Greece's Rockpages spoke exclusively to original DEEP PURPLE bassist Nick Simper backstage, prior to his recent concert in Budapest. The following is an excerpt in which he talks about the MkI lineup of Deep Purple:

Q: I think I read somewhere that you preferred Deep Purple had remained a solid band, the original band.

A: "Well, I think the original band is always the best. You look at ZZ TOP or AC/DC, they retain the same guys. There was never really the chance for Deep Purple to develop a style, because we were lucky enough or in some ways unlucky enough to have a hit record in America a matter of a couple of months after we formed the band. It was very shortsighted on behalf of everybody involved, the managers, the record company, they just wanted to push us out and earn the money. Nowadays, people look a little more longer term. How many bands made three albums in how many months? Nine months? A year? Three albums in a year, it doesn’t happen today, is it? We did that and we made them on very very small budgets. A lot of the tracks were done almost live, because we ran such tight budgets, we spent all this time working, working, working, touring, there was no chance to really try and develop as writers or even as a proper unit and in the end, after six months of touring in America, everybody’s getting a bit sick of it. We all had different points of view of how the band should go and how the band should be run, what agents we should have and sadly the whole thing imploded. I think if it had been given the chance, if that line up had been given the chance to relax a little bit, if we had had the same opportunities like the Mk II lineup had, I think we would have surprised everybody. Cause we had just started to develop, at the end of the third album, started to find the leash, the direction we were gonna go in, which wasn’t that much different to what happened when they got the two other guys in."

Q: It was an evolution of the music, generally, after the 60s…

A: "Yeah, I like to think, I mean I can tell for a fact that the Mk I Purple stuff is much more involved and much more difficult to play than the Mk II stuff."

Q: Mk I was more progressive…

A: "Yeah, the original line up was more progressive and it was kind of sad, because Ritchie Blackmore and myself came from the same background, we were to rock n roll, we worked with Screaming Lord Sutch and people like that, we both wanted to simplify the music, but it was all no and we kinda deferred to Jon Lord, cause obviously he was a talented man, he got a tremendous knowledge of classical music and he was kind of steering us in that direction. First of all we thought, that’s not a bad thing, because we admired what the Vanilla Fudge had done and we thought we were gonna do the same, they inspired us. But we got to the point where there was no one person in Deep Purple who was a songwriter, there never was, but when we played together, we could create stuff and unfortunately, there was a lot of money at stake and it made the band diversify… Certain people were trying to write all the songs (laughs)… they wanted their way, other people wanted their way, and we weren’t working as a unit. That’s an aspect of it, really. Some bands are lucky. One guy comes and he’s a great songwriter, like Pete Townshend, and you say, ok, you write the stuff, we just play it. There wasn’t a writer in Deep Purple, but between us all, we could all have our bits and create something good, and that wasn’t allowed to develop. I think that’s why there was a lot of dissatisfaction in the band."

Read the full interview at this location.