![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/gillan4.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/gillan2.jpg)
We’re a rock and roll band
The second part of Jon Lord’s feature originally published in New Musical Express on March 13, 1971.
Before then he had been proving the perfect interviewee by just talking, making good points, raising sensible arguments and leading me through his career very carefully. I asked him what method the group adopted when it came to recording, expecting some highly involved answer. But it all sounds remarkably simple.
“One or two people come up with ideas for numbers at rehearsals and we work on them and try to get them into some sort of form to take them on to the studio,” Jon replied. “There’s the usual scene of putting backing tracks down first, then solos, then voices if there are any.
“‘Black Night’ just happened when we were mucking about — the riff came, then the song. We leave the number for a few days and come back to it to see if it sounds as good as it did when we left it.Studio techniques
“Ian Paice and Roger are getting very interested in studio techniques and they know all about the control boards and such things which I don’t, I haven’t the faintest idea. We like to go down to see the tape to disc transfer because that’s where a lot of tapes get messed up, in the cutting room.
“We don`t like to farm the covers out without having some say in it, but having superimposed our faces on Mount Rushmore for the last album we’re running a bit short of ideas. “We did fall into the trap of making an album that didn’t sound anything like we did on stage but Deep Purple In Rock’ was very much as we are on stage and the next one is going to be an extension of that. I’m quite proud of some of our old albums, you look back at them with affection, but some of them make me cringe.”
Read more in Geir Myklebust’s blog. Part 1 is here.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Reading this makes me a bit melancholy because Jon is not with us anymore. Thank God we still have the music.
November 5th, 2020 at 17:54