Ian Paice Of Deep Purple On The Songwriting Process Behind The Group’s 21st Album ‘Whoosh!’

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON – SEPTEMBER 11: Drummer Ian Paice of Deep Purple performs live at the Paramount … [+] Theatre on September 11, 2019 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo by Jim Bennett/Getty Images)

Since 1968, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Deep Purple have been at the forefront of hard rock. Alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, the group was instrumental in sparking the metal revolution that would follow in the U.K., thanks to new wave of British heavy metal acts like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, and in America as thrash metal bands like Metallica crossed over to the mainstream.

Responsible for the sale of more than 100 million albums around the world, Deep Purple experienced its biggest commercial success following the 1972 release of the album Machine Head, which spawned genre defining hits like “Space Truckin’” and the iconic, enduring anthem “Smoke on the Water.”

With the exception of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, all living members (drummer Ian Paice, basist Roger Glover and singer/songwriter Ian Gillan) from that era of the group remain in the band today as Deep Purple celebrates more than 50 years with the release of its 21st studio album Whoosh! (now available via earMUSIC).

Working with famed producer Bob Ezrin (KISS, Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper) for the third consecutive album, the group began writing in Germany, ultimately recording in Nashville – quick, enjoyable sessions which churned out 13 finished tracks.

Lyrically, several of the new songs address contemporary topics and, while penned by Gillan prior to the onset of COVID-19, nevertheless manage to address today’s world.

“We think it’s got some wonderful different moods on it. I think there’s a couple of tracks there which may turn out to be a little more important than we thought they were,” said founding drummer Ian Paice of Whoosh! “I think ‘Man Alive’ hits some wonderful notes. The atmospheric nature of the track is very beguiling. I also like more straight rock and roll, which is ‘No Need to Shout.’ If somebody had told you that was a bunch of 20 year old’s making rock and roll, you would’ve said, ‘That sounds great!’ I love that. It’s just straight ahead. So I think it’s a nice record.”

I spoke with Paice about the songwriting process at the heart of Whoosh!, working with Ezrin on the new album and teaming up with bassist Roger Glover as Deep Purple rhythm section for most of the last 50 years. A transcript of our phone conversation, lightly edited for length, follows below…

I read that this album was written and arranged over three weeks in Germany and then three more in Nashville. How long did you guys actually spend in the studio recording in Nashville?

IAN PAICE: I get my stuff done first. The backing tracks are all done together. So, usually, I’m in the studio between about seven and ten days. I think this one was eight days. 

Once I’ve done my bit, I get the hell out of there. I have no interest in hanging around while they do the overdubs and the rest of it. Once I finish my drum parts, the next time I want to hear it is when it’s close to finished. Then I can make an evaluated opinion and add my two cents if I think anything needs changing.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – APRIL 08: (L-R) Ian Gillan, Ian Paice, and Roger Glover of Deep Purple pose … [+] with Lars Ulrich of Metallica on stage in the press room at the 31st Annual Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony at Barclays Center of Brooklyn on April 8, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

It sounds like everything came together pretty quick. What kind of an impact does that have on things? 

IP: If you can make a record quickly – and that means getting things caught in three or four takes – it’s generally a good record. Because you haven’t got bored with playing it.

The albums that are a problem are where you just can’t get the backing track and you’ve had to play it fifteen or sixteen times. Which times, you may have gotten it perfect – but it’s no good. It’s lost all its humanity. It’s lost all its inspiration. Everything you’re doing is something you did before. So that act of creation is gone and it’s now recreation. And it just isn’t the same. 

When we started working with Bob Ezrin in 2012 – which is amazing, three records ago now – he just took that out of the equation. He just said, “No. Once we’ve done it three or four times, I promise you, I have all the bits I want. We’re gonna move on and we’re gonna keep it exciting and vibrant.” Which is what he’s done. And which we’ve found is so enjoyable. So it’s not unusual to go in the studio for six hours and come out with three backing tracks. That’s how quick it can be. So that’s refreshing.

And it’s fun to record. Because for years it wasn’t fun. For years it was a labor of work – where being on stage is a labor of love. And now it’s all a labor of love. Now it’s something we look forward to. And that is a wonderful feeling.

I’ve read that Bob’s goal early on was to capture the live essence of Deep Purple in the studio. I know you guys record together live in the studio. How important is that?

IP: Well, we’ve always recorded the backing tracks together. The four instrumentalists, we always do it together.

There’s a moment you can capture when you’re all in the studio. It may be eye contact, it may just be a physical movement – and you react to it. When you layer things in a more modern way of recording popular music, that’s not possible. If some guy goes in on Wednesday and the next guy goes in on Thursday, well it’s all very clean and pretty but you miss those moments. But we’ve always done it that way. And we get those moments. And it gives the track a different life. And we will continue to record what you might call the “old-fashioned” way.

