Posted on by Nathan Beaudry

Episode #276 – Deep Purple – = 1 (Part 2)

Link to video episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgCzjKZx8Q

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Album Tracks:

  1. I’m Saying Nothin’
  2. Lazy Sod
    • “Recently, a young journalist asked me how many songs I had written in my life. I replied that the last time my assistant counted, twenty years ago, it was over 500. I felt quite accomplished until she pointed out Dolly Parton’s 5,000 songs, calling me a lazy sod. I couldn’t help but agree and wrote down the exchange in my notebook.” Ian Gillan in a recent interview (ROCKS magazine, June 2024)
  3. Now You’re Talkin’
  4. No Money To Burn
  5. I’ll Catch You
  6. Bleeding Obvious

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Reception and Charts:

  • In Classic Rock UK Ian Gillan says: “I didn’t want to conceptualise the album, but I wanted some common thread. There’s no literal connection, it’s just a mood thing. They feel like they’re all coming from the same room.”

Reviews

  • Classic Rock interview from June.
  • Power Play Rock & Metal Magazine
  • Rasmus Heide in The Highway Star
  • ROCKS Magazin #101 (Translation by Raff Kaff)
    • Deep Purple =1
    • A classic
    • When Deep Purple announced the definite departure of Steve Morse, who worked for Deep Purple for nearly 3 decades- longer than any other guitarist- and who built an era with the band that had late career highlights with the release of the album trilogy Now What, Infinite and Whoosh, you could have bet that that was it for the hard rock troopers that entered the ring in 1968.
    • However, Deep Purple have always been a band that lived and played by their own rules.
    • The sympathy, that one would like to extend to him ( Morse) after the first incredulous listen is insofar no surprise. He, who kept Purple alive for so long and accomplished great things, but who, for many, played too delicately, with too little power and, after all, not dominantly enough.
    • What had happened? The gentlemen that had turned gray in dignity stand at the very front of the stage together with their new guitarist Simon Mc Bride and stick their bare behinds with delight and in unison into the faces of the notorious nay-sayers, for whom DP ceased to exist after the final exit of Ritchie Blackmore in 1993.
    • =1 is an inspired, hard and playfully fresh album whose obvious guitar sound surprises the listener and which excites with attainable songs. [An album] that pushes all of its classical characteristics through the filter of time (?). All that with a belligerent and physical presence, that even the comeback album from years ago “Perfect Strangers” lacked in some places.
    • It only takes the first one and a half songs to be sucked deeply into =1. The record begins with a percussive guitar-figure that goes on to become the first significant guitar riff of the Mark 9 incarnation throigh a very poignant tonal sequence.
    • As soon as Don Airey’s meaty organ passages set in, that McBride answers forcefully with mighty rhythm salvos, the sound and effect of “Show Me” result in some parallels to “Highway Star”- performed with the maturity of a band that has nearly 60 eventful business years to show for themselves. Anyhow, the organ and guitar point, time and again, to the legendary double Lord-Blackmore.
    • Following up, “A bit on the Side” with its trudging Bass goes much furtherand lets their ( the band’s) unbrifled greed for jams shine through, from which DP shape their songs these days. A short Synth-solo in the middle, an Organ-Drum break ( Ian Paice is THE swing machine anyway and simply the bomb!), then it continues with the remainder of the verse. And then, when everything could be well and over with, McBride comes along with a teeth-baring solo, as if there was no tomorrow- a dream of a Jam-inferno, much too short for a record, that Airey rekindles time and again with his organ passages. You just have to sit down for a bit afterwards!( like you have to catch your breath)
    • Also “Sharp Shooter” lives on a surprisingly hard guitar riff that is kept on a 70s level by Airey’s smacking organ. Shortly before and during McBride’s lead entry there are indeed a few “Space Truckin'” moments: Whoever struggled with the more mellow guitar work on the Morse-era albums will be absolutely delighted. Especially by the brooding “No Money to Burn”. “A Portable Door”, with its majestic shuffle groove, is the catchiest and by far the most classic (i.e. most MK2 -like) Purple piece in a thousand years, in which organ and guitar align first, then hiss and spit (like a cat)  at each other.
    • “Old Fangled Thing” is a playful piece, during which it seems that Alice Cooper might have shown up in the studio. There is a second Cooper moment on “Lazy Sod” that, aside from that, could have easily been created with Riff Master Ritchie Blackmore himself.
    • “If I were you”, as a focused power ballad, could pass for a sequel to “When A Blind Man Cries and possesses a touching, sentimental quality only in part due to the age in Gillan’s vocal delivery and the added strings. McBride’s power-blues solo reminds, in its singing tone and expression, of Gary Moore as well as Warren Haynes. Deep Purple saved two of their most genius numbers for last: The highly dramatic
    • “I’ll catch you” begins almost like a depressing Broadway-bar number, Ian Gillan’s story-telling in the surrounding of his band gives goose bumps that McBride intensifies with his lead interjections. And when 
    • “Bleeding Obvious concludes the album, raising a crazy Prog suite that gives a Purple nod to Kansas, Dream Theater and even briefly Iron Maiden, the craziness is complete. As fantastic as the precursors with Steve Morse may have been: maybe they were “merely” the groundwork to this unbridled album with brutally strong and memorable songs, with which the British gentlemen give Simon McBride an unshakeable place in the band’s history and take him along to the Pantheon of rock history.
    • “Machine Head” and “In rock” do not shrink by a millimeter if one states the truth: =1 is a classic!
    • 10/10

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