The singer may have been in one of the world’s biggest bands but it didn’t make him rich. He talks about living on stolen dog biscuits, writing Smoke on the Water and why he’s still
rocking at 78.

Halfway through Deep Purple’s new album, = 1, comes a song called No Money to Burn. It is about being totally strapped for cash. This is from the classic rock pioneers who, having made it into the 1975 Guinness Book of Records as the world’s loudest band, went on to sell more than 100 million records and fill arenas across the globe. Surely, I ask their singer Ian Gillan, when we meet in the suite of a smart hotel in Düsseldorf, there must be some money to burn.

“Not if you’re as bad with money as I am,” says Gillan, 78, whose four-octave range and rugged good looks took him off a council estate in Hounslow and into global fame. Gillan exudes a certain bruised sensitivity, which I can only put down to five decades of a life in rock. “I tend to have just enough for next week. I call the office each morning and say, ‘Can I afford this?’ Generally, the answer is no.”

Gillan cannot blame himself alone for such relative penury. Deep Purple, the band he joined in 1969 after a stint as the lead in the original stage show of Jesus Christ Superstar, has been a famously chaotic proposition. Their guitarist, the mercurial Ritchie Blackmore, abandoned ship in 1997 to become a neo-medieval minstrel. In one notorious early 1970s incident, Gillan requested Deep Purple’s Child in Time be left out of a concert set list because he had a cold and couldn’t hit the high notes. Blackmore played it anyway just to annoy him. Gillan eventually got fed up and walked out of the band in 1973.

“After that I didn’t get paid for ten years,” he says. “It took a lot of lawsuits to see a penny, and eventually the [band’s] accountant went to jail, but it was common in those days. When Roger [Glover, the bassist] and I joined in 1969, we shared one set of clothes between us so we couldn’t go out at the same time. Roger didn’t even own a pair of shoes. It’s not unknown for me to steal a handful of dog biscuits to get through the day.” Not that the dog biscuits had any mind-altering effects.

Despite their status alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath as the pioneering monsters of heavy rock, Deep Purple were never a drug-taking band (or at least in their classic “mark II” line-up). Gillan didn’t smoke a joint until he was 38.

The organist Jon Lord (who died in 2012) had a classical background, Blackmore came from the disciplined world of session musicians, the drummer Ian Paice started out in dance bands and Gillan got going in pubs.

Some of the adventures experienced along the way are recounted on the new album. A Bit on the Side concerns a woman called Charlene whom Gillan met one evening in a nightclub in Berlin. “Charlene turned up in a silver lamé dress, looking very beautiful. We were chatting away, drinking champagne, when I noticed that she could have done with a second shave. Charlene from Berlin turned out to be Charlie from Belfast.”

Gillan always knew he was going to be a singer. His grandfather had been an opera singer, his uncle was a jazz bassist, and his father, a factory storekeeper, and mother, a teacher, enrolled him in the church choir as a boy soprano. “Then my voice broke, I heard Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley, and that was it. London was full of potholes and bomb sites, and we had encouragement from our parents, who had been through the war, to build something new.”

The jazz-influenced Paice, 76, is the only member of Deep Purple who has been there since the beginning, answering an advert in March 1968 to audition for a new band being put together by Tony Edwards and John Coletta, businessmen looking to invest in rock’n’roll. “We weren’t sure what we were meant to be,” says Paice, an amiable fellow with a ponytail of grey hair, of those early days. “We had three virtuosos in Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Lord and myself, so we could do interesting versions of other people’s songs, but we didn’t write our own material until Ian and Roger came along. By that time we were influenced by the Who and Jimi Hendrix, and I thought, this could be fun.”

Gillan went from singing in a harmony pop outfit called Episode Six to fronting Deep Purple just as they were on the verge of becoming one of the biggest bands in the world. What was that like? “I think we adjusted to immortality fairly quickly,” he replies, making me think that a stint as the actual Son of God in Jesus Christ Superstar probably prepared him for it. “The thing we didn’t handle so well was the business side.”

Money was a problem from day one. When he and Glover were still sharing the same outfit, Gillan recalls going to the band’s management offices in central London to ask for an advance to buy some new clothes. “The response from our manager John Coletta was, ‘I knew you were trouble the moment I set eyes on you. If you ask me for money one more time, I’ll throw you back in the gutter where I found you.’ Those words are etched onto the back of my skull because I had never heard anything so horrible in my life. If you can ride through crap like that and come out the other side, you can cope with most things.”

