Prolific Popoff's Purple Prose Goes Deepest

It’s hard to fathom that a collective founded in 1968 is still out there in 2025 with most of its classic lineup, frequently touring, and putting out solid new material (as with 2024’s =1).

But that is indeed the case with Deep Purple, one of classic rock’s most stalwart bands and an early progenitor of hard rock and heavy metal. Who over the past seven (!) decades have seen great successes and failures, lineup changes, periods of hiatus, crashes and comebacks, and falling in and out of favor.

And of course, being responsible for one of classic rock’s biggest ever anthems with the go-to riff for amateur axemen hoping to impress ladies standing in the aisles of Guitar Center.

That would be, of course the surprisingly true tale of the fiery demise of a Swiss casino/music venue, “Smoke on the Water.”

Martin Popoff is perhaps the most word-spewing music journalist ever with 8,000+ record reviews, 125+ books, and many liner notes to his credit. He’s also a great admirer—though not a blind one—of the band. He charts their career and music in the doorstop-of-a-book Seven Decades of Deep Purple: An Unofficial History (640 pp., $60, Schiffer Publishing).

Like many of his previous books for Schiffer, this one is lavishly produced on quality paper with score of photos of the band in staged and live shots, record covers, ads, backstage passes and various ephemera. And as its roots come from Popoff’s two previous tomes on the band, along with new writing, it’s more text heavy.

That text relies heavily on Popoff’s own many (and revealing) interviews with band members of various lineups through the years and fellow musicians, with secondary sources from other writers. His own commentary is kept to a minimum. But he is spot on about the band’s proclivity for really bad and bizarre album covers.

After achieving early success with covers of “Hush” and “Kentucky Woman,” the jettisoning of Rod Evans (singer) and Nick Simper (bass) brought in the “classic” Mk. II DP lineup of founding members Ritchie Blackmore (guitar), Jon Lord (keyboards), and Ian Paice (drums) with new boys Ian Gillan (vocals) and Roger Glover (bass).

It’s this group that recorded Deep Purple’s best-known material from “Smoke on the Water,” “Speed King” and “Highway Star” to “Space Truckin’” “Woman from Tokyo” and “Lazy.” Though the Mk. III lineup (with Glenn Hughes and pre-Whitesnake David Coverdale on board in place of Glover and Gillan) with its funkier sound, produced a couple of fine records as well.

For those who only know Coverdale from his big-hair, sexed-up, smoldering Whitesnake MTV video days, it’s amusing to read his self-deprecating comments about how the then 21-year-old got into the band seemingly against all odds.

His audition cassette was of an off-the-cuff drunken singalong taped at a party, and the photo he sent in was in his Scouting uniform from years earlier that his mother had to find. By his own admission he was pimply, wore glasses, and a bit fat. But the voice got him in as he fixed those other issues.

Popoff also details the sometimes (OK, often) decades-long fractious relationship between Gillan and Blackmore. Relations that were still raw enough that when Deep Purple was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016, rock’s “Man in Black” (who has spent most of the recent decades fronting Blackmore’s Night, a medieval music troupe with his wife) declined to attend. Rock nerds will also note Popoff questioning why original member Rod Evans was included as an inductee, but not Nick Simper.

Like some of his previous books, Popoff waltzes chronologically through the band’s discography as the spine for telling the story. What makes Seven Decades of Deep Purple likely more aimed toward the hardcore fan though is this. By the book’s midway-point, the narrative has already gone through the band’s ‘70s heyday and even up to 1983’s great Mk. II reunion effort Perfect Strangers.

That leaves the entire second half concentrating on their output from that time forward, covering records that probably are not in a lot of folks’ collections like The Battle Rages On…, Abandon, Bananas, and Rapture of the Deep.

Deep Purple recently went through yet another lineup change (they’re now up to Mark IX) with the jettisoning of longtime guitarist Steve Morse for the very talented Simon McBride, with Don Airey remaining on keyboards.

The Houston Press spoke with Glover last year about the band’s most recent album and during the Houston stop of their accompanying tour this writer (like Popoff) found the formerly hard-living Gillan’s voice to be amazingly well-preserved and powerful.

How long Gillan and Glover (both 80) and Paice (a relatively spry 77) can keep up the Deep Purple pace is unknown. But in Popoff’s Seven Decades of Deep Purple, fans have the (so far) definitive word on the band. And the deepest.