= 1

According to their interviews, they (or at least some of them) were sure that Now What?! would be their final one, then the same about Infinite, then about Whoosh! and especially Turning To Crime (yep yep, a bunch of covers, it's no accident, the hard rock dinosaurs seem to say their last farewell to their business, don't they?). But no, this is not the end. Nobody can guess how much time the band still has ahead for doing music, probably that's why Gillan (as the main composer and the only lyricist) does his best to do as much as possible until it's possible. No matter if better or worse than In Rock/Machine Head, if only to do something new. And what's the result?

Well, when Deep Purple split up in 1976, most of us, their young listeners (me too), thought that Deep Purple would become another 1970s rock band who lit up and went out. And what a pleasure to admit that we were wrong. Moreover, the 8-year hiatus (1976-1984) was in fact a fiction. Just remember the three albums by Gillan (Mr Universe, Glory Road and especially Magic) that continued and developed what started on In Rock and Fireball. The 1984 reunion marked the band's growing and maturing. Fewer hits (like Smoke On The Water) - more melodies. Fewer drive (like in Space Trucking) - more profundity. And more prog touch in music (not to be forgotten). I'd say this fruitful tendency reached its peak with Purpendicular but was not lost in later decades.

(By the way, my personal rating scale for the Deep Purple releases is, to say softly, not typical. I consider Fireball and Concerto For Group And Orchestra their best ones from the 'Mark II' era, Purpendicular their very best during all the 56 years of their history, and my personal ratings for Who Do We Think We Are and The House Of Blue Light are at least 4.5 stars each. In addition, I consider the departure of Blackmore in mid 1990s a good fortune for the band, I find this guitarist inadmissibly overrated.)

The band's new album, =1, fits very well into the sequence starting with Now What?!. (Excluding Turning To Crime of course, due to the evident reasons.) Again: no hit like Smoke On The Water (thank God, I hate this song since my schooldays!), but most of the tracks are amazingly cultured, noble, thoroughbred if you like. And this is what was slightly missing in their 1970s, with the only exception of Fireball. Yes I agree, the young energy and recklessness went away from the band's music many years ago. But the nobility that came instead, is it really less valuable? I doubt. A rock musician is a revolutionary, nobody will dispute this. But first of all, a rock musician is a musician. An inheritor of all who lived and worked before. Surely revolutionary (i.e. law-breaking) tendencies in 1970s hard rock were not as deep as (for example) in so-called alternative music. Just remember how Minimal Compact, Cocteau Twins or Trisomie 21 outspokenly played the fool, musically misbehaved in early 1980s before creating new musical canons in late 1980s and 1990s! Hard rock is a different case; we all remember that not only Deep Purple but also Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk were classically influenced and trained since the very beginning. Nevertheless, I think that only in 1990s-2020s Deep Purple truly became an inheritor of the entire musical culture of mankind. No more, no less.