I'm a speed king, you gotta hear me singing

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

05/09/71 : Deep Purple In Rock - Deep Purple

Our third visit with DP and our second this year and my expectations are very much that I'll appreciate the skill, but not the noise that they make with that skill.

Well, well, well. Not only did I appreciate the skill, but I also quite appreciated the noise - wonders will never cease. It's good old-fashioned 70s rawk and I don't really have anything more to say about it - so let's just crank up the volume and rock out. 

We're at a year low of #34 in the charts this week on their second week of a five week run - but that was its third run and the first one was definitely the most successful, lasting 54 weeks and peaking at #4 in its second and sixteenth weeks. The top five this week were Simon & Garfunkel, The Who (a new entry), The Moody Blues, TOTP Vol 18 (the third one we've seen in the top five this year) and Rod Stewart, with there being no more new entries in the entire chart.

Wikipedia tells us this is their fourth album and the first with the Mark II line-up. We've covered this already, but it's basically Gillan & Blackmore & others - and boy were they sneaky about getting rid of the original vocalist and bassist. The rest of the entry is basically about how they decided this album was going to be loud and how they went about it. Critically, it was well received at the time and is still highly regarded as one of the first heavy metal albums and commercially it did well, getting to #1 in Australia and Germany - although it only got to #139 in the US, where their first two albums had done considerably better.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up an original version for a fiver, but if you want one with the original Harvest inner sleeve (and who doesn't?) then it can set you back up to £360. I imagine decent copies of this are actually pretty hard to track down because plenty of them will have been played hard and often in the early 70s and way beyond - and I imagine the first bars takes a certain age of person instantly back to that time. But I found it surprisingly enjoyable coming to it some 55 years later.

12/09/71 - Not particularly enjoyable


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