Happy birthday to Don
Don Airey, the mainstay of the band for the last 20 years, is celebrating his 75th birthday on June 21, 2023. Many happy returns, sir!
![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/morse1.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/mcbride5.jpg)
Don Airey, the mainstay of the band for the last 20 years, is celebrating his 75th birthday on June 21, 2023. Many happy returns, sir!
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
All the best Mr Airey. Easy to forget that he has been around for quite some time & was a late starter in a sense of becoming a ‘household’ name of sorts. A bit like RJ Dio & a few others, being the ‘new kids on the block’ at the time for want of a better description. Cheers.
June 21st, 2023 at 00:07Yo,
Happy birthday Don, have a great day, & thanks for the music !
Peace !
June 21st, 2023 at 02:53Happy Birthday Don
June 21st, 2023 at 06:55We love you and take is easy on your birthday
Peace ✌️
And while we are celebrating a birthday for Don why not a winter solstice (here in southern Hemisphere) & a summer Solstice up north, with the mighty Jethro Tull from the Songs From the Wood album. After all Airey did tour with Tull in the late 1980’s. Cheers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJS9TjjHxx8
June 21st, 2023 at 08:00all the best from the bronx
June 21st, 2023 at 10:39Happy Birthday Don 🎂🎈🍻😁🍰🧁🥧
June 21st, 2023 at 12:03You mean the Eurovision Song Contest guy, he’s with Deep Purple too?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azw4Kh8Rqpw
Our birthday child’s shy first TV appearance (01:11) in 1974:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGghvgGZeSs
(The guitarist must be Adrian Vandenberg.)
Let’s hear a jaunty little birthday tune!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtjDigJ_QQI
(In hindsight, I think Don was well-advised to not pick up on his then-guitarists sartorial recommendation: “We should all wear something with flared arms for tonight’s gig!”)
Early interview with his drummer buddy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id3oKevhdfo
June 21st, 2023 at 12:35For our solstice-enchanted Herr MacGregor (with apologies for the lame lead vocals): Don and remnants of Jethro Tull …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WujIbIah-fA
June 21st, 2023 at 12:41Happy Birthday Don!
June 21st, 2023 at 13:20Today is also mine!
🍺🍺
Quick story about Don ..saw Purple in September 2002 at Plymouth Pavilions ( Jon’s Retirement tour ) …it was an awesome concert , the band actually came out into the crowd during ” Ted” Gillan had had an argument with a security guard ( unusual for him !) …so he was making a point .
Anyway, as I said , awesome gig , great atmosphere, everybody happy and, at the end of the gig as I walked out of the arena and into the foyer with my sister …..there was Don just sat there, chatting totally innocently with a couple of guys …totally unfazed by everyone around him !
I said ” Hi Don , great gig ” …to which he humbly replied ” thanks ” …I couldn’t believe it, it was surreal ..there was one of the stars of the show …in the foyer before me and acting like he had just played in a pub band …what a guy !
Happy Birthday Don …lovely guy and wonderful musician
June 21st, 2023 at 16:05I love the fact the Eurovision clip is from a site wanting to keep Eurovision live, when it is so obvious that Vince and Mike are miming – especially as Vince is normally the bassist and Mike is a guitarist – and normally in a different band. I must admit, I had forgotten Kimberley did not get to appear.
Happy Birthday, Don, and others and a happy unbirthday to the rest of us.
June 21st, 2023 at 17:08And sadly, Don is the last man standing out of Colosseum II.
June 21st, 2023 at 17:33Like the new Seekers, it was shorter lived than the original – a version of which is still touring, with Malcolm Mortimore from Gentle Giant taking Jon’s role.
A very HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Mr. Airey!
June 21st, 2023 at 18:18We are looking forward to seeing you again with Deep Purple in Austria in July.
@ 8 – thanks for the Martin Barre & Don Airey link. I quite liked the vocalist as he sounds much better than the battle weary Ian Anderson has for a long time. He just needed to be up a little more in the mix perhaps. Regarding the Solstice Bells song I have been worried all night about possibly giving away my penchant for dancing around the mistletoe on a full moon wearing bells & things. Thankfully no one here has noticed that & also the possibility of me being noticed dressed in all the garb in the front row at a BN gig. Although they don’t tour downunder to all us peasants out here anyway. Regarding Cozy being persuaded to being the spokesman for Rainbow back then, that is a good laugh when he says, ‘this is the strongest Rainbow lineup ever’ or something like that. A little bit of PR there no doubt. Difficult to pass the Dio era for the strongest lineup. No disrespect to Don Airey or Roger Glover at all as I much prefer the Difficult to Cure album than Down To Earth. A shame Cozy wasn’t on that album. Now ring out those bells everybody. Cheers.
