Legendary rockers DEEP PURPLE have launched a countdown clock online for what is expected to be an announcement of the first details of the group’s new music. The countdown, which is scheduled to hit zero on October 6 at 7:00 a.m. PDT / 10:00 a.m. EDT, can be found on the domain name TurningToCrime.com — a possible song or album title — where visitors are redirected to a page on the web site of DEEP PURPLE‘s record label, earMUSIC. The landing page features mugshot-like photos of bandmembers Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Ian Paice, Steve Morse and Don Airey, along with the text “Turning To Crime” and the aforementioned countdown clock.
Last December, DEEP PURPLE bassist Roger Glover revealed during a virtual meet-and-greet with Finnish fan Anssi Herkkola that the band was planning to enter the studio in 2021 to begin work on another album. Speaking about how he and the other members of PURPLE have been spending their coronavirus downtime, Roger said: “All this COVID situation has meant that we can’t tour. We’re twiddling our thumbs, really, for over a year, and the idea was to possibly go back in and do another album. And so we’re just working towards that. It’s so quick after we’d done the last album, [and] maybe that will spoil things, but we’re gonna try and do another album at some point next year. We’re experimenting with stuff.”
DEEP PURPLE‘s latest album, “Whoosh!”, was released in August 2020 via earMUSIC. The LP was once again helmed by Canadian producer Bob Ezrin (KISS, PINK FLOYD, ALICE COOPER), who also worked on the band’s previous two studio albums, 2017’s “Infinite” and 2013’s “Now What?!”
Glover told Den Of Geek about the PURPLE songwriting process: “All our songs come from jamming. We don’t actually write songs, they just evolve as we play. The first writing session is usually a lot of fun. We just explore different rhythms and riffs and whatever, and then take a break to listen to them, and figure out which ones we really want to work on, and that’s the second writing session. And then we go to the studio and record them, but at this point, we rarely have finished vocals or lyrics. It’s usually when the album has been all recorded instrumentally that [singer] Ian Gillan and I go off on our own somewhere for a couple of weeks and we write the words. Sometimes he writes on his own, sometimes I write my own. Sometimes we write together. And that’s how it comes out.
He added: “You don’t go to a PURPLE session with anything like a finished song. You go with an idea, and we all work on it together. It’s got to be a collective. That’s the point of the band — it’s a collective. So, one person couldn’t write a DEEP PURPLE song. It takes five of us.
“We’ve always done it that way. It’s a strange way to write songs, I know. Most people write the songs before they go in the studio, we write them after we’ve been in the studio. But it was like that in ’69 when I joined the band. It’s been the same ever since.”
In the Den Of Geek interview, Glover also said that DEEP PURPLE has “always” been a democratic group. “It was right from when I first joined the band,” he explained. “We decided that whoever writes any particular idea, we all share, because we all contribute. The way we play is almost as much a part of the writing process as what the riff or the lyrics are. So we all shared everything. It didn’t last that way. When I left the band, and Gillan left the band, it changed. It changed up until when Steve Morse joined. When Steve Morse joined, we said, ‘Right, let’s share everything.’ It takes away stress, it takes away ego, it takes away jealousy, it takes away bad vibes. And I think we all share and we all write for it. We all work our bits. So that’s the way we do it, and it is a democratic band.”
(Thanks: Deep Purple Italia)
