Roger Glover plugs new solo album Mask, keeps mum about Deep Purple reunion

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON SEPT. 7, 1984

By Steve Newton

After leaving his band of four years, Rainbow, Roger Glover is back again with the original lineup of seventies supergroup Deep Purple. Glover supplied the bottom end for Purple on such powerful tunes as “Smoke On the Water” and “Highway Star”, but often had to stand in the shadows of ultra-flashy axeman Ritchie Blackmore.

Keeping to his own side of the stage and never moving around much, Glover concentrated on being the backbone–along with drummer Ian Paice–to one of hard rock’s most thrilling live bands, a harbinger of the eighties’ metal craze.

Roger left Deep Purple in late 1973, but was reunited with Blackmore in ’79 when he joined Rainbow, producing and playing on their Down to Earth LP. The two had worked together in Rainbow ever since, but after last year’s Bent Out of Shape LP and single “Street of Dreams”, the urge to relive {and reinvest in) the Purple Daze became too much.

The severed lines of communication between the old members were patched up, and now the reunited Purple is in the studio making their first album in 10 years. Plans are also underway for a mammoth worldwide tour, which would very well bring the band to Vancouver.

Glover phoned me from somewhere in Vermont, where the new album is being made, but group politics forbade him talking much about the details of the reunion. So we concentrated mostly on his new solo release, Mask, which was also self-produced. (Glover even did some of the album cover artwork himself).

He also talked about Kate McGarrigle’s appearance on the song “(You’re So) Remote”, his disappointment with the music scene in the mid-seventies, and his feelings about playing lead vocalist for the very first time.

I understand you got the idea for making The Mask when you showed engineer Nick Blagona some of your poetry.

Yeah, that’s right. I’ve always enjoyed doing solo albums–in fact I’ve done two before–but they’re few and far between. And I need an enormous amount of inspiration to do one, because I’m so busy doing everything else that I don’t think about it.

But he read the poetry and said, “Do your own album!” I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, but he kept on and on, so eventually I did. Not that there’s any poetry on the album. It’s just that that proved to him I could write things other than heavy metal.

It says in your bio that the song “The Mask” was influenced by an African photo safari you took in 1976.

Well, I’ve been listening to African music for years, before I went to Africa and since. I was on my way up to Canada to start the solo album and the song just suddenly appeared.

At first it was just myself on the album, putting all the tracks down and using a rhythm machine. But I needed a core to record with. So I called Joe Lynn Turner, the old Rainbow vocalist, and said “Do you know any good guitarists?” And he mentioned David Gellis, so I decided to give him a try. And the first session that we did together–drummer Chuck Burgi, Dave and myself–was magic. We blew.

How did you happen to get Kate McGarrigle to sing on “(You’re So) Remote”?

She first came to my attention through an album they made in 1978, simply called Kate & Anna McGarrigle. In fact, it was Melody Maker‘s Rock Album of the Year in 1978, believe it or not. It was a marvelous record, and it’s one of my favorite all-time albums. And when I was looking for a girl singer, Nick the engineer–who lives in Montreal, and knows Kate and Anna–said “Well, why don’t you ask Kate down?” And I thought she’d never do it, but I gave her a call and she agreed to come down. And we got on great.

It also says in your bio that, since departing Deep Purple in ’73, you underwent a period where you were totally tuned out to music.

Well, not totally tuned out. I just felt that it wasn’t going anywhere. You see I’ve always been a music lover, as opposed to a musician. I like to go out and buy records and get excited by them. That wasn’t happening anymore in the mid-seventies, and I couldn’t figure out why–I thought maybe it was because I was getting old! The Bay City Rollers were huge, and I couldn’t understand it.

It was kind of a desert creatively, until ’77-78 came around. Then all of a sudden bands started happening. XTC’s Drums and Wires was the album that did it. I listened to that and I went potty on it. It wasn’t business crap like Bay City Rollers–it was good old music.

How did it feel, being in the lead-vocal position for the first time on Mask?

A little uncomfortable. I had fun doing it, but there were an awful lot of self-doubt moments. I don’t particularly think I’ve got a good voice–I don’t like the sound of it much–but there is this desperate need in me to actually express myself with my voice. So regardless whether I’m happy with it or not, I’m stuck with it, and I’m just trying to make the best of it. I mean, Dylan doesn’t have a particularly good voice. Mark Knopfler’s the same. John Lennon. They’re not too tall voices–they’re not operatic or anything like that. But the point is, they get their message across.

Do you think your reputation as a hard rocker is any detriment to your solo career?

It’s possible. I really don’t care. If people buy the record thinking they’re gonna get hard rock and are then disappointed, then that’s really their problem and not mine. If they listen hard enough, hopefully, they won’t be disappointed.

Do you intend to follow it up with another solo album?

Well I certainly want to. I’ve switched now from Rainbow to Deep Purple, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t carry on a solo career. I did Mask in between Rainbow commitments, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t do another one in between Deep Purple commitments.

I was told by PolyGram that you didn’t want to talk about Deep Purple.

Well it’s not so much that I don’t want to talk about it, but that’s our policy at the moment. In the Rainbow situation, I was the spokesman, but in Deep Purple it’s different. There’s five of us, and we’re all equal and we’ve decided that there’s going to be no press, no interviews, till we’re all ready. So that’s the reason why there’s no conversations about Purple.

Any idea when the Deep Purple tour might start?

Well, we’ll probably go to Australia in November and we’ll start in the States sometime early next year.

Hope you make it up to Vancouver.

Oh, I don’t see why not. It’s a big city, and last time we came there we had a great gig. I’ve been there several times before, and I’d like to go again. I’m sure we will.

….with hundreds more to come