Deep Purple has been on an incredible form in their later years. The release of Now What?! in 2013 was a notable step up in terms of quality of songwriting and performances, and this was continued on Infinite (2017). These albums had been produced by Bob Ezrin, who deserves every credit for helping the band find new mines of motivation, inspiration and creativity to tap into.
Everybody were excited to learn that Deep Purple were returning to the studio with Bob Ezrin for the third time. Not that anyone was surprised – with him, the band had fallen in love with studio work again after dragging their feet for several years.
“I still remember the first conversation we had with Bob,” says vocalist Ian Gillan about working with Ezrin. “He told us, ‘What I want is what Deep Purple used to do. You should be developing ideas from improvisation sessions. If a song is 10 minutes long then I don’t care. If a song is two minutes long, I don’t care. I don’t want songs, I want music. The songs can come later.’ And so the root of everything became easier. Bob isn’t there when we start to write, but he’s instilled that mindset into us. Everything has loosened, but there’s also more focus. […] Bob’s a genius. He’s unlocked the invisible chains that we’d wrapped around ourselves.”
The battle cry ahead of this album was “putting the Deep back into Deep Purple”. Deep is obviously the opposite of shallow, and as an extension of that, it was all about following the ethos of the band they used to be that got successful in the first place: to be brave and bold and write from the heart. “A hint of commercialism had crept in,” admits Gillan, “and it was important to lose that to become honest again.”
Whoosh! is a peculiar album title. It’s not a particularly un-Purple one though – this is after all the band that called an album Bananas. Ian Gillan has explained that the album’s title was chosen for its onomatopoeic qualities (i.e. a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes): “Whoosh is a word that, when viewed through one end of a radio telescope, describes the transient nature of humanity on Earth; and, through the other end from a closer perspective, could illustrate the career of Deep Purple.”
In some interviews, the use of the word in an episode of John Cleese’s TV show Fawlty Towers was also brought up, where Fawlty has the following one-man dialogue with himself: “Whoosh! What was that? Your life. Oh, can I have another one? No, sorry, that is all.”
“Time has a way of not stopping,” adds bassist Roger Glover, “even when you’re stopping. I still find it really hard to believe how old I am [he turns 75 in 2020, just like Gillan]. I feel the same as I did when I was twenty. It’s hard to get used to. Of course, the closer you get to the end of your life, you realise what a life you’ve had. Did you waste it? Are you happy with it?”
As a word that describes things flying by and being over before you know it – such as mankind’s relative time on Earth, let alone our own individual time, or the time of the band you’re in, there is actually quite a bit of depth to the word as an album title if you start looking closer.
Perhaps not seeing this and thinking it to be silly or throwaway, several fans took issue with the title and distanced themselves from the album long before they even had a chance to listen to the music on it. Gillan encouraged those fans to simply listen to the album as an enjoyable experience, ignoring things like the title. The simple fact is; if you liked the two previous Bob Ezrin-produced Purple albums, you should also like the new one, no matter what it says on the tin. If anything, the reluctance of a few people is only going to make a bemused band pick an even weirder title if they do this again. Some things should perhaps be enjoyed without overthinking things.
Having said that, there is a lot of lyrical substance on the album. If you want to dig in deeper, you certainly can. You will find grand reflections on humanity, the state of the planet, specific issues, and even the band itself. None of these are pushed at the listener though. The music is at the forefront and the lyrics are delivered with the usual mixture of Gillan panache and rambling – you need to focus to take them all on board.
The album begins with Throw My Bones, which sets the tone with a groovy guitar riff.
That opening immediately sets it apart from the previous album Infinite, which started with the creepy, atmospheric, spoken word-opening of Time For Bedlam. The first song will always define a certain tonal quality for the album, which both of those songs did very well. In this case, Throw My Bones sets the album off with an in-your-face and immediate zest.
The song continues as it starts, chugging through the verses while expanding wonderfully in the choruses. While the song starts off with a distinct guitar riff, it is very much a band song. It is in fact the lovely sounds of organ and keyboards that in many ways ends up colouring the song the most.
That lovely, succulent keyboard sound in the verses is actually what brought the song back from the brink of obscurity. The original song jam stems from the Infinite sessions in 2017, but nothing was done with it then and it was subsequently forgotten about. A representative from Ear Music (record company) in Hamburg had heard the session tape containing that piece of music, and the haunting keyboard sound would stay with him. Ahead of the Whoosh! sessions, he reached out to Bob Ezrin to politely ask if the band would consider giving “the music from the previous sessions” a new chance. Ezrin pulled it out, and the band immediately reconnected with it, wondering why they hadn’t done more with it to begin with. Ultimately, everything has its time and place.
