Deep Purple

DEEP PURPLE

Language level: Advanced

Source: Speak Up

Standard: American accent

We Hate MTV!

The British group Deep Purple are a rock legend. First formed in the 1960s, they were one of the most successful bands of the 1970s, when their song “Smoke on the Water” became an anthem. And, like the Rolling Stones, they have enjoyed impressive artistic longevity, even if they have undergone numerous line-up changes over the years. Recently Deep Purple released a new album with Edel, Rapture in the Deep. Lead singer Ian Gillan and bass guitarist Roger Glover, who both joined the group in 1969, have met with Speak Up. They began by talking about one of the new Album’s tracks, “MTV”, which is in fact attacks on the awfulness of classic rock radio in the United States. Roger Glover is the first to speak:

Roger Glover

(Standard: British accent)

It’s changed, you know. When we first went to America, I was amazed at how wonderful it was, the radio was totally free, DJs could play anything they wanted, usually album tracks, or entire albums, it sounded good in the cars, every time you got in a car and you turned on the radio, you got this enormous war, big sound, you could hear the bass. It was free radio, and over the years, it’s changed, it’s become dependent on advertising, the bottom line is the dollar, they get people coming in, tell them what to play and they do these polls, and it’s kind of, it’s changed drastically, and it’s now become so marginalized, you get a radio station playing one particular kind of music and nothing else. And we come from an era where music is everything, there’s all kinds of music around there, we grew up listening to classical music, gospel, blues, jazz, pop, anything, Sinatra, it was all one big thing about music. Now it’s become so thin, that little margin that they work under, and there are some people that listen to just one station, they don’t listen to anything else and it seems a shame to me that on a hard rock station you can’t hear Stevie Wonder.

WEIGHT PROBLEM

Ian Gillan feels that this approach affects the average age of Deep Purple’s audiences when they go on tour:

Ian Gillan

(Standard: British accent):

We play to millions of people around the world every year, in every part of the world, and the average age of our audience in South America, Brazil, Chile, in Central America, Mexico, in Canada, in Australia, in Asia, in most…all over Europe, the average age, right on this next tour, is going to be about 18 years old: in the United States, the average age will be…fat!

UNDERGROUND

And yet research has shown that younger fans, even in the United States, prefer bands like Deep Purple to more contemporary acts:

What’s happening in America is the same as what’s happening as far as Deep Purple is concerned, and quite a few other artists – we started off as an underground band, that’s the only way we could see ourselves because we weren’t played on the radio anywhere, and it was before any musicians of our ilk were played on television, so as fashions have come and as fashions have gone, we are remained underground and I think a lot of kids are looking for something which is a bit more interesting than what is being force-fed, corporate force-fed, down their throats form MTV, classic rock radio and every market(ing) thinks it can package stuff up. As always, the audience has been under estimated.