Made in Japan: The Rise of Deep Purple Mk II

This programme contains some strong language

CHEERS AND APPLAUSE

All I want to say to all of you is thank you very much, you've

been great. Thank you for everything you've given us in Japan.

And thank you, really, you're the representatives of the whole

world, as far as we're concerned.

Thank you and God bless you for everything you've ever given us.

And this is the last night. The end.

Thanks a lot.

CHEERS AND APPLAUSE

I didn't think Machine Head, at the time, was anything special.

It was Made In Japan that threw it into the stratosphere.

We did the same songs on stage

and it seemed to take off that much bigger than Machine Head.

It's a beautiful snapshot of the band in all its glory.

Firing off each other, working it out, live on stage.

On the night.

And then people started to break down.

'72, I think we made two albums, six US tours.

Something happened. Ritchie and Ian Gillan agreed to disagree.

I wrote a letter saying I was going to leave.

No-one said anything, so I assumed they wanted me to leave.

It was just pressure, pressure, pressure,

and that's exactly why that split happened.

# My woman from Tokyo

# She makes me see

# My woman from Tokyo

# She's so good to me. #

# When I was younger, so much younger than today... #

We started in '68, Jon Lord and myself, and we put the band

together, and I don't think we quite knew what direction that we had.

We kind of...flim-flammed around in certain areas.

I think the first album was a recording of everything we'd learnt.

I don't think we had anything else. I think that was it.

A couple of original bits and pieces and then quite a lot of covers.

# Help me get my feet back on the ground... #

The highs were the interaction that Ritchie, Jon and I found,

musically

and personally.

We had a great time.

The lows were...learning very quickly that the...balance

of the band, personnel, couldn't go as far as it really needed to.

As we were staggering into 1969, Ritchie and I, particularly,

realised that the band was in danger of not being quite what we'd

seen it as in our minds.

It was going a little bit...pop.

There we are, like, really searching for an identity

and that search goes on pretty much through the first three albums.

A friend of mine had a singer in his band, it was Ian Gillan.

So we tried out Ian. He had the scream, he had the look,

and that's why in 1970 we were on our way.

Good morning. And how are you?

# Good golly, said little Miss Molly

# When she was rockin' in the house of blue light

# Tutti frutti was oh so rooty... #

Then, of course, In Rock came out and that became

a phenomenon in the British charts, in the top ten for over a year.

It hit a chord with the British youth and Europe.

# I'm a speed king

# You go to hear me sing... #

When we saw what In Rock had done, it was a calling card.

It said - this is Deep Purple.

Everybody in the band was absolutely behind it

and that lasted pretty much into the Machine Head era.

# Saturday night and I just got paid

# Gonna fool about, ain't gonna save

# Some people gonna rock, some people gonna roll... #

Deep Purple In Rock stayed in the charts for over a year.

Big success to follow.

I think there was a feeling of - what do we do next?

How do we top that?

# I don't care

# What you think

# I never heard you

# I never heard you anyway... #

Fireball, there was a kind of certain intimidation going on

and by the time it was finished, I think we were a little tired.

Fireball was lots of fun, but it was a little more introvert.

And there's still some great tracks on it, but it didn't fire up

the imagination of the public the way that In Rock did.

# Oh...

# Like a demon's eye. #

Fireball, it's a troublesome...album because, to me,

you couldn't have had Fireball without In Rock.

But you couldn't have Machine Head without Fireball, so it sits

very nicely as part of those three really...good rock albums.

The success that In Rock and, not quite so much Fireball,

gave us allowed us to say, "OK, the next time round, we're

"going to get a situation where once we've got the sound, three weeks,

"we've got the songs together, we just record them," you know?

And that's what we did with Machine Head.

Ha-ha.

Yeah, let's go.

# Oh, yeah...

# Uh-uh... #

Although we were wildly successful, Deep Purple In Rock

and Fireball, we actually hadn't made much money

because we were paying back the management for having funded

the band for so many years.

So despite all that success, you know, we needed to make some money.

# Really hate the running

# Really hate the game

# Looking at them all, I want to be unborn again... #

In 1971, the law changed.

If a recording is done overseas, so long as the overseas derived

income wasn't remitted into the UK, it wasn't taxed in the UK.

