Their magnificent guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, has long since left the band for a life of quasi-medieval music-making. Their keyboard player, that classically trained gentleman of arts and letters Jon Lord, has lately passed away. And yet, in a band with just one member of the original lineup remai...
NOW WHAT?!
EDEL/EARMUSIC, 2013
A meeting with producer Bob Ezrin proves instructive. An attempt to bottle live lightning in the studio prompts a generally exciting return.
IAN GILLAN: The fans wanted it, the label wanted it. No-one in the band was particularly interested in it – we’re basically a performing band, and we had all the material we needed.
ROGER GLOVER: There was some talk that we shouldn’t do albums anymore. But we’re an albums band and if it’s out of fashion or not, I think we have to stick to who we are. We did start thinking about it two years ago – we had a writing session in Spain. Some of the key ideas came from that session. Then a year ago Bob Ezrin came to see us in Toronto and he just inspired us. The next writing session we had in Dusseldorf in a big hangar, was with two words of his in mind: “stretch out”.
IAN PAICE: We met with him in Canada and we realised we were all on the same page: to try and catch in the studio some of the magic that goes on onstage – which happens and then is gone. Bob said, “That’s what you want to capture.” There’s a lot of musicality in the old records. We took a couple of weeks in a soundstage in a town in Germany and chucked ideas out. We honed them, sent the ideas to Bob and after that it became easy.
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