ARMAGEDDON
Armageddon’s Ring still needed a drummer and a vocalist who could sing and whose voice had broken, and to get rid of Luke as soon as possible. My father’s response upon hearing our cassette had been to walk out of the room at the first drill of Luke’s solo broadside.
‘I spoke to Luke actually,’ said Paul, soon after that first rehearsal. ‘Just yesterday in fact.’
‘I don’t suppose he’s decided to leave the band?’
‘No, he was saying how excited he feels about our progress to date. He said he’s going to go and buy a Marshall amplifier next weekend so we can hear him a bit better.’
‘Oh, I see.’
I practised manically. I pledged to myself that I would play guitar for at least two hours every day, and stuck to this schedule religiously. The songs I was writing now were twice as complicated as before: they had quiet intros, sultry middle-eights, spastic codas, indeed anything and everything I could squeeze in. I even began to conceive an Armageddon’s Ring concept album based around a massive nuclear war, but I couldn’t think of any concepts to go with it except explosions. I played in my small bedroom, trying to headbang but unable to because it made me dizzy, while my family banged on the wall.
Then, one afternoon, my eye was caught by some brightly coloured, ‘electrocuted’ capital letters on the front of a magazine in WHSmith: Kerrang! It looked amazing, revolutionary, so I peered a little closer. The front page was claiming a world exclusive: my hero from Kiss, Ace Frehley, pictured for the first time ever without his make-up on. The picture was crap, though: Ace was wearing huge sunglasses and covering the bottom of his face with his hand; you couldn’t see anything except a few pockmarks. But I was still sufficiently excited to snatch up the magazine and buy it straight away. Sitting on my bed back home, I devoured every revelatory word. Here was my world on the page. I’d had no idea such a source existed. I read every article seven or eight times, picking up vital Metal information: links of different band personnel;