S: Oh, great. For some reason, and I’ve been analyzing this to death as has everyone in the band. But the fact that there have been a lot of young people at the shows has actually worked in my favour as the new guy. Because they may have heard the Machine Head songs but they probably don’t know the band so well, that they would be “Oh, I hate the new guy, just because he’s a new guy”. They totally accept the band the way they see it, be it old or new stuff that’s played. They get into the energy of every tune.

Indeed, I mean God knows how many generations of fans come to your gigs. Probably like grandfathers and their grandchildren’s children or something along those lines.

S: Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, when you’re on stage, you can’t see very far into the crowd as far as faces go. Up front, where you can see from there, is almost always taken by the younger people, or the very rabid fans.

Yeah, or who knows, maybe their just wondering that “When did Blackmore go blond?”, or naah, doubtful.

S: *laughs* Yes, who knows.

S: Well, actually it’s along those latter lines. Of course, any chance we get to stretch out and play something differently than last night, those are my favourite moments. So the solos and jamming bits, like the intro to Highway Star, we always do something different, Roger Glover (bass) and I. On the guitar solos, I always change something up. On songs like When A Blind Man Cries, a bit more quiet, you can hear every little nuance in the solo. Those are the moments I really look forward to, because it really does matter what you play. You can’t just coast along and fake it. You have to reach deep inside and come up with some inspiration or other wise it will sound really stupid.

S: For stuff like that I have decided not to plan things out in advance. It makes it more fun for me and possibly a little less polished for the people. We do it just for fun, to joke around, playing these little quotes that people will probably recognize from classic rock radio or their shelves or both.

S: Well, the main instrumental theme in the song - also the base of the solos - came by accident. We were in the middle of the recordings of the Purpendicular-album and I was doing this two-handed harmonics thing in the studio when Roger overheard me while getting coffee or something. He then said, “You know, we could make a song out of that.” I was just messing around with the thing, thinking that it could be something I could use with my own band some day. I thought it was too melodic for Deep Purple. He just said “Are you kidding? Let’s try it!”

- And that day we had the arrangement done with everyone pitching in, and got the instrumental form completed. Then we just gave it to Ian (Gillan, vocals) and said, “There you go.” *laughs* It was very nice. Jon Lord was also champion of doing very melodic things, interestingly enough, so is Don Airey (current keyboardist), so we try to mix the things up with both rocking and melodies.

S: Yes, it’s very possible. You know how with a group of friends you may react to things very differently than with another group? Deep Purple as a band is totally unimpressed with playing with technique but no feeling. Although I’ve never tried to play technique with no feeling. *laughs* But it can surely be perceived like that by some people. So the melody and the phrasing, to some extent even the attitude, of your playing, are very important to this band.

S: Actually, we designed another guitar twenty years later, called the Y2D, meaning two decades after, which was pretty much designed for the Deep Purple gig. The model is just a little bit more oriented for heavy, distorted rock sounds, although it still has a pickup that will help me clean up the sound with any amp setting.

- It goes first into the tuner, which of course has the A/B-switch, and into my Engl amplifier, which has been slightly modified for my preferences. I’m aiming to get a little more mid-range out of it. It will probably become a “Steve Morse-version” or something, because they will have made so many mods to it. It runs into their cabinets, which have speakers along the lines of vintage 30 Celestions. The speakers are also angled in different directions so that the sounds don’t spray into just one direction, helps to spread out the sound so that the audience in one place isn’t plastered with just guitar.

- For delay, I currently have two Memory Man delays. I use them because they have a little bit a modulation in them, making a warbly sound close to an Echoplex, which is what I started with in the bad old days of equipment *laughs*. Those go to two volume pedals, which are set on one hundred percent effect. So that if you press on the volume pedal, the delay will come through a second Engl amp. So youre always playing through the dry amp, nothing changes, no effects. Then you can control the delays, whether you want a short or a long delay, with the volume pedals, which are just passive Ernie Ball-models. They allow you to mix in some delay and take it away instantly. On a fast run you can easily hold back on the delay and on a longer single note, you can press the delay up again to make that note really sing more.