But I’ve got to be honest, recording in the digital age is far easier than it was in the analog times. In the analog times, you had to be good and you had to get it right within one or two takes or you had to go back and start again. If we get a take in one great go, that’s fabulous. But, quite often, what you hear on the record is an amalgamation of two or three takes. With digital editing, you just take the second half of the first take and marry it to the first part of the second take… and nobody can tell! It’s just perfectly seamless. So the pressure on you to get everything right in four or five minutes is slightly more relaxed.

On the down side of that, it’s very, very hard to tell who’s any good anymore. Because the studio wizardry is so all-encompassing that we’re as bamboozled as anyone else! “How did they manage that?” Well, the truth is, most of the times, they didn’t. 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – APRIL 08: (L-R) Roger Glover, Ian Paice, and Ian Gillian of Deep Purple … [+] perform on stage at the 31st Annual Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony at Barclays Center on April 8, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

I saw Ian Gillan say of these sessions that quite a bit was born out of simply jamming together in the studio under Bob’s supervision – as opposed to sitting down and actually making a concerted effort to write. How much of what we hear on Whoosh! musically is born out of simply enjoying jamming together?

It’s very rare that one guy will come in with a formulated idea. There’ll be little riffs or little bits and pieces where somebody says, “I think this will be interesting…” But we just start playing. The first guy will start making some noise and, if it’s interesting, the rest of us will join in. If it’s not interesting, then you go and get a coffee and you realize what you did was not as good as you thought it was.

But when we do this thing, this creating new bits of music – because that’s all they are. They’re not songs yet. We don’t have a dedicated songwriter. So we can’t be that way – They’re always cooperative ventures. And that happens through just playing together and seeing what happens.

If you start something and people join in, you may fiddle around for 15 or 20 minutes trying to find what there is in your idea. And of that 15 or 20 minutes, 15 minutes may be very average. But you may have one minute of that magic where stuff comes together and makes you say, “That’s it! That’s the idea in a nutshell. Now what do we do? How can we extend it? Where do we go with it?” And it’s those moments that you end up putting together which become pieces of music which could become songs. But until Ian Gillan gets his words and his top line on them, that’s all they are are pieces of music.

Occasionally, when we’re doing this stuff, he’ll say, “Well, it’s lovely. But there’s no way I can make it into a song. It just won’t work. There’s nowhere I can go with this.” So you take it and say, “OK. Let’s find the best bit and call that an instrumental passage.” And we’ll reconfigure the other bits so a song can happen.

But, until he’s got his bit, we have no idea what it’ll turn out to be. We’re just presenting him with pieces of music that we think are interesting and will create an emotion.

It is a mysterious process. There are a lot of other bands who wouldn’t go that way. But it’s the only way we’ve ever done it. And I think it’s the only way we can do it.

Speaking of Ian’s words… I know that these songs were written and recorded well prior to the pandemic – but I couldn’t help but notice an eerie connection in some of the lyrics regardless of that. Have some of these songs kind of started to take on new meaning for you in light of where we’re at at the moment?

I think the pandemic has just focused everybody’s mind on how fragile the whole thing is – how fragile society is. One thing like this can just stop the world. 

But for the last 15 or 20 years, we’ve been seeing all of the other little signs. Whether it be dirty air or crap going into the oceans or burying all of this toxic stuff under the ground and hoping it won’t be our problem. Well, sooner or later, it all comes home to roost.

And Ian’s lyrics have always been about the world he lives in. Not every song is a social commentary – rock and roll is meant to be fun as well. But if you go back right to the early 70s, “Child in Time” was a social comment song. It was that Cold War time when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were threatening to trade punches with each other. The world was not a comfy place. But, for normal people… It seemed like everybody understood, except the politicians, that we are all the same. And threatening to hurt each other really doesn’t achieve anything.

So that was a social comment song. It wasn’t telling people what to do but said, “Think about it…” 

And I think the lyrics on two or three of the songs are relevant to today’s situation. “Hey, just be aware.” And if you can nudge people into just giving it a thought, with a little bit of a rock and roll, I can’t see anything wrong with that. I’m a great believer in not telling people what to do.

UNITED KINGDOM – DECEMBER 16: TOP OF THE POPS Photo of DEEP PURPLE and Roger GLOVER and Ritchie … [+] BLACKMORE and Jon LORD and Ian PAICE and Ian GILLAN, L-R: Jon Lord, Ian Gillan, Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Paice (front, on drums), Roger Glover – performing on show (Photo by Ron Howard/Redferns)

What I have so much respect for looking back at 50 years of your band is that natural evolution. You were never bowing to trends, whether it be radio or anything else. Everybody was kind of forced to catch up to Deep Purple. How important has it been kind of at all times to push the group forward on its own terms?

IP: You have to go back to the period where we started – when success came along. And I’m not really talking about the initial success that came in ‘68 with “Hush.” I’m talking about the success that came 18 months after that when Ian and [bassist] Roger Glover joined the band.

We had a system where the record companies were run by people who liked music and were interested in different art forms. They were part of it. And they were clever enough to sit back and let these kids create something about which they knew nothing – other than the fact that all of the kids around the world liked it and the record companies were making a fortune. So they had the sense to leave the lunatics running the asylum. That’s the way I like to look at it.

And that changed about 25 years ago. Big companies bought the record companies and other companies bought them. And all of these guys that were part of the music scene were moved sideways. And these faceless suits came in who had no connection to music at all. They were there to make sure that at the end of the year, the black column was bigger than the red column. And that’s what changed it all, you know? 

But if you’re not beholden to those people and you’re not beholden to radio to get a top 10 airplay thing, what you have is a fanbase that wants you to just push your own boundaries and keep them interested. And you can sort of make your own choices. And sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong. But so long as you do it with absolute belief, then it’s OK. Nobody gets everything right all of the time. There have been some great movie stars who’ve made absolutely awful films. You look at it later and go, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t have done that…” But at the time you did it because you believed it was right. 

And we’re in this position now where we’ve been around so long, we can call our own tunes. We’re very, very lucky. The record company that we’re signed to at the moment [earMusic], the guy running it, Max Vaccaro, is a fan. He’s a music fan. He’s also a Deep Purple fan. So he understands that to try and pressure us to do something that would not be natural would be pointless. Our fans wouldn’t like it. We wouldn’t like it. And it wouldn’t work.

So we are in a very fortunate position. I understand a lot of younger bands are not in that position. They’re almost pressured into sounding like everybody else. Because that’s what there is at the moment. Radio stations are playing stuff that sounds the same. It’s safe.

I’m amazed when we get a new track on radio – that they’ve had the guts to do it. Because it doesn’t fit into any real demographic. It just is.

You and Roger as the rhythm section is something that, for the most part, has defined Deep Purple regardless of who else has been in the band at any given time. How has that musical relationship between the two of you grown over 50 years and what’s it like now on album 21?

IP: After that much time, you don’t even think about certain things. They just happen. And they sort of happen within a nanosecond of each other. One of us can just have an inflection or something and the other will pick up on it. Because somewhere in the past, we’ve done it before. And in the back of your mind, you have a little reference point to it.

If we’re jamming on stage and I come up with an odd little rhythm pattern inside the form of the song, the second time we do it, Roger’s got it straight away. He locks in. He’s ready for me. And it’s a subliminal thing. You’re not consciously thinking about it.

To be honest, when Roger first joined us, there wasn’t a lot of discussion. We just sort of fit together.

And he’s a very forgiving musician, Roger. He lets me lead. That, for me, is much easier than having to follow people. Because that’s the natural way I play. So he gives me a great deal of freedom.

Without Roger there, it’s a different entity. You just need that solid foundation. And that’s what he gives the band.

BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND – NOVEMBER 17: Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Steve Morse, Ian Paice and Don Airey … [+] of Deep Purple performing live on stage during the opening night of the band’s farewell tour at Barclaycard Arena on November 17, 2017 in Birmingham, England. (Photo by Katja Ogrin/Redferns)

I think people might tend to see their favorite artists doing a live stream and don’t necessarily understand how dire the situation is right now for a lot of musicians without the ability to tour. You have a new album out – but can’t tour. Just how important has touring become as we face a future where it’s off the table indefinitely amidst the coronavirus pandemic?

IP: Well, it’s a complete role reversal. Back in the glory days, you made a record and you toured it to sell the record because that’s where the money was. You’d earn so much from a gig but if that generated multi-million record sales, that’s where you made your coin. Now, it’s totally the reverse. You make a record to promote your tour. And it’s the tour, if you’re lucky enough, where you show a profit at the end of it and live. So it’s completely flipped on its head.

Live concerts are the lifeblood of musicians right now. And a lot of them are really suffering with what’s going on. And they’re going to suffer for a long time yet.

It’s OK for a few of us. We’ve got those glorious old records in the back catalog which provide us with royalties every three months. But for people without that fallback, it’s really tough. And I do feel for them.

We’re very lucky. Everything we had this year got cancelled. But our agents got in very quickly and rescheduled about 95% of what we had for next year. So, assuming the world does get a little bit more sensible…

I am a Chicago-based writer and broadcaster who’s tracked the changing music industry since the mid-90s with frequent contributions to WGN Radio and the Daily Herald.

I am a Chicago-based writer and broadcaster who’s tracked the changing music industry since the mid-90s with frequent contributions to WGN Radio and the Daily Herald. Email: [email protected]

SOURCE: https://www.w24news.com