REVIEWS
Deep Purple / Reef
London O2 Arena
Two generations of classic rock royalty reliably deliver the goods.
“Who put sugar in my tea?!”
Ian Gillan returns to the stage after yet another Don Airey solo.
KEVIN NIXON
‘Purple are still the greatest hard rock band of their vintage extant.’
Can it really be three decades since likeably loose-assed Glastonbury four-piece Reef fronted a TV ad campaign to alert us all to the myriad benefits of the digital format of the future, the Sony Minidisc? Apparently so. But as this snapshot from history cautions us, not everything turns out quite as one might expect. Back in ’95, when Reef were poster boys for a thing called Britrock (due to its handy concurrence with Britpop) and having hefty TOTP-bothering hits, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that by now they’d be comfortably filling O2s of their own. They even had a proper No.1 album (back in a day when physical formats were still a thing). Yet here they are, happily opening for the Purps, and respectfully thanking people for listening.