The singer may have been in one of the world’s biggest bands but it didn’t make him rich. He talks about living on stolen dog biscuits, writing Smoke on the Water and why he’s still rocking at 78. Halfway through Deep Purple’s new album, = 1 , comes a song called No Money to Burn.
It is about being totally strapped for cash. This is from the classic rock pioneers who, having made it into the 1975 Guinness Book of Records as the world’s loudest band, went on to sell more than 100 million records and fill arenas across the globe. Surely, I ask their singer Ian Gillan, when we meet in the suite of a smart hotel in Düsseldorf, there must be some money to burn.
“Not if you’re as bad with money as I am,” says Gillan, 78, whose four-octave range and rugged good looks took him off a council estate in Hounslow and into global fame. Gillan exudes a certain bruised sensitivity, which I can only put down to five decades of a life in rock. “I tend to have just enough for next week.
I call the office each morning and say, ‘Can I afford this?’ Generally, the answer is no.” Gillan cannot blame himself alone for such relative penury. Deep Purple, the band he joined in 1969 after a stint as the lead in the original stage show of Jesus Christ Superstar , has been a famously chaotic proposition.
Their guitarist, the mercurial Ritchie Blackmore, abandoned ship in 1997 to become a neo-medieval minstrel. In one notorious early 1970s incident, Gillan requested Deep Purple�.