June 21st, 2023 at 22:17I cannot help but be reminded of Return To Forever & John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra when I hear the Colosseum 2 band who are a superb band in their own right. And also those early Journey albums 1974/76 era, so different to anything they did after vocalist Steve Perry & the AOR thing. Fusion & progressive rock probably the best way to describe those early Journey albums. Cheers.
June 21st, 2023 at 23:51Apologies, Marcus forced my hand, he wrote ‘New Seekers’, how could I feel other than compelled I cry?!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBC911tWsAU
Now that IS live (at the RAH in 1972, it’s basically unplugged sans the fancy orchestral arrangement for Eurovision) and you can hear how good and tight their harmonies were. Also, pretty face Paul Layton was one hell of a melodic and intuitive bass player, propelling a band that often played without drums. I could listen to his playing all day.
IIRC, some then band members of Katrina opted out of the performance because they didn’t like the song or the ESC environment, hence the artificial line-up. Personally, I think it was a perfect number for ESC, catchy and suitably hymnic, it won deservedly and unsurprisingly. As regards live or not live, doesn’t the ESC feature pretty much everything, full live, (quasi-live with not the musicians on stage playing the electric instruments, but the electric combo of the orchestra), half playback (only the vocals and the orchestra live, that used to be the standard I think) and with dance oriented acts even full playback?
As regards Colosseum II, yup they were Return to Forever clones, but then who wasn’t in the jazz rock genre at the time? You either patterned yourself after the ‘airy’ (no pun intended) Weather Report or the ‘rockier’ Return to Forever, depending on whether you had a guitarist in the line-up or not (Weather Report did without one, Return to Forever had then guitar god Al Di Meola, everybody and his brother wanted to be like him). Colosseum II (the name was forced on them by the record company) obviously chose the wrong time with Punk and all taking over, plus their music was less accessible than either the original Colosseum or even Jon Hiseman’s next project Tempest (his band after Colosseum, but before Colosseum II):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U1aHr9tf1E
June 22nd, 2023 at 13:52Herr MacGregor, Cozy doing interviews for Rainbow wasn’t that rare in the 70ies,
https://ritchieblackmoresrainbow.wordpress.com/sounds-june-23-1979/
Blackmore was of course always a reluctant interview partner and the uppity English music press preferred speaking to Cozy (who had some notoriety due to his work with Jeff Beck, his racing and the RAK teenybopper hits) even before Ronnie had left.
Cozy wasn’t a great diplomat for sure! I remember an NME interview with him around the time of the release of the On Stage live album and he was adamant how it was crap (to the repeated incredulity of the journo) and that his own performance had suffered because great parts of it had been recorded at the end of the Rising world tour “when I was already too knackered to play properly having blisters all over”. He also claimed that Rainbow on a good night could “kill” the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Aerosmith and Ted Nugent (he named exactly those four bands) live (discuss!) and mentioned in passing intra-band-near-punch-ups and why keyboarders don’t like them (“messes up their hands I guess or something …”).
BTW, Herr MacGregor, this quote from the Sounds interview linked above sums Cozy’s attitude of playing “with” a bassist aptly up:
“The bass player was a little more tricky. I got Clive Chaman in from the Jeff Beck Group, he also used to be a member of Hammer. However he didn’t really work out. He’s a funky sort of player, he needs a lot of freedom and he wouldn’t have got that with Ritchie. After a while we were going crazy, we couldn’t find anybody at all. Then Roger Glover said, ‘Well, what about me?’ Ritchie asked me what I thought as I’d have to work with the guy and I said,
‘Fair enough, I’ll give it a try, once I start playing I can never hear anybody else anyway.’
So Roger became the bass player.”
June 22nd, 2023 at 14:36Hey, Happy Birthday Don! But, with all due respect… “THE mainstay of the band??!!” Who wrote this?? Ever hear of Big Ian, Little Ian, Roger, and Steve?? “A mainstay of the band” would have been more correct.
