Just dug this one out #25 - Deep Purple In Rock

Deep Purple in Hanwell

On his blog Music Arcades, David posts a piece about an album every day, the recordings are selected using a database and a random number generator. "Just dug this one out" was me trying to do something similar but my posts are sporadic and the randomness is the disoganised randomness of my head rather than database driven. The posts on Music Arcades contain a mix of (lots of) obscure, (some) familiar and (occasional) "I haven't given that a thought for years". Yesterday's post about Deep Purple's In Rock was one of the latter and I woke up in the early hours of this morning with a strange desire to listen to the album...and write about it. So here I am...doing both.

I didn't have the album to hand, I suspect like much of my dubious past it lives in my dad's shed. So I had to make do with the version that last.fm had on offer, which was of questionable origin, for example the version of Speed King never had the intro that David mentioned in his post (which was one of the things that got my appettite whet in the first place).

In Rock was an album (and Deep Purple were a band) that I was never really a fan of (although it was an album I owned). The Hard Rock/Heavy Metal distinction that David mentions was very important and the music I was listening to and loving during that period was most definitely Heavy Metal. Metal, to me at least, was less pretentious, more exciting, more about the "feeling" and less about the "music" - Motorhead were metal[1], Sabbath were metal and Deep Purple were rock, Gillan (the band) were metal even if Gillan the voice was rock. The late 70s rock graph looked like this (to me)...

punk <- - - -> metal <- - - -> hard rock <- - - - > prog
            ^
            |
            me

So In Rock was an album that meant very little to me and listening to it now there are only mild pangs of familiarity, although Ian Gillan's voice is still something that gives me a buzz - maybe because it is the archetypal rock voice - although it probably makes me want to listen to bits of Glory Road rather than any more Deep Purple.

However, In Rock, puts where I live on the musical map. According to the astoundingly anal (and that's said with genuine envy) Deep Purple Appreciation society website ...

It was at Hanwell Community Centre that Mk 2 began their rehearsals and wrote much of their hard rock masterpiece "Deep Purple In Rock".

Actually there's more to Hanwell than just Deep Purple. The Wikipedia entry also mentions The Who, Marshall Amps, Jimi Hendrix and...errr...The Magic Numbers - and doesn't, but could, mention Uriah Heap.

[1] although anywhere you find a discussion of Motorhead you'll find an argument about what slot they fit into - it seems that some people see HM as something to be slightly embarrassed by and so try and find new (or in Motorhead's case old) places to file the HM bands they love.