The light may be fading for Ian Gillan, but that doesn’t mean Deep Purple’s fireball is fizzling out. He insists that talk of retirement – broached in interviews last year but rowed back since – is premature. “Someone connected it with my failing eyesight, but I don’t see how that’s going to ever stop me singing,” Gillan tells Uncut today. “I will retire or stop when I haven’t got the strength to do it, or when it becomes embarrassing. I won’t just keep going for the sake of it. So when people give me a slap and say, ‘Oi, off you go’, that’ll be it. But we’re getting by so far, and I’m still standing when I walk off at the end of a show, just about.”
The band, after all, are in something of a (deep) purple patch. Since 2013’s Now What?!, producer Bob Ezrin has been tightening their songcraft and revitalising their sound to chart-resurgent effect. “Bob has brought a lot of songs down from seven minutes to four-and-a-half minutes,” Gillan notes. “He’s given them a sense of urgency and impact.” Now new Northern Irish guitarist Simon McBride, who stepped in for Steve Morse in 2022, has settled into the fabric of the band, replacing Morse’s Southern rock style with a more homegrown, riff-first approach.
“It’s British-ised it again,” says Ian Paice, while Gillan cites McBride’s arrival as a propulsive factor in the band’s momentum, taking them from the global arena tour to support 2024’s =1 straight into the recording of a 24th new studio album, Splat! “It became evident as soon as Simon joined us that the dynamic of the band was back on track, the energy level,” he adds. “It’s a cliché, but we got our mojo back.”
Splat! is distilled, high-octane Purple at its finest. There are moments of classic rock’n’roll abandon: “Jessica’s Bra” collates a lifetime’s worth of bar-room exploits into four minutes, “Third Call” forces the listener to picture Gillan receiving a late-night booty call at 80 years of age, and “The Rider” denounces the backstage demands of arrogant rockstars. Gillan’s own greatest excess? “I’ve got a little booth behind the drum kit. I said, ‘Let’s build a tiki bar back here’, and we did.”
But the grand theme is metamorphosis and “the cataclysmic ending to the human race” – and what might lurk beyond, be it the light-hearted vision of a Seventh Circle full of bare-knuckle boxing matches and whiskey lakes depicted in “Diablo”, or the AI that Gillan runs rings around in “Scriblin’ Gib’rish”. Though he imagines them “waving us goodbye” as mankind disappears, he’s no fan of our new chatbot overlords. “You’re getting an interpretation of events,” he says of his AI experience. “They don’t do cryptic, they don’t do humour, they don’t do irony, they don’t do most of the things that enrich our lives.”
The lyrics on Splat! emerged from stories that Gillan spent a year immersed in writing. Would he ever consider publishing them? “No, no, no, no. I destroy everything. I always have, in the studio. Nothing remains. When I finish a session for an album, erase everything, because one day some bastard’s going to stick it out and it’s substandard.”
Such is the drive of the new-look Purple that Paice claims they’re considering a return to the studio for another new album in 2027. “We don’t have six, seven, ten years, everybody knows that.” But he also suggests that the Splat! world tour might be their final long-haul around the globe, and they’ll play shorter runs in future. “There’s other stuff in my life. But the idea of actually stopping, that doesn’t compute.”
“It’s skipping stones across the water,” Gillan concludes. “If you’re bouncing across the surface, it’s effortless. If you’re having to wade through the waters, it’s quite difficult, no matter how old you are. But we’re Purple at the moment, I’m skipping stones.”
Splat! is released by earMUSIC on July 3 – pre-order here. Deep Purple’s world tour kicks off in Finland on June 11 and includes six UK shows in November – go here for tickets and the full list of dates