June 22nd, 2023 at 23:19‘Can we have everything louder than everything else’, the old saying rears it’s head again. I wonder what Roger Glover thought of working with Cozy, was he too loud, too busy etc? Everyone has their niche in some aspects, some too much, some too little & some just right. Regarding Cozy’s media stints he was quite well known with the British press. Those older clips where he is messing about on those children’s shows or fundraisers, what ever they are. Even Percy was on one with both of them getting smashed in the face with cream cakes etc, all in good fun. Although that is in 1981 after the Rainbow stint. The drum duel with that rather young lad & many more. I can just imagine Blackmore saying that to Cozy, you are good at it, just do it. The first link below is a good short interview with Mr Powell regarding that lineup of Rainbow. The second is the shorter version of the children’s pie throwing show with Percy. Cheers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd1_uvzsi2Y&t=250s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-glKUwLbHI&t=163s
June 22nd, 2023 at 23:25Sorta related, some fresh Rainbow porn for the devoted …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiNX8veRv8E
June 23rd, 2023 at 02:59Roger simplified his bass playing for Rainbow quite a bit. In fairness, that was not only due to Cozy’s take no prisoners drumming, but also because Roger concentrated – unlike with Mk II – on the producer role so his bass parts became a bit of an afterthought after everything else was done. But if you listen to his bass playing and sound on Who Do We Think We Are and then switch to Down To Earth, there is little of his former bass playing magic evident. Perhaps he was also a bit rusty and, of course, Down To Earth was aimed to be commercial.
I’ve never heard Roger say anything really negative about Cozy, he’s mentioned that coming from someone as metronomic as Little Ian, Cozy was more prone to rushing and cutting corners in breaks (Bob Daisley has said the same thing) and how he was unhappy that Cozy refused to do another take of the drums on Since You’ve Been Gone which is why Roger found they sounded a little stiff (the drums you hear are second take). Cozy despised the song at the time. Ironically, it would become his signature tune later on so that even Brian May played it when Cozy and Neil Murray were with him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3qqRZhWzDI
I actually liked Cozy’s drumming on SYVBG, it sounded “apt” and reminded me of the Mickie Most RAK teenybop fodder singles he had done with Cozy Powell’s Hammer. In essence, SYVBG is glorified glam rock, it doesn’t take much to imagine Brian Connolly & Co. doing a version of it in 1975. Russ Ballard had written hits for other glam rock bands too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtzdigGGZys
June 23rd, 2023 at 03:24I do remember Brian May talking about Since You Been Gone, he was besotted by it as a great ‘catchy’ rock song & raved about the riff also. It isn’t a bad song at all however it is not for my repeated playing, even back in the day. Too commercial for my ears especially for Blackmore, but as we know there was more to come. Not to worry it could have been worse. Russ Ballard was a prolific writer indeed. Cheers.
June 23rd, 2023 at 10:11It’s an immediate earworm alright.
That is how the song first got their attention, in the version of South African (almost) all-girl band Clout, which – contrary to conventional wisdom pretty much contained already all arrangement ingredients often wrongly attributed to Rainbow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu_NTgbat4I
Arrangement-wise, Ritchie and Roger didn’t really change much other than playing the verse in standard time (not very elegant given that the vocal melody really has a halftime feel to it) as opposed to Clout’s halftime and adding some Ritchie doodling in the halftime middle eight. If truth be told, the version by the girls is even a bit rawer, guitar-heavier and faster.
Still, it did what Ritchie wanted, you can’t argue with success, Down To Earth doubled the sales of all previous Rainbow albums.
June 23rd, 2023 at 16:07Interesting hearing that Clout version, better than Rainbow or should I say better suited to Clout, they did a good version of it, well done. Regarding Rainbow covering that, pretty sad really that Blackmore had to do a cover of another song to ‘boost’ popularity & open the door to the abyss of commerciality & AOR ‘copying’. I guess that is one of the reasons I don’t like it, the first is the song & then there is the desparation. A cop out indeed. Cheers.
June 24th, 2023 at 04:50When I first heard SYVBG at a party (I didn‘t have the Down To Earth album yet and had no idea how the new Rainbow would sound), I was first oblivious (I didn‘t recognize it as Rainbow or Blackmore), then surprised (when someone told me this was the new Rainbow single) and finally incredulous (it sounded glam-rocky to me, which in 1979 was an already dated sound). But sure enough, women danced to it at the party, something I had never a single one of them do to, say, Man On The Silver Mountain, Lady Starstruck or Long Live Rock‘n‘Roll, where only the guys headbanged in collective masculine bliss.
I like the song (it‘s dumb in a comforting way), but I identify it more with Russ Ballard than Rainbow, it’s the kind of songwriter‘s ”hit made to order“-craft he can pull out of his sleeve anytime. I still think Sweet could have done a fine version of it. Steve Priest‘s voice would have been perfect for the ”these four walls are closing in“ i.e. ”your poison letter, your telegram“ bridge part, with Brian Connolly belting out the verses and the chorus. But then Ritchie appreciated Sweet (he even went to see them at a US Gig once and played with them on stage)
https://youtu.be/qIFxWz1UG3I
and vice versa (Andy Scott was a Blackmore acolyte), so it‘s all good.
June 24th, 2023 at 13:36