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A missed opportunity
There is a new book out — it is called Deep Purple From 1984: every album, every song, written by Phil Kafcaloudes, and published by SonicBond. David Black got himself a copy and shares his review with the rest of us. We also received a copy for review, which we hope to complete and publish as soon as possible.
In 2019 SonicBond published Deep Purple and Rainbow 1968-1979: Every Album, Every Song and it was a patchy affair written by a fan of the band but not a hardcore fan and was therefore lacking in depth or insight. When it was announced that the follow-up Deep Purple: From 1984 was to be published but with a different author, I was hoping for an uberfan revealing things I didn’t know. In that respect, the book is a disappointment.
There are three principal failings: lyrical analysis, live recording reviews, and general errors.
From the extensive bibliography listed at the end the author has done some research but his attempts to analyze the lyrics are undermined as he doesn’t appear to be aware of the Caramba! website and Big Ian’s explanations in the wordography section. This results in numerous misinterpretations, which fatally undermine the credibility of the text. For example: he tells us that Knockin’ at Your Back Door is about an uptight woman oral sexed back to life when, as any fule kno, and in the words of the man himself “What I was talking about was good old upright Christian heterosexual buggery as opposed to the other kind.” And this is the very first track reviewed! He is baffled that The Unwritten Law is about venereal disease, misses the point that Ramshackle Man and the “stumbled through the door” line is about Big Ian nakedly crashing into an argument between Ritchie and his girlfriend, that A Castle Full of Rascals is about parliament, gets the source of Hey Cisco wrong, misses that Pictures of Innocence is about the EU commission. Wrong Man is apparently about an unnamed villain whilst we know that it’s Wayne Williams, Rapture of the Deep about “lovin’ and carin’”, and so it goes, and so it goes. There are several more, but it becomes depressing to list how badly the text misses.
The author also sets out to review the live albums but is selective in his choice and the choices are very odd. Perfect Strangers Live is reviewed (without any mention of Ritchie’s less than stellar playing) but In the Absence of Pink isn’t. Nobody’s Perfect is reviewed (and he seems to think in some cases that Ritchie is on top form!) as is Come Hell or High Water, but he reviews the DVD not the CD or the Birmingham/Stuttgart box set. Live in Montreux 1996 is ignored, but Live at the Olympia is reviewed. Live In Rotterdam isn’t. In Concert 1999 concerto is reviewed, but Total Abandon isn’t – which is odd as the author is Australian. The Soundboard Series and Live in London 2002 are absent, but Live at the NEC 2002 DVD is included even though it was part of a larger set. Live in Montreux 2006 is reviewed but yet again it’s the DVD and the last set to warrant reviewing, so Live in Montreux 2011, Verona, Wacken and Setting Sun in Tokyo are all absent.
Compounding all of this are sundry other errors: when reviewing Nobody’s Perfect to not know that the “cool jazz blues, probably the most effective since ‘lazy’ is yet another of the band’s surprises” when we all know this is Ritchie’s Blues and has been in the set since 1973. Blues is described when prefacing A Gypsy’s Kiss from Perfect Strangers Live as “Blackmore improvises over some subtle Lord organ work in a 52 second jam.” The NEC’2002 DVD review is illustrated in the photo section with a cover of Birmingham NEC from 1993. And then there are some track listing mistakes (which to be fair may be a function of Australian editions) but the review of the tour edition of Rapture misses The Well Dressed Guitar and the Hard Rock Café Live tracks. Infinite adds the tracks from the singles release, but not all of them, or the Hellfest live tracks from the gold edition. The shame is that for a true fan, these errors jar so heavily that any enthusiasm for the content is lost.
In conclusion, the book is a big disappointment for the hard core fan and such a missed opportunity. The real shame is that the author has an engaging tone and that, if he was an uberfan, this would have been a worthy purchase – but it’s not!
Review by David Black
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Well David, thanks for helping me save some money 😉
April 9th, 2025 at 09:04Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I haven’t been impressed with any of the other books in the On Track series either, no matter who the author may be.
April 9th, 2025 at 14:04Ouch! 😯
I haven’t yet seen Phil K’s work (but I’ve ordered a copy just out of respect for the work he must have put in + literacy empowerment is a good thing in Australia …), but to be fair: That was an insurmountable task he chose. I know a bit about DP (yet still learn new stuff all the time and also have long-held convictions shaken up), but I would NEVER dare to take on something like this, especially an analysis of all of Ian’s lyrics. (And I’m still not quite convinced that KAYBD is solely about anal sex, I think Ian has overplayed that part over the years just for the heck of it, it’s his “SOTW was based on Beethoven’s Fifth”-adage by Ritchie, their humor is sometimes similar.)
