By Martin Popoff

In discussion with ROGER GLOVER concerning his new solo album If Life Was Easy, the legendary bassist and producer let on that a new DEEP PURPLE studio album isn’t exactly imminent.

“The thing is, the way Purple works, is that we don’t actually write songs,” begins Roger. “They evolve. They evolve out of some kind of mysterious foggy wasteland, which is called jamming. It’s a strange phenomenon, really. No one analyzes it, we just play something. If you go into a writing session with Purple with a completed song, you’ll get laughed out of the room. Because they don’t want to hear that. If anything, they want to hear a riff, a simple chord change, a groove, a kernel of an idea, which then everyone can work on, and throw in their six pence for it.”

And some of this music-mashing has indeed taken place, divulges Glover. “We have, yes. In March we got together, nine days. That was the jamming part. There’s no songs finished. There is arrangement, there’s sort of some basics there, but they need another writing session to get it out. And I’m sure that’s going to happen probably at this point, next year, because time is running out on this year, and we’re already working (ed. meaning touring) October, November, December.”

In closing, I asked Roger how his lyric writing had been evolving, right here and now in his 60s, compared to the band’s other lyric-penner, the yowler himself, IAN GILLAN. “Yes, I’ve never thought of that – another very interesting question! Because Ian and I obviously write together, and have written a lot together. But quite frequently, I mean, he’s off on his own tangent now, and he wants to express himself. He doesn’t want me tagging along suggesting lines that he hadn’t thought of. And maybe that’s something we’re going through, and maybe something we’ll return to. It seems to be a liquid affair, our relationship. I’m quite happy to let him do lyrics, and certainly within Purple, because he has a way with words, which is why we became songwriters in the first place, why we became a team. Because he had a funny way with words. He had much more fun with it than I did. I tend to take it more serious, and have tried to write about the graver aspects of life, whereas Ian, you know, I wouldn’t say flippant, that’s the wrong word, but lighthearted, and kind of having fun with words, if you like. Not so much the meaning. He likes the sound of words more than the meaning of words. I prefer the meaning to the sound, and maybe that’s too simple an explanation…”