Rockpages.gr press release
Greece's based Rockpages Web Magazine
spoke exclusively to the original DEEP PURPLE Bassist, Nick Simper,
backstage, right before his concert in Budapest, Hungary. Here's an
excerpt where he talks about the MkI of DEEP PURPLE:
Rockpages.gr: I think I read somewhere
that you preferred Deep Purple had remained a solid band, the original
band.
Nick Simper: Well, I think the original band is always the best. You
look at ZZ Top or AC/DC, they retain the same guys. There was never
really the chance for Deep Purple to develop a style, because we were
lucky enough or in some ways unlucky enough to have a hit record in
America a matter of a couple of months after we formed the band. It was
very shortsighted on behalf of everybody involved, the managers, the
record company, they just wanted to push us out and earn the money.
Nowadays, people look a little more longer term. How many bands made
three albums in how many months? Nine months? A year? Three albums in a
year, it doesn’t happen today, is it? We did that and we made them on
very very small budgets. A lot of the tracks were done almost live,
because we ran such tight budgets, we spent all this time working,
working, working, touring, there was no chance to really try and develop
as writers or even as a proper unit and in the end, after six months of
touring in America, everybody’s getting a bit sick of it. We all had
different points of view of how the band should go and how the band
should be run, what agents we should have and sadly the whole thing
imploded. I think if it had been given the chance, if that line up had
been given the chance to relax a little bit, if we had had the same
opportunities like the Mk II lineup had, I think we would have surprised
everybody. Cause we had just started to develop, at the end of the third
album, started to find the leash, the direction we were gonna go in,
which wasn’t that much different to what happened when they got the two
other guys in.
Rockpages.gr: It was an evolution of the music, generally, after the
60s…
Nick Simper: Yeah, I like to think, I mean I can tell for a fact that
the Mk I Purple stuff is much more involved and much more difficult to
play than the Mk II stuff.
Rockpages.gr: Mk I was more progressive…
Nick Simper: Yeah, the original line up was more progressive and it was
kind of sad, because Ritchie Blackmore and myself came from the same
background, we were to rock n roll, we worked with Screaming Lord Sutch
and people like that, we both wanted to simplify the music, but it was
all no and we kinda deferred to Jon Lord, cause obviously he was a
talented man, he got a tremendous knowledge of classical music and he
was kind of steering us in that direction. First of all we thought,
that’s not a bad thing, because we admired what the Vanilla Fudge had
done and we thought we were gonna do the same, they inspired us. But we
got to the point where there was no one person in Deep Purple who was a
songwriter, there never was, but when we played together, we could
create stuff and unfortunately, there was a lot of money at stake and it
made the band diversify… Certain people were trying to write all the
songs (laughs)… they wanted their way, other people wanted their way,
and we weren’t working as a unit. That’s an aspect of it, really. Some
bands are lucky. One guy comes and he’s a great songwriter, like Pete
Townshend, and you say, ok, you write the stuff, we just play it. There
wasn’t a writer in Deep Purple, but between us all, we could all have
our bits and create something good, and that wasn’t allowed to develop.
I think that’s why there was a lot of dissatisfaction in the band.
Read The Full Interview On:
http://www.rockpages.gr/detailspage.aspx?id=4459&type=1&lang=EN