Posted on by Nathan Beaudry

Episode #260 – Deep Purple – Rapture of the Deep (Part 1)

Link to video episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15MYpDew4-8

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Lead up to the Album:

  • Roger: Was the songwriting process any different from ‘Bananas’ to ‘Rapture Of The Deep’?
  • “Not really. We all put stuff together before we meet up but in a strange kind of way it writes itself really. The songs take on their own life when everyone starts chipping in. We really feed off each other. Sometimes that means they get taken off in a direction you might not of thought of, but that’s OK.
    Ian writes about 75% of the lyrics and his stuff is often very wild and wacky, whilst my lyrics are more wistful and poetic I suppose. Just those two different ways of looking at things makes for some interesting results. Sometimes you have to fight a bit if it’s one of yours, sometimes you just let it go because it becomes something rather special. If it’s a song that needs to be kept faithful then we all have the luxury of being able to do solo work too, so everybody’s happy.”
  • ‘Rapture Of The Deep’ marks a significant career step for the band, breaking away from EMI. It’s hard to believe they got so complacent with a band like DEEP PURPLE.
  • “We’ve always been in and out of love with EMI, so it was long overdue for a change. As it worked out, circumstances forced our hand but it really has turned out for the best for DEEP PURPLE. It was a total mystery to me why EMI decided not to continue the relationship.”
  • IG: Well, in a couple of respects. It´s obviously the same producer, same city, same line up. But there was some differences, yes. We came off the back of an 18 month tour with “Bananas”. I mean literally! The band was HOT! I mean there was a tremendous amount of empathy between the musicians, so when we went into the studio there was a…I sat in amazement every day watching these guys work and music was created. And the ideas were flying back and forth and everyone picking up and understanding exactly what was being offered. Someone would start a twiddle a little riff or something like that and everyone would get it straight away. It was great fun! We had no plans and we just decided on a starting date and everyone turned up at the studio and we put the coffee on and told some jokes and talking about the glittering prospects Queens Park Rangers and Sunderland and Nottingham Forest the forthcoming season (laugh). And then we went in and started banging away. Nothing really happened for the first few days and everybody´s just sort of exploring ideas. The only other thing really, apart from that, from a lyrical point of view, was that the previous album was very…leaning very heavily on a political attitude and this one is very much more of a spiritual type of approach.
  • IG on the writing process: It´s a matter of discipline. You go in the studio every day and start jamming. These guys are unbelievable musicians! So they start jamming without a rhythm or a riff or a lick or a chord. Somebody starts a chord sequence and everybody follows. Somebody starts a lick and everyone does a counter riff or whatever and then the dynamics slowly…I´ll give you an example! … They don´t get written as such. The big job of course is writing the words and I normally get up at five o´clock in the morning and prepare those when I´ve got the tunes sorted out in my head. I like to work in the quiet, before the sun comes up. But it´s very spontaneous. It seems to be a very nonchalant approach.
  • Jeff Miers in the Rapture of the Deep Tour Book & Press Release:
    • “Rapture of the Deep” is the spot-on moniker for the disc you hold in your hands, and I’ll stand on any classic rock radio programmer’s desk in my cowboy boots and scream it loud, proud and Gillan-esque; “This is the best Deep Purple album there is, dammit! Forget ‘Machine Head’ – that was then; this is most decidedly now!”
    • This is the fourth record created by the revamped and rejuvenated Purple following the umpteenth departure of the mercurial Mr. Blackmore. The guitarist – one of the most significant in British rock history – had ceased to be a contributing force and was in fact draining Purple of its collective spirit when his ship finally set sail for good, a bit over a decade back.
    • Blackmore’s exit is, in a sense, where our story begins, for the surviving band members left to pick up the pieces in his violent wake – Gillan, Glover, Lord, Paice – agreed unanimously on only one six-stringer, the soon to be knighted Steve Morse. Hardly scraping the dregs from the bottom of the barrel with that choice, boys.
    • This is Deep Purple, 2005 version. Intense, fearless, full of fire, and wit, and passion. Marked by serious virtuosity, but never a slave to it. Still finding new meaning in a medium they all but single-handedly created. Grab ahold of this, and don’t let go.
  • Press Release