The title of Throw My Bones is a well-known reference to throwing dice. “I got lyrical inspiration from an article I read about the origins of dice,” says Gillan. “It documented that our ancestors sat around in caves throwing bones for games and competition. The old witch doctors used to throw bones of animals and pretend that they knew about the future depending upon which way the bones fell. As time went on, dots were painted on the bones and it became a game of chance. The song is about that and the concept of fortune telling and I’m thinking to myself, well actually… I’d rather not know what lies ahead because it takes all the fun out of it.”
What we hear on Whoosh! is the sound of a band playing together. Unlike most others, Deep Purple have always recorded each and every song live in the studio as a band, with as much as possible of the song stemming from that live performance. Things are obviously patched in, but the live approach really comes across on songs like Drop the Weapon. The guitar kicks off the song again, with lovely keyboard jumping in over it before the full band elegantly slots into a groove.
This is a rather slinky and playful number as it moves along, even though it breaks no musical new ground. This is Purple very much as we know them in the Steve Morse era. For all the songs upbeat qualities the message is rather more serious.
“The song reflects an emotional rage I had one day,” says Gillan, “reading about yet more kids being shot and stabbed to death in London. The figures were horrendous! And I did not see anyone talking sense about it. And so I just sat down and wrote about this kid, from the perspective of putting an arm around his shoulder and saying, ‘you want to get to a higher position in the gang and everything else, but you’re just being used’. It’s just an arm around a kid’s shoulder. A brotherly arm around the shoulder, telling him ‘drop the weapon. Walk away.’ That sort of thing. Just a very heartfelt lyric at the time. On the day.”
In addition to being about how the policing aspect should be about advising these kids in a non-threatening manner, there is also a bit of reflection around the grand ambitions of flower power and the hippie movement.
No sound of silence, just streets of violence
We’re in overload, wrong side of the road
Oh San Francisco, where the hell did you go
We have enough of that peace and love
“It goes back to the idea when society was actually trying, through things like flower power and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, to become a less violent place,” says Gillan. “It didn’t last very long, because it’s not in human nature.”
Topically, We’re All the Same In the Dark is somewhat similar in terms of trying to understand your fellow man so that peace and love has at least a fighting chance. The thought of putting two people together in a dark room, stripping them of visual impressions and any knowledge about each other, is not a new one. Gillan is convinced they would usually end up being friends.
“Yeah, well, there we are, aren’t we?” says Gillan. “You take a catholic and a protestant, and you take people with long vendettas, and you put them together in a room in the dark, and they will probably get along very well. If they don’t know their history they’re just two complete strangers with a need for conversation and company. You can apply that to human psychology I think.”
Baby won’t you be my friend?
And love me right until the end
I don’t care what shape you’re in
What you’ve done or where you’ve been
I’ve got nothing to hide from you
We can sit and talk about the past
We don’t need to tell the truth
To tell the truth now
We’re all the same in the dark
Musically this is a memorable song due to its many lovely melodies. It takes the shape of a very comfortable mid-tempo jam which support the vocals without any huge elaborate instrumental sections (for a change). It is melodic and comfortable, but insistently played.
Uncharacteristically, Gillan has worked a lot on adding backing vocals on this album. This song is a good example of how effective this is – check out the pre-chorus bridges. The Gillan-fronted Deep Purple was never much of a backing vocals type of band – his skills as a vocal soloist never necessitated it, but as his singing style and approach has changed I find it a very welcome addition here.
Nothing At All has an immediate hook in the call-and-response of arpeggios between guitar and organ, which is nothing less than sensational. In Deep Purple, you will find this type of interaction between band members all over the place – sometimes in the background, other times just as a minor flourish, sometimes more prominent. This is one of those that is so powerful that it ends up pretty much defining the song it is on.
“Those wonderful exchanges between Morse and Airey happened during our first writing session in Germany,” says Gillan. “We spent six days in rehearsal, and I could not believe what I heard. My head nearly exploded – it sounded immediately overwhelming. The song was left aside as we moved on to other things. I later pleaded and begged for Nothing At All to be completed, and when Bob Ezrin heard the recordings he took my side. That sped things up, haha!”
The song is not what you could call an archetypical Deep Purple song musically, but still a clear highlight on the album. Rather than featuring a heavy soundscape to rattle the windows, it has a distinctively lighter touch. This simulates the collective laissez-faire attitude toward climate change – that it’s “nothing at all” – which the lyrics portray.
