(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 2 December 2025 6:00, UK
Sometimes, the line between being drunk and dreaming is relatively blurred. The two feelings associated with both sensations are very similar, and both experiences can also birth pretty bad creative decisions. Just ask Bruce Springsteen.
Springsteen has written a multitude of songs over the years. Throughout his career, there was never really a period when he stopped putting pick to string and pen to paper in a bid to write songs. He has drawn inspiration from everywhere you could imagine, even from his subconscious. However, writing songs that are inspired by something you come across in a dream is not something which The Boss recommends creatives do frequently, given it doesn’t often sprout good results.
“Usually what happens is you dream a song you’re writing, and you think it’s fantastic. Then you wake up and it’s always not,” explained Springsteen, “You know, there’s something in the dream that feels great but when you wake up it’s like ‘Oh, this is… never mind’.”
You could argue that being drunk does something similar. In the same way, once you’ve had a few beers you begin to think that calling your ex is a good idea, I wonder how many bands have had one too many and started writing a song that was never going to be fit for human consumption. “Play that song we started working on last night,” one member will say, before the most unlistenable culmination of chords blasts its way out of booze-soaked speakers.
Of course, we are always going to have exceptions to rules, and Deep Purple were once on the receiving end of as much. One of the band’s most well-received albums is In Rock, but people appreciate it as an album rather than as a selection of individual songs.
As Ritchie Blackmore and Co tapped into their head-banging roots, they put together a wonderful mosaic of rock that needed to be enjoyed in its entirety. This is great for album lovers, but the record label was concerned by the fact that it didn’t feel like there was a single on the album that they could put on the radio. As such, they asked Deep Purple to write one.
“I love the way that song was born. It happened one night in the studio after we finished Deep Purple In Rock and the management were screaming for a single, because there wasn’t an obvious single on the album,” recalled the band’s bass player Roger Glover, “So we thought that we’d humor them, because we never thought of ourselves as a singles band. We spent a whole afternoon trying to get a riff and nothing happened.”
At a loose end, the band decided to call it a night and headed to the pub. As rock stars do, they ended up drinking a little bit too much, and when the pub eventually closed, they decided to keep the party going back in the studio. It was here that the hazy-brained Ritchie Blackmore came up with a riff that they could run with, and from the harrowing depths of drunken disorder, the single ‘Black Night’ was born. Dreams and drunkenness… sometimes they work.
“Round 7:30 we decided to go down to the pub and stayed there until closing time and came back to the studio completely drunk,” said Glover, “Wherupon Ritchie picked up the guitar and started playing what was to become ‘Black Night’ and we said ‘Yeah, that sounds great let’s do that’.”
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