Core Band:

Technical:

  • Management [Business] – Barbara Fucigna
  • Management [Personal] – Bruce Payne
  • Mastered By – Andy Van Dette*
  • Producer, Engineer – Michael Bradford
    • Roger: “”Michael Bradford is an engineer, a songwriter, a bass player, he´s a guitarist, he´s good at a lot of things – he´s a good talker, too and he´s a pretty good chef!” Ian and Roger talk about the recording studio “The album was recorded at Michael Bradford´s studio in Los Angeles: He´s moved into a new house with a very nice environment. It´s a small room with a kitchen where we used to stand and write the lyrics and a little yard outside where we could relax and sit in the sunshine, have a beer. We worked there from noon to 6 o´clock – 6 days a week, we didn´t work on sundays, Michael wants a day off, but it´s good to clear your head. And it took five weeks. Yes, it was very interesting, very spontaneous.- Sometimes you have a writing sessions, where you write the songs, then you have a recording session, when you record them. This album was done pretty much at the same time: we´d go in, write what was going to be the idea for the song and immediately go into record mode and captured it. Michael is very good at stopping us from overdoing it. Usually it´s two takes and that´s it! We all played together and the whole album has a spontaneous feel to it we would have lost if had gone over and over. That´s why it´s not perfect!”
  • Technician [Studio and Tour] – Michael Berger (6)
  • Tour Manager – Ian ‘Spider’ Digence*
  • Tour Manager [Assistant] – Andrea Kramer (2)
  • Recorded at Chunky Style Studios in Los Angeles, California.

Album Art & Booklet Review

  • Artwork, Design – Ioannis (2), Roger Glover
    • https://www.thehighwaystar.com/specials/rotd/ioannis.html
    • I have worked with Deep Purple now close to 8 years. Abandon being my first cover with them and it’s been a very rewarding experience.
    • The cover drawing is by Tom Swick, it was a color cartoon that Roger Glover saw in a magazine (New Yorker I think) and thought it was an interesting idea to develop further.
    • Returning from the tour Roger headed down to my design firm, we worked 8 -9 hour days for about a week or so and designed together the packaging for the new album which includes a 2 disc LP, Two Digipaks (10 and 11 song versions) complete with 16 page booklets different from the CD version. 3 CD jewelcases with a 16 page booklet (10, 11 songs version and a Japanese version) and a promo poster.
    • We created 17 pieces of original art (with the origin being the cartoon) that I’m really proud of. The cover though is really all Roger’s design. He picked the color, font, title art, and had the cartoon version done as a simple B/W.
    • Roger and I worked together as art directors which was a blast.
    • We are talking about doing a book project together and will hopefully work on the 2006 tour merchandise late next month.
    • Ioannis
  • Painting – Tom Swick
    • Only one other entry on discogs.
  • Ian:”It´s a phrase coined by Jacques Cousteau to define the confused state you get into as a diver when you get down to three atmospheres, which is 30 metres or a hundred feet. And you go through a feeling of euphoria; it has a strange physiological effect on your mind and your machine function. It´s a bit like being drunk and stoned – not that I would know, of course (laughs).-
  • A fan sent in a small picture: In a small village in England there was a pond and there was a sign in the water saying “Danger – deep water” and somebody had crossed out “water” and put in “purple” instead. And so it was in the back of our minds and “Rapture of the deep” described very well the way I was thinking at the time: If you are in a condition like that, you start thinking about things in a different way. And there is quite a lot of spiritual content in the underlying theme of the lyrics of four or five songs certainly. It´s not to be taken literally – it´s a word picture.”
  • Ian and Roger: “”The man is standing with two trees on every side and he´s like a reflection, but if you look into the water, the trees are wobbling and he´s straight. It´s thought-provoking, that´s the idea of it.- Rapture is a happy state, it´s a state you´d like to be in, but the more happier you get, the more dangerous it is!”

