Shades of Deep Purple (1968) - Deep Purple: music in shades of dark purple!

July 1968 gave Deep Purple fans their debut studio album - "Shades of Deep Purple", which means "shades of dark purple". The work was recorded for exactly three days at London's Pye Studios. The record was first released in the States on Tetragrammaton Records, and a little later, in autumn of the same year - on English Parlophone.

In the spring of 1968, two major record labels - Tetragrammaton Records and Parlophone - signed an album recording contract with an as yet unreleased but ambitious rock band. The terms were extremely strict: the record must be released in July this year. Tetragrammaton created an avant-garde fame for itself, which, it should be noted, it succeeded brilliantly. It was the first label to risk releasing John Lennon and Yoko Ono's joint studio record "Two Virgins", on the cover of which the pair were completely naked, which made all the others refuse to release it. But the success of Tetragrammaton demanded a new and colourful creation capable of reaching major peaks. With the help of Derek Lawrence, they found exactly what they needed. Roundabout was the name under which the members of Deep Purple's first line-up toured.

It's worth noting that this very Derek Lawrence was nominated as the producer of Shades of Deep Purple, but the team did an excellent job themselves, which negated Lawrence's role. Work on the record took three days: four tracks were recorded on Saturday, three on Sunday and the last single on Monday. Derek once confessed that his only task in making the album was to make sure that Blackmore and Lord didn't overdo the solos.

When working on the album, the band clearly calculated the sequence of each step. The members really wanted to combine all the compositions. For this purpose, a BBC album with many effects was purchased, which were later inserted into Shades of Deep Purple. The compositions themselves were an exact repetition of the repertoire from the Scandinavian tour. At that time, the unknown band had to give concerts in the smallest and most remote towns in England and America.

To make the cover for the record, the band members were dressed up in fanciful costumes that were honoured during King Edward's reign. The lighting was slightly obscured. Jon Lord later admitted that the costumes looked amazing, but wearing them for more than forty minutes was a real challenge.

The team's painstaking endeavours were crowned with success: as scheduled, the record and single were released in July 1968. By the way, as for the track, the band insisted that it would be their interpretation of The Beatles' single "Help!" in baroque style, but the record label opted for Joe South's more commercial-sounding "Hush". And that decision turned out to be the right one. Very soon the song reached the fourth position and stayed in the top charts for more than two months, overtaking such a hit Beatles single as "Hey Jude". The album itself, as a debut album, also proved to be no less successful, after a few months it was already firmly entrenched at number 24.

Strangely enough, the band did not receive the desired recognition in their home country, the UK, either among listeners or critics. One of the journalists of Mick Farren, an influential UK rock magazine at the time, described his impressions of Purple's performance as follows:

"The only thing I didn't catch at their concert was the music itself. The only thing I remembered was the small pompous noise, which could be described as something between a lame opera and the sound of a bomber landing".

There were also those who saw Deep Purple as a ridiculous imitation of Vanilla Fudge. One day, during a concert performance, someone couldn't resist shouting out loudly: "That's Vanilla Fudge, only for beggars!". However, what was repulsive in England, on the contrary, was a huge success in the USA. The Americans were particularly captivated by the peculiar solo duel between Blackmore and Lorde, which became the highlight of Purple.

If in America the band was something of a headliner, for whom an individual tour was always organised, in England it was considered no more than a relative band to brighten up evenings in beer halls and other entertainment venues. The most Deep Purple could do in the UK was to play as a warm-up act for other bands. For example, in a Yorkshire drinking establishment they warmed up the audience before the performance of Sweet Shop, which later became known as Sweet.

Brian Connolly recalls that evening with laughter and irony:

"That show is impossible to forget. I remember it very well, as if it were yesterday. The place where we played was a typical pub that the locals like to visit in the evening, and in the corner there was a tiny semblance of a stage. And then they come in, the Purple members. They were all so cool - well, how could they not be, after all, their fucking hit was No1 in the States. They had their own stylish, colourful clothes and everything... They were good guys and great musicians, but a shithole like a backwater pub was not their level, which was a real pity...".

Subsequent performances in their homeland were roughly the same. Deep Purple played at Redding's eighth annual summer festival, but their performance was simply eaten up by the popularity of other big-name guests. The failure could only be described as overwhelming. Purple were not mentioned in the music festival reviews by any of the many journalists.

However, things were completely different with the autumn tour in America. In Los Angeles the musicians were royally welcomed by Tetragrammaton Records: they were driven everywhere in expensive Cadillac limousines, which they had seen only in films before, stayed in a posh hotel on the central Sunset Marquee boulevard and regularly had luxurious evening entertainment, taking them to the city's elite clubs and restaurants. It was then that Purple made a splash on the television show "Blind Date", where they performed the single "Hush".

The first performance brought unheard-of popularity. At the National Jazz and Blues Festival, the audience received Deep Purple a thousand times more warmly than the then-famous Cream. Many even resented the fact that the British rock band was cut from the programme in favour of more notorious and popular bands. Due to the ever-increasing demand for Deep Purple's work in America, the band continued to tour in the States until the end of 1968, and after the new year they returned home.