ARTICLE ABOUT Ian Gillan (Deep Purple) FROM New Musical Express, December 26, 1970
A little bit of Cherkazoo and other stories from the very popular Mr. Gillan in this one. I sure think a certain guy called Rad Losev and a whole bunch of other Purple fans in the highwaystar.com will be pleased with this one.
Read on!
Snob groups make Ian purple with rage
By Richard Green
It becomes a bit strong when groups get so selective in their attitude towards work that they cut their dates down to one or two a week, thus denying fans the chance to see the people whose record they have spent money on. Chicken Shack’s Stan Webb is all against this type of thing and now Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan has entered the fray.
Normally a pretty content person, happy
making good records and touring with Purple (though he’d like to alter this slightly later), he cannot tolerate pop snobbery.
During the group’s recent German tour, Ian gave me his views on the subject, beginning with: “We play for whoever wants to hear us. If the hall is full of heads smoking their joints that’s okay and if the next night it’s all schoolkids dancing about yelling `Yeah, Black Night, Black Night’ that’s okay as well. “It really annoyed me when Black Sabbath said they weren’t going to make any more singles because they didn’t want that kind of audience. The kids come out of school and borrow the money from their parents
to come to the concert, there’s nothing wrong with them. “You can’t play to heads all the time. If you adopt that kind of attitude you’re killing your market. There’s a lot of musical snobbery, which I hate. “About five years ago a lot of people were making very good records, there was a lot of good music coming out, from U.S. Bonds and ‘New Orleans’ right through. It was just music that people liked, there were no labels like teenybop and underground being applied like they are now.” Though Purple’s present status the list of fulfilments pleases Ian he can forsee the time when he may not be so involved. He tends to look to the future more than a number of musicians and it may well be that a project he has just
completed could lead to his achieving at least part of his aims. “I’ve just written a children’s story called `Cherkazoo’,” he revealed. “It’s a fantasy with weird animals and big blonde giants and things. I went to see Richard Harris and Stanley Baker at their offices and they were interested enough to consider filming it for television next Christmas.
“It’s taken two years on and off to write. I find writing very relaxing. It’s great when you sit down with a big blank sheet of paper and you begin to fill it with words. I wrote about anything — take Monty Python, I’m sure a lot of that comes from what happens in the studio. You can sit in a pub and say to a friend ‘Can youimagine if this happened? and you build a big thing out of it, you could write it all down and get a story. I sit down at home and create fantasies and write about them.”
Ian has never struck me as a writer of a non-musical variety so I asked him how he got started in that field.
Went mad
“When I was in Episode Six with Roger Glover he wrote and I said I wished I could and he went mad. He really got angry and told me that anyone could write, it was just a matter of sitting down and doing it. He was fed up with people telling him they wished they could write