S: Well, the main thing I remember, saying to myself every day at the age of fifteen for instance, was that I’m not going to go to sleep until I’ve discovered something or written something on the guitar that I couldn’t play before. That was the only rule I kept, that I has reasonably accomplished something. It could’ve been technique, just playing-wise, but more often it was writing music, something new by myself.

- Then at the age of about seventeen I got into a university where I just had to improve on both classical and electrical guitar in order to be able to handle anything. So I began to train about an hour and a half on both classical and electric, so three hours of training just technique. That you can only do when you don’t have a job, don’t have a family, aren’t married and don’t even have to cook your own food, because in the university you just went to a food hall, gave them a card and got some food*laughs*. And of course, in addition to the technical training, I would play with other people or something, so I would spend about eight hours on the guitar daily in some fashion or other. But those are entirely unsustainable amounts of practise for your body for a very long time. Although, there is still a group of technical exercises that I go through every day.

S: I hope no one is reading who might be offended by this *laughs*. First of all, I’ve been driving that way about my whole life. We had very different kind of traffic, where I did that. We had very wide lanes, organised traffic and not that much people, on the highway where I did this. But yes of course, I did this. Time is time, you get only so much of it before you die and I took advantage of it as much as possible.

- I could run a gentle slalom course while practising and I guarantee that I never stopped looking out the windows, got in anyone’s way or ever closed my eyes while I was playing *laughs*. I was just doing mechanical things on the guitar to keep up the muscles.

S: Oh yeah, every two weeks.

Please tell me that the decision to let you go was made by a gym coach whose name was the basis for the name of the Dixie Dregs, emulating the legend of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s birth.

S: *laughs* Actually, in one high school that I went to, the decision came from the gym coach, so you’re close *laughter ongoing*

S: Yes, yes indeed. Actually, I have one of the frames from that episode. One of the artists of the show gave it to me.

Wouldn’t it be cool if on some special gig, Ian Gillan decided to emulate Homer in the second verse and sing: “I am hungry for a candy bar/I think I’ll eat a mouse”.

S: *laughs* I don’t think anybody in the band gets The Simpsons as much as I do. It may be an American thing. A lot of the humour in there is oriented with the weird things that we are brought up with. I do think it is the best writing on TV.

Definitely. Many have said that the show has lost it’s touch nowadays. I’m not totally with that, but I would say that even an average Simpsons-episode is still way better than 99 percent of the other garbage on the airwaves.

S: I’m with you there. Of course you can’t always be on, it’s just like a group improvising on stage. But even their average input is great. Just look who’s been in it. Conan O’Brian has been a writer on the show. Some of the cast members from Saturday Night Live contributed ideas for it. Harry Shearer, better known of course as the bass player of Spinal Tap, has done the voices on it for years. A lot of great talent on that show.

S: No no, he must have just been doing some recreational exploring of the unused areas of his mind. As long as he wasn’t driving with a guitar or having children waiting for him at home, it was fine *laughs*.

Ok, good then. It just disturbed me on the spot a lot. I felt it as very disrespectful towards the band.

S: Well, to me disrespect in a concert is something like making yelling or throwing stuff at you when you’re trying to do something. It’s disturbing someone when he’s trying the best he can, like similarly can happen in a ball game. If you didn’t like it, then don’t go the next time, but don’t throw things.

- Like when I first joined the band and we went out on tour there were two cities, where there were some people at the shows who were throwing things at me because I wasn’t Ritchie Blackmore. I can’t do a whole lot about that fact, can I *laughs*. But it’s understandable when diehard-fans are involved.

The same people were probably as bitchy when for example David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes came into the band, although they turned out to be awesome.

S: Anybody, just anybody who comes into a band to replace someone who has been there a long time will go through the same thing. Actually it has been easier for me than I ever expected, overall it’s been really good. I think partly because Joe Satriani did the tour with Deep Purple for a few months in 1993 before they got a permanent replacement in me. So people were used to the idea when I came in.

S: Oh. That’s a good question, one that I have never thought about. So off the top of my head, which is not always the best answer to quote *laughs*, I would say it is giving the energy that you can’t express any other way. Safely *laughs*. The energy that is the angst and joy of being alive.

S: Thank you and the best to you as well. Bye.