The O2 is a beast, cavernous and indifferent, but Deep Purple cracks it open like a sonic crowbar, peeling back decades in a single, guttural roar with “Highway Star”, and the whole building surges forward. Ian Gillan, at 79, is still a man who sings like he has no business being alive tomorrow. He stretches syllables into attacks, growls through the engine of the thing. Simon McBride—new, but not new—wields the guitar like an inheritance. The O2’s corporate sterility is no match for this kind of velocity.
It’s a beautiful kind of ugly. Rock music in its purest, most self-indulgent form: solos that don’t end, organ blasts that sound like they came from a church where God got tired of keeping it pious. Don Airey’s fingers move like they’ve been given secret instructions from Jon Lord’s ghost. He wrings an entire war from his keys. It’s somewhere between a bar fight and a symphony, and it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends.
Gillan has long abandoned the high-pitched acrobatics of his youth, but there’s a charm to how he leans into what’s left. He prowls instead of pounces, his voice curling around the edges of songs that are older than half the audience. “Lazy” starts like all the best things do: slow, blues-drenched, stretching time itself. A tease of what’s coming. Roger Glover’s bassline walks in circles, comfortable in its own swagger. When it kicks in proper, the whole crowd moves—not jumps, not moshes, but moves like a collective thought. It’s the kind of groove that Deep Purple have always been capable of, the moment where it stops being a concert and starts being something closer to a cult ritual.
“Anya” becomes something different in his hands tonight—not youthful desperation, but something older, more weathered. A song that remembers every stage it has ever been played on. A song that wears its own history like a second skin.
Then there’s “Smoke on the Water.” There always is. That riff, played by thousands of teenagers in bedrooms and garages, is still king. A song that belongs to the people more than it ever did the band. McBride plays it faithful, lets the audience own it. Gillan steps back, lets the chant fill the room, nods like he’s hearing it for the first time. It’s absurd, really, how much power those notes still have. After everything, after every cover band, after every drunk uncle at a wedding reception—still, the sound of something being built from the ground up.
And then the encore. “Hush” is a beast, its bones still intact from the days when it was a vehicle for psychedelia. Tonight, it’s a rock ‘n’ roll exorcism, McBride and Airey passing solos like a live wire between them. Gillan grins like a man who has seen the face of rock and roll’s god and found it amusing. The song twists, stretches, elongates into a last moment of delirium. The kind of sound that makes you forget your own body, your own job, your own future.
Then, finally, “Black Night.” A stomp, a groove, a parting shot. The crowd does what it always does—sings it back, sends it ricocheting across the arena. The band stretch it out, savor it. Glover’s bass hums under everything, grounding it like a heartbeat. Gillan throws a “Goodnight Irene” riff in at the very end, winking as if to say, that’s all you’re getting. The house lights go up. The spell breaks. And just like that, the train barrels into the dark, leaving only the smoke.
Words & photos – Richard Isaac
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