BTW: Whether Wayne Williams was really the “wrong man” as IG thought in 2006 when he wrote the song is from today’s view (and further evidence obtained) at least debatable:
From WIKIPEDIA:
QUOTE
In 2007, the FBI performed DNA tests on two human hairs found on one of the victims. The mitochondrial DNA sequence in the hairs would eliminate 99.5% of people, and 98% of African-Americans, by not matching their DNA; the sequence found matched Williams’s DNA.[33]
DNA testing was performed in 2010 on scalp hairs found on the body of 11-year-old victim Patrick Baltazar. While the results were not firmly conclusive, the DNA sequence found appears in only 29 of 1,148 African-American hair samples in the FBI’s database, including that of Williams.[34] The Baltazar case was included among 10 additional victims presented to the jury at Williams’ trial, although he was never charged in any of those cases.[35]
Dog hairs found on Baltazar’s body were tested in 2007 by the genetics laboratory at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, which found a DNA sequence also present in the Williams family’s German Shepherd. However, the director of the laboratory, Elizabeth Wictum, said that, while the results were “fairly significant”, they were not conclusive. Only mitochondrial DNA was tested; unlike nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA cannot be shown to be unique to an individual dog. The report said the hairs on the bodies contained the same DNA sequence as Williams’s dog, a DNA sequence that occurs in about 1 in 100 dogs.[35] The FBI report stated that “Wayne Williams cannot be excluded” as a suspect in the case.[36]
UNQUOTE
That is not a criticism of Ian’s then support to have Wayne’s case reviewed, which remains commendable. Just as not everyone incarcerated for a capital crime is guilty, not everyone is the victim of a rigged proceeding against him/her either. I prefer inadvertent support of someone who might be guilty to an innocent man withering away in a cell. It’s the attorney in me rearing its ugly head! 😉
April 9th, 2025 at 15:01Agreed Uwe. When Wrong Man was written it was still an open investigation. The DNA is pretty damming
April 9th, 2025 at 20:29Karin et al:
it’s not quite as bad as David writes. lyrics are definitely subject to the interpretation, and listeners certainly have the right to their own opinions, which may not be the same as the author intended. that’s the beauty of art.
as for the selection of live albums to include, the rationale is laid out in the introduction to the book. the reviewed ones are either contractual obligations (nobody’s perfect), important to the band’s history (CHOHW, concerto’99), or showcasing the band in a new lineup (olympia, nec’2002).
April 9th, 2025 at 23:10Nick, acknowledged but In The Absence Of Pink was important in the band’s history (more so I would argue than Perfect Strangers Live and released before it). The book reviews CHOHW video – which is the inferior Birmingham gig – whereas if he’d reviewed the actual album or the Brum/Stuttgart box set he’d have reviewed the awesome Stuttgart gig with its draw dropping Anya and all the extras that Ritchie dropped in on the night. If the choice was showcasing the new line up then Bombay Calling precedes Olympia. My overarching point was that there wasn’t a consistent rationale to the choices that an uberfan would make.
April 10th, 2025 at 06:26Admittedly, one can get lost in the dense jungle of DP live albums, many of them by now pre-historic, who have never been curated well and largely forgotten over time – Live At The Olympia is almost like a bootleg in status today, having never been rereleased though it was an excellent depiction of the band’s live prowess at the time. It was still the honey moon phase between the band and the hay farmer from Florida who could play the geetar a little beet!
Considering how Purple is first and foremost a live and even a jam band, it is beyond explanation that no massive boxed set (we’d be talking about something like 50 CDs I guess) exists pulling all their live material over the decades together. And if they did that, they might also throw in a gig of Mk V and VI respectively, two line-ups that have not been properly documented live at all so far. And they both had good gigs to, don’t try to tell me otherwise, let’s not even talk about the historical relevance.
April 11th, 2025 at 11:11@7
“Considering how Purple is first and foremost a live and even a jam band”
Ok, but maybe everybody will agree on this:
https://youtu.be/WZupw1nllFs?si=nzK2fJXnAAvy8k8Y
The banjo-player in this particular video is on fire 🔥
I would have LOVED to have experienced this!
April 13th, 2025 at 09:08(Not that I’m implying that the gentlemen Morse and McBride aren’t good, because they certainly are!) but man RB was inspired here! 😍
Yeah, on a good day Ritchie wasn’t bad if DP backed him.
April 13th, 2025 at 14:31