It’s with great excitement that we here at The Deep Purple Podcast announce the upcoming book “Before We Forget” by our good friend and patron Ovais Naqvi.
Ovais has worked tirelessly over the past two years speaking with dozens of collaborators, friends, and family members of the late Jon Lord to bring forth this superb work on his life and career. Within is the most complete and meticulously detailed account of the gear and instruments he used to style some of the greatest recorded music of the past 50 years.
The Author in His Own Words:
“I grew up in North West London (the home of Charlie Watts, Keith Moon and Nicky Hopkins), listening to Jon Lord’s extraordinary sounds and music and the idea of this biography was to celebrate his genius, but to approach him from the direction of sound, instrumentation and musical DNA”, writes the author Ovais Naqvi. “I was less interested in his “life”, even, in a way, wanting to continue to protect his privacy and I was more interested in how such remarkable musicality emerged from a small semi-detached house in Averil Road in Leicester in the 1940s.
“My question, ‘was how could a kid growing up in austere 1950s Britain, become so adept at so many forms of music?’ Then, when you turn to the London live scene from 1964, from his knowing the teenage Ronnie Wood and living in his mum’s house, to playing alongside his brother Art Wood, Jimmy Page, Ray Davies, being on Ready Steady Go!, to being at the Apple Records launch party, Lord is here, there and everywhere – even before Deep Purple form in 1968.
“He could play jazz, blues, R&B, soul and pop and compose orchestral music, alongside coinventing decibel-breaking heavy rock, all with equal facility. That’s incredible in itself and led me to ask ‘how’, with what kind of a musical brain – and with which tools – did he manage to achieve all that? That is, in essence, what drove this amazing journey”.
Never before has anyone taken such account of the gear setups that Jon Lord used over the years. This book serves as an amazing telling of Jon Lord’s musical endeavors but also serves as an important reference of the equipment and instrumentation he used throughout his storied career.
The book contains full identification of all the Hammond organs he played on a permanent and long-term hired basis in Deep Purple and Whitesnake between February 1968 and September 2002.
This includes an array of over 50 electric and acoustic pianos, monophonic synths, polyphonic synths, effects units, sampling units, MIDI synthesisers and keyboard module units.
Ovais has had the fortune to connect with Deep Purple as well as Paul Mann to discuss Jon’s life and legacy.
This book is an absolute must for any fan of Jon Lord, Deep Purple, or the incredible advancements and influence that keyboards and synthesizers have had on the music over the past 50+ years.
You can pre-order the book here.