In 1954, the popular high-street retail chain Woolworth launched its own record label, Embassy Records, to help feed, or perhaps more accurately exploit, the growing appetite British teenagers were getting for rock’n’roll music imported from America.Newcomers in a competitive market, the label’s unique selling point was that they could commission soundalike copies of the most popular songs on the US ‘hit parade’ within days of their release, and make them available on vinyl in Woolworth’s department stores across the country at a significantly lower price than the original recordings. As Ian Paice recalls, there was but one minor flaw in the company’s cunning corporate plan.

“Those knock-off records were crap!” he says with a laugh. “They were recorded quickly, by a bunch of average English musicians in a cheap studio, and they sounded so flat and lifeless. Now the original records, they still sing. You put them on now and the magic is still there. Listening to them you can totally understand why a whole generation moved away from jazz and be-bop and said: ‘I like this!’ Those records switched our generation on. And those memories continue to inspire us, even now.”

SIMON EMMETT/PRESS x2

On September 6 this year, a new website, TurningToCrime.com, materialised online. It featured police mugshot-style black-and-white images of Ian Paice and his Deep Purple bandmates Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Steve Morse and Don Airey, plus a countdown clock scheduled to hit zero one month later, on October 6. Online speculation converged to suggest that this activity, hosted on a domain owned by the group’s Hamburg-based record company earMUSIC, was intended to tease an imminent announcement of new music from the quintet. Come October 6, this prediction was shown to be correct. Or at least technically correct, as the website revealed that Turning To Crime, Deep Purple’s twenty-second studio album, scheduled for release on November 26, would be a collection of songs previously recorded by other artists. If the prospect of a new Purple album emerging just 15 months on from the August 2020 release of their rather excellent Whoosh! was a welcome surprise for fans, the notion of the legendary English group – rightly acclaimed as one of the most influential, and boldest, architects of the hard rock genre – returning as a covers act in the twilight of their distinguished career sat uneasily with many – not least, as it transpires, with certain members of the band.

“If you saw Ritchie Blackmore playing back then, or Jon Lord, it was like nothing you’d ever seen before. It was unreal, devastating.”

Don Airey

“Oh, I was totally against it to start with,” Ian Gillan admits breezily, phoning from his property in Portugal. “I thought that Purple purists, myself among them, would see something like this as criminal, metaphorically speaking, so initially I didn’t like the idea at all. And then I started tapping my fingers on the desk at home, and thinking: ‘Hmmm, well, what are we going to do for the next year if nothing is happening?’”