(Credits: Far Out / W.W.Thaler – H.Weber, Hildesheim)
Mon 1 September 2025 17:30, UK
When assessing heavy metal’s most important pioneers, the silver medal after a certain quartet of Brummie occultists has to be handed to Deep Purple.
There’ll be contestation, sure. Led Zeppelin likely holds many metal fans’ second place, and not forgetting The Who’s raucous racket and The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ blistering their suffering drummer’s fingers that paved the way, but the weighty grooves conjured by London’s Deep Purple point the way for the new wave of British heavy metal set to explode by the 1970s’ close.
It was the ‘Mk II’ line-up that would stand as Deep Purple’s classic era. Adding to founding members Jon Lord’s heavy keys and Ritchie Blackmore’s hefty guitar attack was new frontman Ian Gillan, imbuing their thick plume of swirling proto-metal fug with his gusto and commanding vocal prowess.
Cutting four records during this period, it would be 1972’s Machine Head that would endure as their defining album entry-point, owing much eternal fascination to the strength of its second UK single.
Deep Purple’s biggest hit was born from disaster. Having booked Switzerland’s Montreux Casino to record the Machine Head sessions, plans were scuppered when an audience member at Frank Zappa’s headline show the previous night at the casino’s theatre let off a flare gun towards the venue’s rattan-covered ceiling, the space suddenly catching fire the moment Mothers of Invention keyboardist Don Preston was about to break into ‘King Kong’s synthesizer solo.
Deep Purple eventually had to settle for the nearby Hôtel des Alpes-Grand Hôtel, as well as The Rolling Stones’ much sought-after portable recording Turbo truck. Inspired by the smoke hovering over Lake Geneva, a rough jam in need of lyrics prompted the band to craft a slapdash account of their pyrodrama into the immortal ‘Smoke on the Water’, replete with lines that play out with an urgent reportage on the jam they’d found themselves in: “We ended up at the Grand Hotel / It was empty cold and bare / But with the Rolling truck Stones thing just outside / Making our music there”.
From calamity was plucked a heavy-metal mined gem. Edited down to a radio-friendly single edit, ‘Smoke on the Water’ would smash global charts and stands as a foundational record for the world’s nascent metalheads, pushing Machine Head to the very top of the UK Albums chart and unleashing on music an insanely infectious riff that many people find themselves humming or whistling who otherwise know nothing of Deep Purple or even much of rock.
It’s also a number Gillan still finds joy in performing, from his brief days fronting Black Sabbath to his solo shows years later. “Like all the narrative songs, you can place yourself there, he confessed to Songfacts in 2020. “It’s fantastic, I love singing it. It’s such a groove. And the important thing is everyone in the audience is so involved in the song, and of course, they know every word and the groove. It’s a shared experience. It’s like a congregational euphoria. It’s amazing. It’s fantastic. I love it”.
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