Just a few of us walk arm in arm
It’s innocent and charming
But the children seem to be getting alarmed
Don’t worry kids, it’s nothing at all
It’s nothing at all, nothing at all
And the old lady smiled
It’s nothing at all
Then she blew all the leaves off my tree
The old lady who ‘blew all the leaves off my tree’ is Mother Nature. This is Gillan’s enigmatic way of saying that she is all-powerful. We still need to take care of her to be able to breathe and survive. The lyrics become a wonderful reflection on the nonchalance of society. The brunt of the song is clear: we’re in a pretty precarious situation and we’re not taking it seriously enough.
“I liked the phrase ‘She blew all the leaves off my tree,’” says Gillan. “I thought that says it all. It’s very obvious to anyone who cares that things are hotting up a bit. We have overpopulated this planet so unbelievably heavily at an exponential rate in my lifetime alone. It’s fair to say that there’s an awful lot of people in this generation who are complacent about it. I was imagining this indolent upper-class person who is totally dismissive of the climate challenges. When the kids get alarmed, that guy would say something like ‘Don’t worry kids, it’s nothing at all.’ Hence the title.”
The song is a perfect marriage between music and lyrics. Both are cheeky and mischievous. The song is playful, yet with that ability to turn at any time – just like Mother Nature will turn on us if we’re not careful.
The organ note that signals the start of No Need To Shout is identical to the note that starts their monster hit Perfect Strangers. Of course, instead of going to the song our minds are conditioned to expect, they launch into the new song. I foresee a lot of merciless tricking of audiences when they play this one live!
The song has a groovy and percussive bedding which sets it apart nicely from the previous tracks. It has a vintage flair in playing and overall approach which long-time fans will pick up on and appreciate, but at the same time, it is clearly “new Purple”.
“Roger came in with this lovely bass riff and we all hooked onto it straight away,” says drummer Ian Paice. “It emerged in the morning and by the end of the same day we had a fully formed piece of music that feels great to play.”
Lyrically, the song is a broad pop at politicians. “Not anyone in particular,” says Gillan. “They’re all useless. They come in full of idealism and vigour. They’re so full of energy and altruism and doing good things for people. And within five years they’re talking rubbish. They are sucked into the system. They’re destroyed, they have no independent voice. They’re just along for the ride then. Not one politician that I see, or read about today, will give the slightest indication that anyone on the other side might have done something right. Or had a good idea. Everything is wrong. What we want is intelligent people doing what they should be doing – collaborating on solutions, not fighting each other all the time.”
Bassist Roger Glover’s first reaction to the lyrics were that they were a bit mild. Lines like ‘Shut your mouth and go away’ seemed mild for a hard rock band. He wondered aloud whether a more dramatic choice of words should be considered. Gillan declined. “It’s just a politician,” he said. “Why should I waste my energy? It’s just like… [brushes imaginary dandruff off his shoulder]. Just, ‘Go away.’ I don’t even want to raise my voice.”
In spite of this seemingly relative calm in his approach to the lyrics, Gillan delivers the lyric to this song with a satisfyingly fitting amount of attitude and bite. “It’s just a bunch of crap / You’re talking out your hat,” Gillan spits, adding some “hah!” with suitable amounts of contempt for good measure. Don’t believe for one second that Gillan has lost his bite.
That takes us to one of the two most musically unique and fascinating songs on the album. The second one comes later, but for now, Step By Step provides a spooky otherworldliness. It was originally called The Skeleton Waltz, which would have been a very good title as far as describing the mood of the song. This is a creepy one. The church organ intro is as gothic as it gets. The time signature when the band comes in is plain quirky, although the song has the overall pattern of a waltz. Haunting organ sounds continues to fill the song, often doubled by the guitar, which is particularly effective. The organ solo is cutely spooky, and with the following guitar solo, the song is starting to lead up to a mighty momentum.
The band dabbled in horror references a few albums ago on the track Vincent Price, and musically this may tick that box even better. The lyrics certainly have a few hints of it too, even though some of the inspiration comes from a very different place. “The lyrics are directly inspired by a sketch by The Three Stooges called Niagara Falls,” says Gillan, “in which the words ‘step by step’ play a key role.”
Add to that the lyrical mentions of moving through ‘the graveyard shift’ and ‘worming your way’ – not to forget ‘holding on to a bag of bones’ – and I think nobody would object if you put this on your Halloween playlist.
