You'll never guess how Ian Gillan, who since 1969 has been the on-again, off-again singer of Deep Purple, spends his spare time. "I am a dedicated opponent of the European Union. It's got to go. A lot of the work I do is focused on that. An idiocracy is taking over Europe that affects every waking moment of our lives with the bureaucracy and all that stuff." Among his projects is a political novel to underscore the point.
But it is here in the U.S. where there are problems with his day job. According to Gillan, only in the United States is it hard for veterans like Purple to get new material heard.
"There is a perception in the States that is different from the rest of the world because of the classic rock thing" Gillan says. "It has always been very difficult to get radio and magazines to deal with anything other than that period which they perceive as being your heyday. In the rest of the world, we are seen very much as a progressive rock band that just happens to have been around for a very long time."
In fact, after the massive success Gillan enjoyed with Purple during the band's glory years in the early '70s ("Smoke on the Water," "Highway Star," "Space Truckin'"), that has usually been the case for him over here. In the early '80s, during one of his honeymoon's from Deep Purple, Gillan put out a string of chart-topping discs in England that were never even released in this country.
One project, though, that made it to the U.S. was the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, in which Gillan plays the Savior.
"It was very low budget. We had gone to Andrew Lloyd Webber's apartment and just rehearsed it around a piano. I recorded my contribution to the entire album in three hours. But I couldn't do the movie. It would have meant taking three months off at a time when Purple was booked solid with gigs and it would have been unfair to the guys. And, I must say, I'd much rather be in Deep Purple."
Not that you will hear it all that much on the radio, but Deep Purple has a new disc, Bananas.
"It's an interesting time for us, because we have a new keyboard player, Don (Airey)—who replaced Jon (Lord) after all these years—and we have a producer," Gillan says. "This is the first time we have had an outside producer and it has made so much difference in how we approach the whole thing. There was a lot of spontaneity and a lot of enthusiasm, which we've always had in the studio over the years. But there was also an objective point of view, which a producer gives you which we've always missed over the years, because we always produced ourselves."
In addition to Jon Lord's retirement from the keyboard, for the past decade Deep Purple's line-up has featured American guitar virtuoso Steve Morse as replacement for Ritchie Blackmore.
"Steve's been with us for 10 years now, and he's as American as you get. But the primary thing is that Steve is an intelligent guy and he is a brilliant musician. Those are the job requirements. He's very much part of the family."