About Me
Their first studio album of this period, released in mid-1970, was Deep Purple in Rock (a name deliberately chosen to distance the rock album from the concerto) and contained the then-concert staples "Speed King", "Into The Fire", and "Child in Time". The band also issued the UK Top Ten single "Black Night". Blackmore's and Lord's guitar-keyboard interplay coupled with Ian Gillan's howling vocals and the rhythm section of Glover and Paice now started to take on a unique identity and become instantly recognisable to rock fans throughout Europe. A second album, the more mellow and creatively progressive Fireball (a favourite of Gillan but not of the rest of the band ), was issued in the summer of 1971. The title track "Fireball" was released as a single, as was "Strange Kind of Woman" - not from the album but recorded during the same sessions. Within weeks of Fireball's release, the band was already performing songs planned for the next album. One song (which later became "Highway Star") was performed at the first gig of the Fireball tour, having been written on the bus to a show in Portsmouth, in answer to a journalist's question: "How do you go about writing songs?" Three months later, in December 1971, the band traveled to Switzerland to record Machine Head. The album was due to be recorded at a casino in Montreux, using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, but a fire during a Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention gig burned down the casino. The album was actually recorded at the nearby empty Grand Hotel. This incident famously inspired the song "Smoke on the Water". Gillan believes that he witnessed a man fire a flare gun into the ceiling during the concert, prompting Zappa to comment: "Arthur Brown in person!" Continuing from where both previous albums left off, Machine Head has since become one of the band's most famous albums, including tracks that became live classics such as "Highway Star", "Space Truckin'", "Lazy", and "Smoke on the Water". Deep Purple continued to tour and record at a rate that would be rare thirty years on: when Machine Head was recorded, the group had only been together three and a half years, yet it was their seventh LP. Meanwhile the band undertook four US tours in 1972 and the August tour of Japan that led to a double-vinyl live release, Made in Japan. Originally intended as a Japan-only record, its world-wide release saw the double become an instant hit. It remains one of rock music's most popular and highest selling live-concert recordings (although at the time it was perhaps seen as less important, as only Glover and Paice turned up to mix it). The classic Purple Mk 2 line-up continued to work and released the album Who Do We Think We Are (1973), featuring the hit single "Woman from Tokyo", but internal tensions and exhaustion were more noticeable than ever. The bad feelings culminated in Ian Gillan quitting the band after their second tour of Japan in the summer of 1973, and Roger Glover being pushed out with him.
