Deep Purple – Hush (Original Film Clip, 1968)

A song written for someone else made Deep Purple stars in America while Britain ignored it

Deep Purple’s own channel cannot say for certain where this film comes from. Its note describes a mimed performance believed to have been made for German television, in which the band were asked to behave like prehistoric cavemen. What the film shows is five young men larking about beside a swimming pool to Hush, the single that took them to No.4 in America in 1968 and did nothing at all at home. Almost everything about the record is documented, down to the day it was taped. Almost nothing about the film is.

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The song was a hand-me-down. Joe South wrote it in 1967 for the singer Billy Joe Royal, who had just turned down another South composition, Rose Garden. South came up with the replacement on the spot, leaning on a car dashboard. Royal recorded Hush in Nashville on July 12, 1967, liked it enough to name his album after it, and took it to No.52 in the United States.

Ritchie Blackmore heard Royal’s record while he was living in Hamburg, and he brought it to the new band he joined in early 1968. Deep Purple played their first show in Denmark on April 20. Three weeks later, on May 11, they walked into Pye Studios at Marble Arch in London and recorded the song on the first day of a three-day session that produced the whole of Shades of Deep Purple. Derek Lawrence, a friend of Blackmore’s from their days working for producer Joe Meek, produced, and Barry Ainsworth engineered. Rod Evans sang, Jon Lord’s Hammond organ carried the arrangement, and Nick Simper and Ian Paice drove it harder than Royal’s version had gone.

A hit on one side of the Atlantic

Parlophone released the single in Britain on June 21, 1968, with One More Rainy Day on the B-side, and it did not chart. The American story was different. Tetragrammaton, a new label looking for British bands, pushed Hush as the single in July. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No.83 on August 17 and reached No.4 on September 21, holding there for two weeks during a ten-week run. It went to No.2 in Canada and No.7 in Switzerland, and it pulled the album to No.24 on the Billboard 200. The trade paper Cash Box noted the gap on August 31, reporting that the record was climbing in America although it “has not taken off in Britain.” Deep Purple did not return to the American Top 10 until Smoke on the Water in 1973, which also peaked at No.4.

Two films and very few facts

The film above is a relic of that moment. The Deep Purple site The Highway Star reported it surfacing on October 19, 2013, and dated it to October 1968. The band’s channel leans toward a German television origin. The location has never been established. One later suggestion places the pool at Deeves Hall in Hertfordshire, but no production record supports it, and no director, program or broadcast date has turned up.

A second film exists, and the band’s channel calls it their first promotional film. It shows the same five musicians performing Hush in Bern, Switzerland, in 1968, with the studio recording as its soundtrack and audience noise added on top. It is embedded below.

The lineup in both films did not last. Evans and Simper left in 1969, and the original five played their final show in Cardiff on July 4 of that year, some 15 months after their first. The band that replaced them made Deep Purple in Rock and became something much heavier. In 1988 the reunited band re-recorded Hush for the album Nobody’s Perfect, with Ian Gillan singing a song he had never recorded with them. That version gave the song its only British chart entry, two weeks in June 1988 and a peak of No.62, twenty years after the original was ignored.

That is why these clips matter more than their silliness suggests. Hush is the only big hit Deep Purple had before they became the band people remember, and nearly everything about it was borrowed: a song written for another singer, a market that was not their own, a lineup that was gone within a year. The films are among the few moving pictures of that first band, made before anyone, including the five men by the pool, knew what Deep Purple were going to be.

Deep Purple perform Hush in Bern, Switzerland, in 1968, from the band’s official channel: