Purple Patches

I never really got into the music of Deep Purple during their first stint at rock stardom. It was only after they broke up that I picked up on their music and that of the various bands that fragmented off from them. I bought a few albums from Rainbow and Whitesnake but it was Gillan that I was particularly taken with. As I replaced or augmented my vinyl collection with CDs I bought a "Best of" compilation of Rainbow. It's OK but I don't listen to it very much. I don't think they were really my sort of thing. However, I never bought any Whitesnake or Gillan on CD. That is, until last week when I spent another freebee Amazon voucher on them.

The first choice was Whitesnake's 30th Anniversary Collection, a triple CD set which pretty much covers all of David Coverdale's solo career. Essentially, Whitesnake consisted of a British Blues-Rock band and an American Hair-Rock outfit. Sandwiched in between that he recorded one album with John Sykes on guitar, the hugely successful 1987, which sounded very Heavy Metal; and a very good album with Jimmy Page which sounded remarkably like Led Zeppelin. Aside from the Sykes/Page albums I tend to prefer the British Blues-Rock material of their earlier albums. Not that the later Power Ballads are bad but they do come across as being rather over-produced.

I did have one Whitesnake album on vinyl, Ready an' Willing, as well as a cassette of 1987. If Ready an' Willing sounds like a sort of Spinal Tap Mickey take then I rather suspect that Whitesnake was the main aim of that joke. Their album titles also included Lovehunter, Come an' Get It, Slide It In and Slip of the Tongue. Yes, this was a band that had mastered the art of the single entendre. However, the material is generally very good and is not a million miles away from the likes of Free and Bad Company. Some of the tracks are surprisingly familiar considering I've never heard a great deal of their back catalogue, although it's difficult to determine if I'm missing anything essential. The only omission I can see is the Sykes version of Crying in the Rain, although the excellent original is there in all it's wrought agony - this was the song that Coverdale wrote about his marriage break-up.

The Gillan compilation is more familiar to me as I did have most of the Gillan albums. However, it also includes material from the Ian Gillan Band. This makes for a somewhat odd mix as the two groups had a radically different sound: Gillan being a modern sounding hard rock band whereas the Ian Gillan Band was more of a Jazz-fusion affair. Nevertheless, this is a decent compilation. Gillan were the first of the Purple spin-offs that I really picked up on. Mainly, this was because they were regular guests on Top of the Pops in the late 70s and early 80s. The hits they played on the show were often their covers of old Rock and Roll records such as New Orleans but the band looked brilliant. Gillan appeared as some sort of long haired Messiah - in fact he played Jesus in the original stage version of Jesus Christ Superstar. Next to him was bassist John McCoy, a huge bald headed man and quite possibly the hardest looking individual I've ever seen - well, I wouldn't mess with him. Next was Bernie Tormé a wild, eye-patched, pirate guitarist (he was later replaced by Janick Gers who would join Iron Maiden in the 1990s). Making up the rest of the band were Mick Underwood and Colin Towns: arguably the most interesting member of the band musically as he has gone on to become a successful film and TV composer.

This compilation, Unchain Your Brain: the Best of Gillan 1976-1982, covers all bases but, having most of the original albums, I would say that there are notable exceptions. I would have thought that most of Glory Road deserves to be on here but omitted tracks include On The Rocks, which features Tormé's extended feedback intro, and Nervous, which had a closed loop ending on vinyl (similar to The Beatles' Sgt Pepper album). I'd would also like to have heard Demon Driver from the Magic album. However, these are merely my preferences and I think the album does offer a good assessment of Gillan's solo years and particularly highlights their sense of humour, such as No Laughing In Heaven which gives a rather Monty Pythonesque take on false piety. My only real criticism is that this would have made more sense if it was chronologically sequenced. However, that would have meant that the less commercial Ian Gillan Band material would have taken up half of the first disk.

Overall a good buy for my £10 Amazon voucher but the early Gillan stuff has got me wondering about a bit of Jazz fusion for my collection.