Deep Purple In Rock is one of the all-time classic albums of its genre. Released in 1970, it firmly put Deep Purple on the map and launched hard rock to the masses alongside Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.
Child In Time is one of the stand-out tracks on the album. You will rarely hear ten more diverse, explosive, rollercoaster minutes of a performance anywhere else. From its tender, fragile, and utterly atmospheric intro, the song builds masterfully until it ends up like a soaring epic, jumping from the highest mountain peaks towards space when earth runs out of plateaus high enough to sustain the grand proportions that it is reaching. Rock music has never been more outright dramatic than when the song crashes to an utter standstill halfway through, only to start the climb all over again from the near-quiet intro one more time, slowly but surely building again until it ends with an even bigger musical orgasm than last time in utter (controlled) chaos. The song contains so much momentum at times that it’s almost a miracle that the grooves on the record is able to contain all the sound.
This was also the song that more than any other launched Ian Gillan as a vocalist of otherworldly skill and unbelievable banshee howls. In 1970, there was simply no one better than him. Listen to him take off in Child In Time and be convinced.
Deep Purple never made a secret of the fact that the introductory organ theme on Child in Time was inspired by the song Bombay Calling that appeared in 1969 on It’s A Beautiful Day’s eponymous album. In fact, certain elements sound fairly similar.
“It was not entirely by accident,” admitted Jon Lord when asked about this by Thor-Rune Haugen in a Norwegian radio interview in 1986. “I quite like the progression from G major to E minor. Bom-bom-bom. [Humming the organ theme in the intro.] But then the bit in between was all mine, and that song obviously had nothing to do with what Ian sang. It’s just that little thing. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Had I known the song was going to become so famous, I might have been a bit more careful about stealing somebody else’s… [laughs] It’s not really stealing, it’s interaction! They stole one of ours anyway. It’s A Beautiful Day had a track on their album which was exactly the same as our song Wring That Neck.”
Jon Lord was right in pointing out that apart from that organ theme, which although it is huge-sounding and important, is still just a very small part of the larger song which is otherwise totally different both musically and lyrically.
When Lord refers to this as interaction, it simply refers to the guys in Deep Purple hearing that song becoming inspired to write, as Ritchie Blackmore famously said, “something vaguely similar” but make it their own.
Also, as Lord points out, what makes this even more interesting is that It’s A Beautiful Day (IABD) followed suit by using the theme from Deep Purple’s song Wring That Neck in one of their own songs. Originally featured on the second Deep Purple album The Book of Taliesyn (1968), the theme was also put to good use on the track Don And Dewey from the second IABD album Marrying Maiden (June 1970)
We should not forget that Deep Purple were friends with the folks in IABD. They had been on the same bill at Fillmore West in San Francisco in late 1968, where it is likely they would have first heard the track. In April 1969 IABD supported Deep Purple on several more US dates. They may even have given Purple a copy of their new album, which they would have had advance copies of at the time. This is likely the time Jon referred to when he later said that he first heard the album in America and was fascinated by the strings on the Bombay Calling song. Nick Simper (original Purple bassist, 1968-69) remembered that Purple Mk 1 did “kick around” the Bombay Calling riff at one time, suggesting that a song using that particular idea could have emerged a lot sooner than it did.
As chronicled in the book Wait For the Ricochet (Simon Robinson and Stephen Clare), the band was rehearsing at Hanwell on 15 July 1969. During a break, Ritchie raised the subject of this particular track. Roger Glover remembers: “There had been a lull in the jamming. Someone said, ‘do you remember that song Bombay Calling by IABD?’ Jon started playing it for us. We all joined in, we slowed it down, Ian started singing over it, and it sounded like it could be interesting.” The seeds of Child In Time had been sown – or as Roger put it in his diary; “Routined Bombay Calling into our own way.”
It’s rather fascinating how the two bands ended up more or less swapping themes. Who did it first? Sharp observers will notice that both the albums in question were released in June 1970, but as the story goes, Child In Time was created first, with Don And Dewey almost being a response. With the releases coming out more or less at the same time, this indicates that the bands were open about what they did with each other and likely saw it as a cool thing. Both sides just enjoyed the interaction, which Jon Lord rightly described it as. More than likely, IABD were flattered that Purple turned their song into something as massive as it was. Purple similarly enjoyed seeing IABD return the favour.
This is a sign of how much the times have changed. If this had happened now, lawyers would likely get involved. There have been many lawsuits over songwriting credits in recent decades, often with record labels and publishers leading the fray rather than the artists themselves. That was unheard of back then. Things were much more open, with creative ideas being bounced around from one band to another, reused, developed, and reworked. A much more experimental and open attitude prevailed, and this cross fertilisation of ideas was not unlike the sort of borrowing and referencing which had long been a feature of classical music.
Led Zeppelin’s debut album is stacked to the rafters with ideas and songs that clearly are lifted directly from the old blues masters, which wasn’t even thought of as anything special. In modern times they did however start crediting the original writers as the climate and opinion on this approach changed. The fact that Led Zeppelin brought an entirely new approach to the material and in several cases changed it significantly would not matter in that regard.
It is worth noting that there is further controversy surrounding where Bombay Calling actually comes from. On the IABD album the song was credited to Vince Wallace and David LaFlamme. LaFlamme is, of course, the singer/violin player in IABD. Vince Wallace is a jazz saxophonist who has claimed he wrote the full song back in 1962 and showed it to LaFlamme in 1966. The earliest released recording of Wallace playing Bombay Calling seems to be the one on the Vince Wallace Plays Vince Wallace album, released on AMP Records in 1974 or 1976, several years later. The fact that he was credited on the first IABD album at all does seem to verify his involvement and gives some credence to his claim. That could mean that Vince Wallace is actually the man behind the iconic keyboard riff in Child In Time.
An interesting postscript: in 2022, Deep Purple released a live album with a 1995 recording done in Bombay, India. Cheekily enough, they chose Bombay Calling as the title for this album, which certainly made me smile.
Another postscript: Ritchie Blackmore has revisited Child In Time with his current acoustic renaissance folk project Blackmore’s Night. Their version of the main theme in the song is very close to Bombay Calling, down to the use of violin and the same percussive pattern. This makes Blackmore’s Night’s rendition of that riff closer to the style of its inspiration than Purple’s version ever was. A conscious decision?
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