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Album Tracks:

  1. Money Talks
    • From Wikipedia: “The track “Money Talks” sees singer Ian Gillan perform the widest vocal range heard on any Deep Purple recording, with the bridge featuring a double-tracked deep bass vocal and the song’s coda featuring a high-pitched scream.” (uncited)
    • Ian Paice (from interview with Benny Holstrom): There is another one, “Money Talks”, that I think can be a really great live track. And one of the obscure ones, one of the strange ones could turn into something wonderful. 
    • Gillan: “This is based on the principle, I think, that money as a currency is an essential tool in civilization. However, when money becomes a commodity it takes on a very nasty complexion. If people are just interested in trading money to make money someone else has to pay for it! So it´s talking about that, it´s talking about the corruption. I mean, there is nothing wrong with earning money, there is nothing wrong with enjoying life but it´s against the greed and corruption that takes place just to accumulate wealth on other people´s expense and so there are references in that about having more food on your plate than you need and not to worry, cause there are guards at the gate. Money always comes back to money, money makes money and it whispers in my ear, it laughs at me – it´s corrupting!”
  2. Girls Like That
    • Ian Paice, when asked if there was a song he would have left off: ““Girls Like That” was that song for me. I thought that’s ok, but I would have left “Girls Like That” off, but Don [Airey] thinks “Girls Like That” is great; so there we go, we just gave up in the end. One day all the music will come out, so it doesn’t matter.“
  3. Wrong Man
    • Ian Paice: “Wrong Man” is just a great rock ‘n’ roll track. They’re the only two we have tried on stage so far (referring to “Rapture of the Deep”, but I get the feeling that three or four more will happen that way.
    • “Wrong Man” got lost. The idea for that came out of the “Bananas” sessions, right at the very, very end. We had finished recording, we were just jamming and I captured it on tape, brought it back to the studio and said, “This is too good for us to throw away”. And there are a couple of other things which we started jamming on earlier in the day before we got into the process of recording what we had done the day before. So some tunes got forgotten, but they are still there, so whenever we go back into the studio again, I’ll bring them back in.
    • We have one wonderful thing Steve [Morse] does, which is very fast, very rhythmic and has the same appeal to me as the riff from “Wrong Man”. I’ll bring that in next time and we’ll get a little bit of extra help from “Rapture” on whatever the next record is, we get something to start with anyway. There are so many ideas, we could have gone on for another three weeks and done a whole new album. We could have done two albums, but we made one album, that’s enough. But the ideas were flowing in, I must say… the ideas were just coming out, coming out and they were great ideas.
    • Roger: “Wrong Man” – it´s such a driving riff and it is great to play live.”
  4. Rapture of the Deep
    • Ian Paice: “Well, I think “Rapture Of The Deep” will become a very similar track to “Perfect Strangers”. I think it has that sort of appeal. 
    • IG: “Rapture of the deep”, the title track, we came back in from a coffee break and Don was going (sings the melody). I was going “Ahh, that´s cool!”. He said “You know what? I hear that we´re going to Istanbul. I´ve never been to Turkey before, so I´m just playing…this is called `Turkish delight`!”. And he was just doodeling or whatever you call it, and just exploring a different scale, it´s an Eastern scale. So emediately Ian Paice started playing along with it and it changed the thing completely when you get two musicians. And then everyone else started playing and it became a joy. So all of those things, they evolve. 
    • Roger on Don: “A couple of years later after we’d toured Bananas he was much more confident and much more assertive in his ideas. He was the one who came up with the riff that became “Rapture of the Deep.”
  5. Clearly Quite Absurd
    • IG: It was very difficult to write that one and also “Before time began”. They were really written as instrumentals. Steve Morse, his guitar playing is very lyrical so sometimes it´s difficult to find exactly where to fit in some vocals on the tracks. But you just have to keep working on it and I think these two songs particulary and “Kiss tomorrow goodbye” fit the spiritual…I have this theory that Deep Purple is still going to be going 2000 years from now, in a metaphysical form. So one of the things I´m talking about lyrically on this record is that in order to survive I believe that the human race needs to mutate in to something non physical, because the rate of expansion is clearly unsustainable at this rate. And if you look at the predictions of the population figures of the planet in 50 years from now, that´s all, it makes you tremble. It´s horrific! Anyway, I´m not Bono and I can´t misrepresent the rest of the guys with my views.
  6. Don’t Let Go

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