“Step By Step is a piece the I find nicely odd,” says Paice. “Wonderfully odd the way that time moves in it. It’s rhythmically very pleasing, because it doesn’t remind you of anything. And the way that the lyric works with that, that rolling thing, it is just so very satisfying. You turn it up and it really feels nice!”
Gillan concurs, and adds: “It is extremely difficult to write vocal melody lines to music of Step By Step’s calibre,” says Gillan. “The song emerged during a morning jam. At first I struggled to navigate vocally between the percussive shifts, but kept at it until it sounded natural and unforced. I cannot remember that we have ever done anything like this song. The piece is fairly bizarre, with metric values from another planet. Of course, halfway through it goes completely nuts! And all the time signatures… this is typically Purple jamming in the studio. Not giving a monkey’s about who’s listening, haha! But I love it. Step By Step raised a lot of challenges, but they were all worth it.”
What the What is the 1950s-inspired moment on the album. Plainly speaking, this is Purple’s take on a good old-fashioned good-time rock’n’roll song, with nostalgic lyrics that fondly look back at those times.
“I like to look back at the 1950s and lose myself to other times,” says Gillan. “That decade continues to be an endless source of inspiration. This is one of those road stories that we couldn’t write when we were kids because we had no experience. But there’s such a wealth of memories and stuff to go back on. This is a song about how things were – pianos in pubs, riverboat shuffles. The works.”
Just a quick look at the lyrics is enough to see that this is an ode to the times the band members grew up in, as it is very rich in reference to the music scene, people, places and events from those rocking and rolling 1950s. It is easy to feel the warmth and nostalgic love shining out from the song. While musically this isn’t the type of song I expect from my Purple, allowing them to be nostalgically indulgent on one song is hardly a problem. In this case, it’s honestly quite the opposite!
Musically, the song sounds like Purple full of 50s dressings. Airey plays classic rock’n’roll piano on this track, including a fabulous and adorable honky-tonk piano solo. Gillan has a suitably vintage room echo on his voice. At times, the guitar has touches of being Chuck Berry-esque. It’s not a fully-fledged 1950s rock’n’roll song, but a song with several touches in that direction. There is no doubt which decade they are looking at.
The song is full of memories and references to how things were. It mentions having to play guitars with five strings or pianos with teeth missing. Perfection was not the goal; it was about getting into the communal spirit of things. To sit around and sing used to be the entertainment in pubs. There was dancing in every pub in London. They all had an old Joanna (piano) and plenty of people who could play rock and roll piano. This scene disappeared relatively quickly over the course of a few years. Slowly but surely, it got to the point where most people wouldn’t know the old English folk songs anymore. Not that old songs was all it was about, people would play rock and roll as well. That’s all gone now, but it is still fondly remembered and treasured by those who were around. The memories are kept alive through songs like this one.
Every bar in London had an old Joanna
And cats who could play rock and roll piano
No one cared a few teeth gone missing
Everybody got up to sing
Five string guitars and old skin drums
On a river boat shuffle, bunch-a drunken bums
No way of knowing when the temperature dropped
The moment was hot, there was no time to stop
The chorus features the enigmatic phrase which gave the song its name.
So bad
We were so bad
We been so bad
What the what happened to you last night?
“We were looking for a suitable percussive phrase that would fit the vocal break,” says Gillan. “My suggested ‘What the fuck happened to you last night?’ could not be used, as they would beep that in America, but it gave the song a direction. And it became, ‘What the what happened to you last night’ instead. Which gave the song its title.”
Where What The What looks back at a certain time more generally, the next song The Long Way Round contains reflections on a more personal level. “This is basically a biographical song,” says Gillan. “I am always looking the wrong way or going the wrong way round, or as the song say, I was looking over there but all the time it was under my nose. The song contains my favourite opening line of all time: ‘You can’t get me down, I’ve got the ‘things are looking up’ blues.’ Basically you’re just lost in a world of your own, and dreaming and facing the wrong way. Going the long way around.”
You can’t get me down
I got the ‘things are looking up’ blues
I know it happens
But it never sticks to my shoes
The music is fairly upbeat, with solid riffing and a driving rhythm. As is the case with several of the songs on the album, the chorus opens up with bigger sounds and layers of Gillan harmonising with himself. It’s tight yet expansive, following the ‘a little goes a long way’-principle.