What happened was that the boys had to become tax exiles.

That is a process which saved a huge amount of money.

We had an accountant at the time called Bill Reid,

a brilliant guy, and he cooked up this scheme.

He said, "Look, if you write songs and record them

"outside of the country, you won't be taxed English tax,

"you're only taxed on what you earn in England."

And we travelled the Continent, so it wasn't a big problem for us

to do that.

We took specialist tax advice that in order for the boys to get

the benefit of whatever they might do in the future, they would

have to have an employment, as opposed to a partnership.

As it was considered that their next album, which they had yet to record,

or even write, was going to be the biggest that they would have had

yet because of the rising success in album sales, that we

would institute the employment regime by having a company

which was an English company,

but it employed the artists only for their overseas activities.

And the next album which they did, which was Machine Head,

made that a very wise decision.

So we thought we'd record an album under studio conditions,

but in a live venue.

Claude Nobs was the instigator of us going to Switzerland

and Claude said that he could set us up with something over there,

which was the Casino, to record at the Casino.

Under the new regime and under their employment contracts,

they had to record overseas. The question then would be, where to go.

And the band and Tony and Jon looked around and spoke to Claude Nobs,

who was a promoter on the Continent.

Claude Nobs, our friend from Montreux, he did the jazz festival.

He said, "We've got tonnes of space here.

You can do it, you can do it here.

We'll find a place in the Casino, which is closed for the winter.

Everyone knows the story.

A little rock 'n' roll that we call Speed King.

# Good golly, said little Miss Molly

# When she was rockin' the house of blue light... #

That was probably the best times of Purple back then

and when we arranged to go to Switzerland to do this album,

it was just a fantastic time, you know?

Unfortunately, the Casino burned down,

but out of that sprang the song, of course.

Without that, there would have been no Smoke On The Water.

Why did you go to Switzerland to record Machine Head?

Several reasons. One being it's a great place to be, Montreux.

We know a lot of people in Montreux. And it was a nice place to go.

The second, because we used The Rolling Stones' mobile unit and that

was in the South of France and it was easy to trundle it up to Switzerland.

Um... And thirdly, money reasons, tax reasons. It's... It's...

You can avoid paying some tax on your albums, on your royalties,

if you've made the album out of the country.

It's a very complicated deal, but it's not illegal.

Tax people know about it, but it's just if you want to take

advantage of it, you have to record outside the country.

And also, we did it in two weeks,

where normally we take three or four months over an album,

on and off, but we just had a concentrated two weeks playing.

We'd written all the songs and we just went in and recorded.

The Casino in Montreux, Switzerland,

if you were doing a tour of Europe, you'd play there.

And the guy who was organising it, Claude Nobs, said, "Don't put

"your gear in yet because there's one more show before you can do it.

"It's a matinee tomorrow afternoon, Frank Zappa

"And The Mothers. Three o'clock. Do you want to go?" "Sure."

'Ladies and gentlemen...'

And about an hour into the show,

someone fired a flare gun into the ceiling, which was made of...

It was like a false ceiling, bamboo.

And there wasn't much of a fire at first, but things came to

a halt and everyone was ordered to leave the building.

And there was a little bit of a panic, but not bad.

No-one was hurt, strangely enough.

And literally within five minutes or so, the place was an inferno.

GUITAR FEEDBACK

Fire!

Probably go towards the exit, ladies and gentlemen.

The fire had started in the ceiling

and it spread without anyone seeing it and it was a huge building,

it wasn't just a casino, it was a venue,

that's where we were watching Zappa, there was a disco there,

bars, restaurants, a big casino, big convention facilities, so it was a

massive building and it was a wooden building and, bang, it just went up.

And the next morning, we went there and it was still smouldering.

It's amazing that no-one got hurt.

We'd just started playing King Kong

but we were playing and in that part of King Kong, I stop the band

and so, obviously, there was a fire and a window in the back,

a big window with maybe a 10 or 15-feet drop down.

They broke that and people were jumping out and...

So, everybody got out.

And Claude, bless him, Claude was wonderful.

There's a photograph of Claude in Machine Head taken as the fire

was raging and he came by the hotel to see us and the look

on his face is evident in that picture, it's a wonderful picture.