Hard Lovin' Man [from In Rock]
"Loud, brash but also flippant. That one song summed up Deep Purple for me."

Fireball [from Fireball]
"It's just so loud and fast. Quite amazing for 1972, I think!"

Perfect Strangers [from Perfect Strangers]
"The reunion record was a pleasant experience, believe it or not, and I think this was the best song on it. It was like classic Deep Purple but with a modern edge."

[RG interview taken from The Guitar Magazine, vol 6 no 3, 1996]
   

"My reputation for collecting Deep Purple bootlegs started when I was in Chicago in the early '70s. I was in a record store and found some bootlegs for sale. I bought them, Sonic Zoom and H-Bomb and a half dozen others. When the first reunion was proposed, in 1984, to make up my mind about joining I started playing those bootlegs. They made me realize that we were a crazy band, never knowing what was going to happen next!

I put that down to us being untogether and not rehearing enough, but then I realized we were a jamming band. It came home to me after listening to those bootlegs that solos are a trademark of this band. I realized just how important that was when I was producing a band that I won't name. One of the guys was doing a solo which was an overdub. I thought, 'That's OK', and told him to do another one. He played exactly the same thing. Why wasn't he playing something different? He said, 'I've learnt this one...' and it came home to me that Deep Purple solos were special because they were done on an ad lib basis. It's what makes them sparkle. That made me see the band reunion in a new light."
[RG interview from Bassist, October 1997]
 
 
 
"A camera team were following us around, filming the ‘Perfect Strangers’ video, and one evening we were supposed to be doing a song for them to film. There was a sense of fun that evening, and Ritchie started jamming this little tune...it went on for about ten minutes...every time we thought it was coming to an end it didn’t ! It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I realised it was, apart from a bit of fun, great playing, very natural. So I was determined to put this one out because its a little gem."
  
     
 

Made In Japan
" ...The gig was in '72. Incidentally, the photograph on the cover of Made In Japan was taken at the Rainbow. It was used because when we were doing the cover design there were no photographs available from Japan."
[RG posting in alt.music.deep-purple, 12.02.2001]
 
 


"When we made In Rock, the record company insisted, that we also had to do a single. We thought we were non-commercial and we must be taken seriously, so we tried to refuse: "We are an album band, we don't want any hit-single." Anyway the record company insisted we had to make something that BBC and other radio stations could play.

September 7, 1969 We went to the studio without any inspiration and tried this and that, but nothing seemed to work. Finally we went to lunch in a pub. Of course it turned out to uncontrolled drinking. We were in the pub until they closed and finally we all were totally drunk. Ritchie and I were the first ones back in the studio. Ritchie took his guitar and played a riff, which sounded awfully great to me. "You did it, this is going to be our single", I was excited, but Ritchie said "Absolutely no way, it is 'Summertime' by Ricky Nelson". With drunken stubbornness I hold that idea and finally I had my way.

We played everything that just occurred to our minds, it was ready less than an hour later and after that Gillan and I did as stupid words as possible. The 'Black Night' name was stolen from a song by Episode Six and then we invented funny rhymes; night, bright, right - whatever came to our minds was all right. Next day the guys from the record company got excited about the fine single we did for them. We just told them not to be ridiculous."
[RG interview from Rumba, no 12, 1993]