![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/gillan1.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/mcbride5.jpg)
Ain’t no love
On November 26 the professional Purple tribute band Purpendicular played a gig at La Traverse in Cléon, France. Paicey once again joined them on drums, and the lineup featured another Purple family veteran — Neil Murray on bass. The setlist, quite understandably for the occasion, included several Whitesnake numbers:
- Highway Star
- Walking in the Shadow of the Blues
- Hush
- Somebody Done It
- Lazy
- Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City
- Black Night
- Carry On Jon
- Perfect Strangers
- Space Truckin’
- Smoke on the Water
- Stormbringer
- Ready an’ Willing
Thanks to MrRogerRocks2 for the clips and to BraveWords for the heads up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
After all these years, it’s so good to see that Ian Paice is still on top of his game. Simply mesmerizing.
December 1st, 2021 at 02:04I’m looking forward to the gig this Friday, hopefully Neal is there, too!
December 1st, 2021 at 13:44Enjoyed those, thanks for posting, the band is excellent.
Good to see Neil Murray, an absolutely superb player who really drove Whitesnake’s ‘stomping’ early years sound; as did Paice.
December 2nd, 2021 at 11:06Way better then the ladies band. Not being sexist at all, these guys just know how to rock.👍
December 2nd, 2021 at 13:18Great to see Neil again with the guvnor drummer, they were a rhythm section on par with the Glover/Paice and Hughes/Paice tandems (Martinez/Paice with PAL was good too). Neil is so vastly underrated as a bassist, not one of his many successors within WS ever came close. If DC still had ears, he would have rehired him long ago.
I think I’m gonna watch them tomorrow at the Rex club in Bensheim, my Harley-Davidson needs to be moved even in this kind of weather … fuck the pandemic, I’m going!
@Mathias, I think you’ll recognize me, there probably won’t be too many bikers there!
I’ve seen Purpendicular twice already. I’m not too great a fan of the singer who is a little full of himself. But with that rhythm section, go I must.
December 2nd, 2021 at 16:45Mathias @2:
yes, apparently Neal is joining them for this whole tour leg
December 2nd, 2021 at 18:00I saw Perpendicular 4 times with Ian Paice.
Good band , but everytime they change there line up.
Once they played with a guitar
December 3rd, 2021 at 09:09player called Valerio Dossini, a young guy and played amazing live….. I’m sorry that he is not playing anymore in this band. You rock Valerio !
That keyboard player needs to get a better rig, that thing is supposed to sound like a Hammond? It looks and sounds like a cheap Casio.
December 3rd, 2021 at 10:19They are very much a one man show of the singer – with assorted backing musicians, Little Ian being the most lucrative one from an audience drawing point of view, but then again also commanding the highest wage!
December 3rd, 2021 at 11:22I was there (in Bensheim).
I’ve seen/heard Robby Thomas Walsh in better form vocally, he was out of key on Highway Star, the opener, might have been a monitor thing, and a little rough around the edges throughout. His DC is better than his IG.
Watching little Ian from so close that you can actually FEEL the original sound of his outsize bass drum (and not the amplified PA signal) is always lovely. He was in good shape, no pandemic pause slacking at all.
I’ve seen Neil Murray with Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, in London at the Queen musical (together with Laurie Wisefield from Wishbone Ash in the house band) and now again with Little Ian. He wasn’t as joyously nimble as I remember him from those early 80ies WS tours – he had a band-aid on his fretting index, that might have held him back a little, sometimes his fretting looked a bit awkward -, but the power and intensity was there. He seemed to enjoy the three WS numbers more than the Purple stuff (with maybe the exception of Hush, introduced as “a song from 1912” by RTW, which had Ian cracking up), but that’s ok, he’s never made any bones about the fact that he considers old WS his musical home. I really like the ‘gentle giant’, he deserved a much greater career.
The keyboard player cited Jon’s idiosyncracies a lot and was generally fun to watch plus he played Pictured Within on the piano nicely before switching to the mighty organ intro of Perfect Strangers.
The guitarist was very much his own man, a modern player with humor, but he off-the-cuff threw in enough Blackmore-isms and even Morse-isms to keep people happy. I liked him best on Ain’t No Love (In The Heart Of The City).
It was my first rock gig since I saw the Marcus King Band at the start of the pandemic in early 2020! That virus is kinda overstaying its welcome!!
December 4th, 2021 at 01:53@9 you are right Uwe….. it’s a one man band. ( the singer ).
I will not write something bad about him, but I know what you mean !
December 4th, 2021 at 08:27Uwe @5: sorry, I missed your post – would have enjoyed looking for you/meeting you! Maybe next time when Don Airey returns to the Rex 😉
Nick @6: I can confirm that – their merchandise includes Neal Murray as well.
The tribute played to Jon Lord is a nice extract of “Pictured Within” (instrumental by Kogler) – not “Carry On Jon” which is a guitar tune by Ritchie Blackmore of course.
It was so cool to get so listen to those three classic Whitesnake tunes with that rhythm section in 2021!
December 4th, 2021 at 09:17@8 welcome to the future … please don’t get me wrong as I’m a hardcore Hammond fan and player myself.
Check out the rigs of current Bassplayer and/or Guitarists.
Do they need tons of Marshalls to get a decent sound? No! (look at the critically acclaimed Kemper Amps)
Those NORD Keyboards (the red ones you see on almost any stage) are an industry standard and sound wise state of the art.
Their Hammond sound is quite close to the original as you could get (in a live setting anyway) in an electronic keyboard but with much(!) less hassle and cost compared to transporting and maintaining an old Hammond and Leslie speaker(s).
For low budget touring bands (and not only those!) the technological progress is quite a blessing.
December 4th, 2021 at 09:38NEIL! Not Neal. 🙂
December 4th, 2021 at 21:02Nord keyboards are indeed fine quality, a market leader (they’re by no means cheap) and as close as you can reasonably get to a true Hanmond sound. I’ve seen/heard them on countless stages with professional bands (eg David Rosenthal plays one with Billy Joel, so do the Whitesnake keyboarders) and experienced them in various bands I’ve played in myself, you’re always happy to meet a keyboarder with a Nord, they are a benchmark of quality and professional sound ambitions. You won’t meet someone with a Nord who can’t properly play or doesn’t care about his sound.
They just don’t look the part. And Jon was no doubt very conscious of his iconic Hammond rock player visual image, none of us would have liked to have seen him sitting behind a single Roland keyboard Ron Mael style [make no mistake: I love the Sparks and Ron’s image plus how he changed the brand name logo of his Roland to “Ronald” : – ) ]. But even Jon has admitted that a Hammond sound can be replicated these days by modern keyboards, adding “but that’s not the point, they don’t FEEL like one when you play them”. That – keyboarders have told me – is indeed true.
December 4th, 2021 at 22:27@ 13 I have 2 15 watt amps, a Vox Nightrain, and Orange Dark Terror myself. Nowadays even for arenas I’ve heard you really don’t need more than 30 watts and many heavy metal bands still like to have Walls of Marshalls but many are dummys. I remember seeing Yngwie in a 300 seat club years back and he had at least 30 Marshall cabs!
December 5th, 2021 at 04:37Not too familiar with keyboards so thanks for the info.
oh no, I should “kneel and pray” … 🙂
Sorry, of course it is Neil Murray 😉
December 5th, 2021 at 08:49