{"id":581336,"date":"2026-05-13T08:06:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T08:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/581336\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T08:06:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T08:06:17","slug":"why-deep-purple-tried-to-blockade-their-1970-breakthrough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/581336\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Deep Purple tried to blockade their 1970 breakthrough"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Deep<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy<\/p>\n

One of the cruellest ironies in music is that you can spend months, even years, painstakingly perfecting every detail of a song, only for it to still fall short of something Deep Purple<\/a> came up with in the early 1970s while drunk and running on almost no sleep.<\/p>\n

Now a staple of every self-respected dad rock record collection in the world, Deep Purple were once the bold, subversive harbingers of hard rock revolution, and it was the band\u2019s famed \u2018Mark II\u2019 line-up that first struck upon that sound. Transforming from the 1960s hippiedom of their early days<\/a> certainly came with its growing pains but, in the tradition of virtually every half-decent rock band, the transition was eased along by copious nights spent in the local boozer. <\/p>\n

Even during the creation of Deep Purple\u2019s ultimate masterpiece, In Rock, which firmly cemented the group among the greatest of the early 1970s, as well as becoming a milestone in rock and roll\u2019s development from being singles-based to LP-focused, the band members often found their inspiration in the bottom of pint glasses. In fact, the album\u2019s stand-out track, and the biggest commercial hit Deep Purple ever amassed, owed itself solely to that Dutch courage. <\/p>\n

Revisiting the recording process of In Rock during a 2011 edition of Uncut<\/a>, the band members recalled that their record label demanded a single, yet to be convinced of the commercial values of being an LP-only rock band. However, the album was already finished, and the band\u2019s creative resources were rapidly running dry so, after a fruitless day in the studio trying to write a single, they retired to The Newton Arms, a legendary pub in Holburn, London. <\/p>\n

After drinking the kinds of copious amounts of alcohol you would expect a hard rock band to get through, Deep Purple returned, stumbling and slurring, to the recording studio, and laid down \u2018Black Night\u2019. <\/p>\n

With Ritchie Blackmore borrowing a riff<\/a> from Ricky Nelson\u2019s \u2018Summertime\u2019, and the rest of the band largely improvising around that, the band recorded the single in a drunken malaise and, by all accounts, didn\u2019t expect it to see the light of day in any major way.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the band\u2019s management and record label saw \u2018Black Night\u2019 as a natural single release. \u201cWe said, \u2018You can\u2019t release that, we were pissed,\u2019\u201d bassist Roger Glover reportedly declared. Ian Gillan tended to agree, opposing the idea of becoming a \u2018singles band\u2019 in any capacity. <\/p>\n

Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we were anti-commercial. But we were anti-contrivance,\u201d the vocalist shared. \u201cAnd, like Zeppelin, we found dignity through the music we were playing. It wasn\u2019t slung together by a producer and a publisher.\u201d <\/p>\n

Adding, \u201cWe decided we were going to take hold of our music and let it evolve organically.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, though, those producers and publishers turned out to be correct; \u2018Black Night\u2019 was released as a single in June of 1970, and it went on to peak at number two in the UK singles charts, becoming the band\u2019s all-time best-selling single and a firm fan-favourite in the process. Not bad for a song recorded in the wake of a particularly heavy pub session. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy One of the cruellest ironies in music is that you can spend months,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[52312,96,128,37001,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-581336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-deep-purple","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-ritchie-blackmore","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}