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EXPLAINED: Jon lord | Rare Historical Photos

"I don't know how many thousands of times I've sung it, but I've never once thought 'Oh no, not tonight'." How Deep Purple created an all-time hard rock classic with a song that "didn't go anywhere"

Built from a riff that came from nowhere, Smoke On The Water has been covered by everyone from ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic to Black Sabbath

Louder

"Can this possibly be the perfect rock album?" Deep Purple climb an early pinnacle on Machine Head

Machine Head was the album that set the template for Deep Purple’s entire future direction

Louder

“Jon offered me the gig and I turned him down. It still amazes me how close I came to not following this path”: Roger Glover’s path to bass greatness with Deep Purple

Along with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, Deep Purple formed the holy trinity of hard rock that would ultimately induce heavy metal

Guitar World

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Ritchie Blackmore finally confirms that yes, Christopher Cross really did replace him at a Deep Purple show that one time

The incident took place in Texas in 1970 after Blackmore reacted badly to some flu shots

Louder

"I'd been conscious of hardly ever being able to capture the heart, soul and spirit of the band." How David Coverdale led a fans' choir to create the connoisseur's favourite Whitesnake album

With three studio albums under their belt, Whitesnake unleashed their live sound on the world in a double dose of Hammersmith havoc

Louder

"I was so terrified to go out I stayed in my room for a week." Rare 1974 talkshow footage starring Ozzy Osborne, Jon Lord and Ian Hunter appears online

The Speakeasy footage is hosted by famed Woodstock MC Chip "Brown Acid" Monck

Louder

"So there I was slinging names about and accusing them of all sorts of things – dastardly deeds and vile occurrences!" Feuding and in crisis, Deep Purple combined two high-profile figures to create an anti-censorship classic

The story of a song that merged Mary Whitehouse's infamous clean-up campaign with tensions caused by Ritchie Blackmore

Louder

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"Sweat was dripping off the walls!" Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood looks back on the '60s, shares memories of The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix and Deep Purple's Jon Lord

Ronnie Wood hasn't lost his enthusiasm for rock 'n' roll

Louder

“I was always pushing him to go back to playing the organ through an amp for some solos… y’know, the sound that he had in the Machine Head days”: Steve Morse on why he loved writing with Jon Lord and the Deep Purple track that started with a cup of tea

Steve Morse on how a noodle during one of Deep Purple's many tea breaks ended up on the album, and the mixed reception from Ritchie Blackmore fans when he'd improvise onstage

MusicRadar

“I was afraid. The idea of being unable to sing and perform was horrifying. All the things you take for granted suddenly taken away from you. It was a very troubling time in my life”: An epic interview with rock legend and Whitesnake star David Coverdale

The highs and lows of an extraordinary career

MusicRadar

“Vanilla Fudge had covered a Supremes hit and turned it into something else. That’s what the band tried to do – put their own spin on it”: The iconic cover version that launched a legendary hard rock band – but nearly turned them into one-hit-wonders

It came a year before Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath released their debut albums

Louder

Glenn Hughes has played with Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Black Country Communion and more - but he should never have left his first band

Glenn Hughes has spent more than 50 years in rock - and he's ready to talk about it all

Louder

“I was driven to Ritchie’s house in Surrey. That was the big test. Sitting in his crazy bar, listening to his amazing demos on a Revox tape machine”: David Coverdale recalls his baptism of fire with Deep Purple

MusicRadar

“We went back to the castle, went down to the dungeon where we were set up, figured out what key we were gonna play in – and then Blackmore came up with that riff!”: Glenn Hughes recalls his magical time with Deep Purple in the ’70s

“I’m very proud of everything that I did with that band," he says

MusicRadar

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The Guardian - UK

‘It’s like having a button that makes the audience go nuts’: Deep Purple on Smoke on the Water

‘We went to see Frank Zappa at Montreux casino. But someone fired a flare gun into the ceiling and – whoosh! The whole building went up in flames’

Metal Hammer

"He was being very naughty under the piano with a woman at the same time he was singing": The epic story of the ‘stolen’ song that could be the next Stranger Things hit

Deep Purple's Child In Time has a long and complicated history – and now a whole new audience are hearing it for the first time

Louder

"The main difference between Future Shock and a Deep Purple record is the trimming of self-indulgent and meandering solos": Gillan's Future Shock pays sonic tribute to their singer's illustrious past

Future Shock found Gillan with a free-spirited sound thatbrought to mind nothing so much as an update on vintage Deep Purple

Louder

“The first time I played Rush’s YYZ I almost broke my fingers!” Epica bassist Rob Van Der Loo’s prog timeline, from Jon Lord to Dream Theater

Deep Purple’s Concerto For Group And Orchestra opened the door to the Dutch artist’s own career in symphonic rock

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Metal Hammer

“We had an exploding Marshall cabinet. The roadies put too much gasoline in it, and it almost blew Ritchie Blackmore offstage”: A metal fan’s guide to Deep Purple, one of hard rock’s original Holy Trinity

Along with Sabbath and Zeppelin, Deep Purple helped craft the primordial goop that spawned metal

Louder

“Pink Floyd weren’t available. Jon Lord turned it down. So it came my way”: Roger Glover made an unexpected success of the soundtrack to a movie that never happened – but was it prog?

Having recently quit Deep Purple, the bassist was looking for a new challenge in 1973. It came in the form of The Butterfly Ball And The Grasshopper’s Feast, featuring notable prog guest stars

Louder

“I had a meltdown. Cocaine psychosis took over – it’s a form of paranoid schizophrenia”: How Deep Purple split from Ritchie Blackmore and made a funky masterpiece in Come Taste The Band

Ritchie Blackmore was out, US hotshot Tommy Bolin was in and Deep Purple’s Mk IV line-up were about to make the most under-rated album of their career

Louder

"There has been no better ambassador for the electric guitar": Bernie Marsden, remembered

Best known for co-founding Whitesnake and as a writer of some of their classic songs, Bernie Marsden spent a lifetime walking in the shadow of the blues

The Independent UK

Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan: ‘I’ve seen parties too wild to describe’

The frontman of the heavy rock monsters talks to Mark Beaumont about booze, the sexual wildness of the Sixties, living out Spinal Tap moments, and the band’s new album

Louder

“We’d arranged to do an album of new material together. He called me… ‘I’ve got cancer; do you mind if we put things on hold?’ Sadly it never happened”: Rick Wakeman’s tribute to Jon Lord

Deep Purple icon, who inspired Yes counterpart to remake Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, had a wicked sense of humour and was a true progger at heart

Louder

"The freedom and joy we had, and the confidence in each other, is remarkable": Ian Gillan looks back at Deep Purple's Machine Head era

With Deep Purple’s original plans for their sixth album having literally gone up in smoke, Machine Head was a triumph snatched from the jaws of disaster

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