Deep Purple
The English rock band that gave hard rock its blueprint and heavy metal one of its founding charges. Formed in London in 1968 and built to be loud, Deep Purple turned classical training, blues muscle, and sheer volume into a sound no one had quite heard before. Deep Purple in Rock, Fireball, Machine Head, and the live landmark Made in Japan defined the band's Mark II golden era and the genre it helped invent — Ritchie Blackmore's guitar and Jon Lord's Hammond organ trading fire over the most powerful rhythm section of the early 1970s.
The lineups changed often enough to be tracked by number — David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes passed through, the band split in 1976 and reunited in 1984 — but Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, and founding drummer Ian Paice remained the spine of the story. Jon Lord died in 2012; Blackmore left for good in 1993. The current Mark IX lineup, with Don Airey on keyboards and Simon McBride on guitar, released the band's twenty-third studio album =1 in 2024 and a twenty-fourth, Splat!, in 2026. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016, Deep Purple remain a working band more than half a century on.
Articles on Deep Purple
Deep Purple – Arrogant Boy
Deep Purple Released the Lead Single From Their Twenty-Fourth Studio Album, "Splat!", on May 13, 2026. Ian Paice Has Described "Arrogant Boy" as a Direct Stylistic Return to the "Highway Star" Template That Made the Band's Reputation in 1972.
Deep Purple – Mistreated (Live 1974)
Deep Purple – Smoke On The Water (1972)
The most famous riff in rock was a last-minute scramble to fill out an album — a true-crime travelogue about the night a flare gun burned a Swiss casino to the waterline.
Deep Purple – Highway Star
The band wrote it on a tour bus to prove a point to a journalist who asked how they put songs together — then opened their live show with it for the next fifty years.
Deep Purple – Child In Time – Live (1970)
Deep Purple – Black Night
Management Were Screaming for a Single — So the Band Went to the Pub, Then Wrote One That Night