Later in the song, the music quietens down to just the drums and bass pounding the song along, with the occasional keyboard stabs. During this passage, Gillan self-references his time in Black Sabbath (he sang on 1983’s Born Again album). On the Sabbath song Thrashed he sang “Ooh Mr. Miracle, you saved me from some pain / I thank you Mr. Miracle, I won’t get thrashed again.” On The Long Way Round, he sings “I promised myself I would not get trashed again / But the way I’m feeling right now that promise is going down the drain.” A funny easter egg.
The song has a longer, ambient outro where the guitar plays am ambient solo over a blanket of keyboards. This leads quite nicely into the next song The Power of the Moon which starts off with some of the same ambience. The verses contain a constant backdrop of keyboard sound. The guitar is picking away at a melody but not taking centre stage either. The rhythm section is settling in, keeping things going comfortably rather than insistently. The band is providing a wonderfully introvert sound for a song where moods are more important than rocking out.
While the choruses expand yet again, the song keeps dipping in and out of several moods, from the echo-y and wailing guitar solo, the keyboard extravaganza, the middle eight sections with layered vocals and an intense instrumental build… this is a very tastefully played song with a lot of intriguing musical facets. This is very fitting of a song about the moon. More specifically, the many powers that the moon possesses, and the power it can also provide.
“I’ve been banging on for ages about wasting time with wind and solar power,” says Gillan, “when the moon lifts the oceans twice a day. We should be harnessing that. Unlike those other two alternatives it would always be there. It’s be simple to achieve, but there’s such a malaise in this country. We never get anything done.”
The next track Remission Possible is more or less an intro to Man Alive, one of the key songs on the album. The intro starts off explosively with a section (which contains some of the most insane guitar playing on the album), after which it sets the theme for the coming song.
Man Alive is a modern Deep Purple masterpiece in every sense. As soon as the song starts, you immediately hear that this is unlike anything else the band made. It is experimental, it is symphonic, and the initial vocal layering seem to have more in common with Laurie Anderson’s O Superman than what we’re used to from Deep Purple. And this is just the intro.
The album has touched on several topics earlier on the album, including looking ahead, how we combat senseless violence, environmental concerns… and now we look at what could happen when it all goes wrong.
“Man Alive is not your average classic rock song”, says Gillan. “Many of the things I’ve written about through the years have been to do with empathy and telepathy. Human beings lost telepathy when they learned how to speak and write, but children have it. Mothers have it too, and for quite a while now I’ve had this image in my mind of a mother clutching her breast at the very moment that her son falls on a distant battlefield. It’s such a powerful image for me, and it became symbolic of the end of an apocalyptic war.”
Sun sets in the West
The boy has gone to rest
Mama clutch her breast
These words provide a very quick way of saying there’s been a big war and it’s all over. This, and the following verses, sets the stage of a post-apocalyptic world where humans have become extinct. Everything returns to nature and a new order emerges. As the song goes, “Mother Nature loves a vacuum / And so the earth was cleansed, in no time at all.”
Gillan continues: “I remember reading Tarzan books as a kid and being fascinated by the idea of explorers going through jungles and discovering overgrown cities filled with animals and monkeys, cattle grazing in the streets. I was pleased with the way that the narrative developed.”
After the intro, the band plays along and sings as we’re used to, presenting the song in a traditional Deep Purple format. After the verse, the song morphs again, going into a different direction. The track becomes much more symphonic in nature, with the lyrics now being delivered in the style of a poetry reading rather than singing them. Gillan felt that a spoken narrative seemed the only thing to do during those passages, because he didn’t want to encroach on the haunting nature of the music.
This works very well. The music is at this point symphonic and expansive. You can hear an oboe section and different symphonic instruments also appear during these sections. The atmosphere the song builds is incredible. This is above and beyond any other musical expression they have attempted on the album. When it eventually evolves into a guitar solo, it is wailing with emotion – almost crying at everything that happened.
What we are seeing as the listen through this song, is that it always adapts to the story it tells. Some passages are fully suitable to be delivered by Deep Purple the rock band, while other passages demand much more expansive, reflective, or dramatic touches. The song is a musical chameleon, with a lot of different expressions.
All creatures great and small
Graze on blood red soil
And grass that grows on city streets
It’s been a quiet town
Until the word got round
And something washed up on the beach
A man alive
Those last words contain the real drama of the song. The apocalyptic war is in the past at this point, the song is really about the aftermath. Mother Nature slowly but surely putting things back together. A new world order of nature and animals taking over. And then – everybody become aware that a lone man has washed up on the beach. A man alive. Whoosh.
When nature has finally found balance, what does it mean when a man appears? Is it hope? Is it danger? We never know what happens after that point, as this is the moment that really defines the song, as Gillan delivers his final spoken word passage at the end of the song.
A man alone
Washed up on the beach
Just a man
Whoosh
This is obviously the point in the album where ‘Whoosh’ is mentioned in a song, giving the album its name. This mention is completely independent of the album title, which had not yet been selected, but it might have triggered it in some way in the back of the band’s minds.
This takes us to And The Address. It is an instrumental, and the final track of the proper album. It is also the first track on their very first album Shades of Deep Purple from 1968, so the feeling of full circle should immediately become apparent.
It was Bob Ezrin’s suggestion to do it and close out the album with it. His reasoning was that if Whoosh! should turn out to be the final Deep Purple album, that aforementioned full circle would be complete with the band finishing just as they started – first song on first album, and last song on last album. Who knows if it ends up actually being the last one – there has been talk of going back into the studio soon due to the unexpected Covid-19 break from touring.
Of course, And The Address is followed by Dancing In My Sleep, which ruins the argument about “first and last track on Purple albums” a bit. Although Dancing In My Sleep is listed a bonus track, what does that really mean when that track is present on every format of the album that you can possibly buy? Even the vinyl record has that song as the last track on the last side. Unless they plan to drop it at a later stage, the track seems like a pretty permanent part of the album to me.
Having said that, getting another Purple track is hardly a problem!
The track uncharacteristically starts with an intro with touches of 1980s synth stabs, and a more drums/bass-driven song with melodic keyboard backdrops until the guitar finally comes in around the second verse. The song carries a lovely melody and a strong percussive beat throughout. It is very angular and cold, and builds very nicely as it goes on, with great solos from Airy and Morse.
The song is about enjoying your dreams, but it’s hard to get its writer to reveal much more and he even seems a bit dismissive of the song as a whole – with the exception of the guitar solo.
“It’s all about dreaming,” says Gillan “But it’s what you dream about and that’s not really important. There’s only one really important thing on this track and that is the guitar solo for me. With due respect to the rest of the guys, it’s magnificent. Bob has a lot of guitars on the stands in the studio, and said to Steve, ‘hey, why don’t you try that Danelectro Guitar?’ Steve just picked out one and went, ‘oh, yeah, okay’ and played it. It’s one of greatest solos that I have ever heard in my entire life. And that’s why that song is worth listening to.”
The band do a good job of embracing a retro vibe on a lot of the album, but this may be the only track that is firmly 1980s in that regard. It isn’t my favourite on the album, but I’m nowhere as dismissive of its merits as its singer. Perhaps the sonic difference is why it was given the “bonus track” tag, but I’m sure a lot of listeners will enjoy hearing the band take a musical dip into the 1980s on this track.
That concludes Whoosh! – an album that was controversial with several people before they had even heard a note due to its title. Reports from people who have actually listened have been very favourable, with the album performing extremely well sales-wise in most territories.
The impressive form curve that the band has tapped into in the twilight years of their career is just plain incredible. Bands like The Rolling Stones have long been the ones who have pushed the envelope as far as how long a band can keep being active, but with most of their activities being touring, Deep Purple are now the ones showing everybody else how creative it is possible to be in your 70s. Keep in mind, Gillan and Glover are just two years younger than Jagger and Richards, so they are pretty much of the same generation.
With the band displaying levels of vitality and creativity that no other band of their generation has been able to showcase for years, it feels absurd to think of this as any kind of last album. There is no musical decline at all. Rather than continuing to make great music in the vein they always have, they are continuing to stretch, push boundaries and innovate. Other bands would go to desperate lengths to just get a taste of the creativity that can result in a song like Man Alive, for example. This album is a triumph on so many levels. This does not sound like a band on their last legs. It sounds like a band in their prime, still growing, still exploring.
This is not being realistic, though, which is what the band is being. “We don’t want to stop,” says Roger Glover. “There will likely be no planned last show. We will keep going because we all love it, and it’s a lot better than sitting at home. It will be painfully obvious when we’ll have to stop. I hope we can do another album, I hope there will be more shows. We take it one day at a time.”
Gillan gets the last word on that topic: “There is always this dark humour going on in the band. When we met Bob again, it was a Friday. He said, ‘Why don’t we all go out for dinner on Monday?’ And someone said, ‘What’s the big occasion?’ Bob said, ‘Well, you know, we’re all back together again. And we’re all alive!’ And someone said, ‘We better make it Sunday then.’”
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