“You’ve got to remember that gigs were much smaller back then,” the ever-reasonable Paice adds. “On top of that you had 75 per cent income tax in the Seventies and what you’re left with, once you’ve paid managers, agents and roadies, is a couple of hundred quid a week. Purple is not mainstream — never has been, never will be — and if we were worried about the money we would have done something else. If I had enough to buy a beer and do what I wanted to do, I would be happy.”

Besides, it worked out in the long run. “Being on the road with Purple is not difficult,” Paice says, speaking from his smart hotel suite. “We hire a private jet to get us around the place. We pay a premium, but it is a nice life.”

Perhaps Deep Purple in their prime were simply too busy to look at the bottom line. From In Rock (1970) until Who Do We Think We Are (1973), they ushered in a new era of heaviness and complexity in rock, typified by such hits as Black Night and Smoke on the Water, the latter featuring a riff so brilliantly simple, it has been annoying people who work in guitar shops ever since.

“The catalyst of Smoke on the Water was a promoter called Claude Nobs,” Gillan says, citing the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. “We had done a show there and were looking for somewhere to make our new album when Claude suggested the casino, so we went to Frank Zappa’s concert to check it out. I was listening to Flo and Eddie, of the Turtles, doing these beautiful backing vocals, when someone let off a flare gun and, minutes later, the place was in flames. Claude was a hero, pulling the kids out to safety.”

The only reason all this formed the inspiration for the most famous heavy rock song was because Deep Purple were seven minutes short of a full album and had to come up with something quickly. “We were staying at the Grand Hotel and were being driven out of town by the police for making too much noise, so it was a last-minute thing. We came up with the riff during a soundcheck. It was only after seeing the crowd’s reaction to it that a guy from the label cut a three-minute version and it became our biggest hit.”

After leaving Deep Purple in 1973, Gillan formed his own self-named band, and joined Black Sabbath for a stint in 1983, before returning to Deep Purple in 1984. Then he got fired in 1989, before the band reunited in 1992. Throughout it all, he says, they never did too much in the way of planning.

“We wrote Black Night down the pub, which is why the lyrics are a load of rubbish. We never tried to be fashionable, which is why we have survived. It was a big blow when Ritchie left, and awful when Jon died, but the band was strong enough to carry on.”

Paice says the worst period of Deep Purple came in the mid-Nineties. “The band was dying. Ritchie lost interest and audiences were disappearing as a result. We were playing to 16,000-capacity venues with 3,000 people in there, so Ritchie did us a favour by leaving because had he stayed any longer, we would have ended up playing in front of two people. Still, it is a horrible thing to wake up in the morning in a band and find out by four in the afternoon that you no longer have one.”

What was the issue with Blackmore? “My take on it is pretty simple,” Paice says. “Ritchie first left in the late 1970s and formed Rainbow, where he was the boss. When we reformed in 1984, he still thought he was the boss. And that doesn’t work in Purple because there are too many egos involved. He was unhappy, he left, and we dealt with the situation by getting in Joe Satriani for a year, which is lucky because we had a Japanese tour booked and could have been sued for every penny we had.”

Still, you have to wonder about the challenges of being in a rock band well into your seventies. “Your body changes, your mind changes,” Gillan confirms, “but the big change for me came in my mid-thirties. I got embarrassed to be writing about fast cars and so on, and started thinking, it’s got to be exciting, otherwise it ain’t rock’n’roll, but what else is there? I started looking at things in a more surreal way. That’s when I realised. You can write a song about absolutely anything.”

You certainly can. There is a song on = 1 called Lazy Sod, which appears to suggest the rock god of Deep Purple is reflecting on global themes in his old age. “The world is on fire and I can’t get out of bed,” the lyrics say. I take them to be about one’s own uselessness in the face of ecological catastrophe.

“Actually, it is about my cottage in Portugal,” he corrects. “There was a chimney fire caused by a bird’s nest and the sprinklers came on. I was in bed, dreaming about the house filling with water, and I had to build a raft and save the cat. So no, it is not about global warming. It is about my house catching fire. These are the things that keep me happy.”

These are also the things that keep Deep Purple rolling, 56 years after they began, money to burn or not.

1968: the year hard rock was born

Deep Purple

Formed in 1968 in London as a psychedelic progressive rock band, Deep Purple’s music shifted to a much heavier sound with the release of their 1970 album Deep Purple in Rock.

Led Zeppelin

In the same year, in the same city, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham drew on blues and soul influences to drive forward the early British heavy-rock and heavy-metal movement.

Black Sabbath

Meanwhile, in Birmingham, Ozzy Osbourne and friends were preparing to define early British metal with albums such as Black Sabbath, Paranoid and Master of Reality.

Written by: Will Hodgkinson

© The Times of London