Deep Purple

Nynex Arena, Manchester.

Saturday 6 November 2004

One of the central events of my extra special "long weekend" birthday celebrations was the Deep Purple concert at the Nynex. I had quite mixed feelings about it because only a couple of months ago, the prospect of seeing some of my all time heroes would have been a major lifetime's event. Under normal circumstances, the concert described below would have ranked as one of the best  of all time, but after witnessing the sheer majesty and utter brilliance of  Rush, this unfortunately just felt like an also ran. It was very much not second rate at all, but shortly after witnessing near perfection, it was not possible to go away without at least an element of inevitable anti climax. The other problem is that as good a keyboard  player as Don Airey undoubtedly is (ex Rainbow and Ozzy Osbourne amongst others!) Deep Purple have lost a big chunk of credibility since Jon Lord retired. They were always infamous for frequent and drastic line up changes, and whilst replacing guitarist Ritchie Blackmore with Steve Morse was a necessary step which gave them an extra ten years of life, I think that this one was a bridge too far and that they should have called it a day. It was particularly sad to see them doing "Hush" as the encore. Classic track and very well performed, but this was done by the original line up in 1968 and only Ian Paice, the drummer, is still in the line up from those days. An anorak fact may be, but credibility does matter.  Still, for all this, it was very nearly as good as last time I saw them  - but not quite. Most noticeable was more new stuff from the "Bananas" album at the expense of classic material. Quite brave of them I thought, and whilst the material is good, they should remember that they aren't a young band striving for recognition any more: they have sewn their wild oats long ago, people know what they can do, and to be honest, with a group like Deep Purple, none of the fans care to listen to the new stuff live, even though many of them, like me, might have it on CD at home. I also thought that having two other "headliners" on the bill somewhat diluted Deep Purple's impact. Didn't think much of Thunder, they have done one all time classic, "Love Walked In", which has the honey pot days written all over it, but the rest of the stuff, especially the crowd participation, was just silly. As for Peter Frampton, well, he's an established rock act in his own right, but should really have done the Apollo or a smaller venue on his own, because to my mind the material was just too different in character from Deep Purple to make the two of them a remotely credible pairing. As for the concert itself, I think that just coming to the end of an eighteen month world tour, Deep Purple rather thought of it as just another "day at the office". There was no particular sparkle and I thought they were just running through the motions. There was plenty of good stuff, particularly "Knocking At Your Back Door" and "Perfect Strangers", both comparatively recent, and which I have been listening to lately. Needless to say, "Smoke On The Water" got its expected outing, but I missed the humorous medley type introduction that they did at the Apollo. There were lengthy solo parts for keyboard and guitar, but not for the others, which I thought rather went against the traditional old style progressive rock group democracy. The sound was good enough, but not a patch on Rush, and with the passage of time it is hard to believe that they were once in the Guinness Book of Records for being the world's loudest rock band. The Nynex wasn't full to the rafters, but it was only really sparsely populated at the far end. I think it shows that whilst Deep Purple are still popular enough to sell out smaller places like the Apollo, the passage of time and waning credibility has now left  the larger venues a bit beyond their reach. On the plus side there were many more attractive young ladies there than I have ever seen before at a rock concert. Coming shortly after the death of John Peel when we remember one of pop music's most broad minded advocates, it does seem that music fascism is best left to tired out old has beens who belong left well behind in the eighties. These days people tend go to the concerts because they like the music, not because someone on Radio One or in The Guardian tells them that they should. It sounds like I hated this concert, but no, I very much liked it, it's just that Rush were so much better - I'm  more than glad that I did make the effort to go, it was definitely very fortuitous to have such a concert opportunity on my birthday weekend.

(15.11.04)