INTERVIEW: DON AIREY, DEEP PURPLE – March 2024

Shane | 15 April 2024 | Reply

INTERVIEW: DON AIREY, DEEP PURPLE – March 2024

By Shane Pinnegar

Sadly, rock legends DEEP PURPLE have been dropped from the revised lineup for next week’s PANDEMONIUM FESTIVAL, but we’re not going to let that waste this interview with keyboard legend DON AIREY.

Airey is in fine spirits at 8am on a brisk Cambridge morning, and we waste no time getting into Deep Purple, Jon Lord’s old Hammond organ, touring with Ozzy and losing Randy Rhoads, and more.

You’ve been with Deep Purple over 20 years now, are you still the new guy, or has Simon McBride now inherited that title?

Yeah! Simon’s the boy wonder now, even though he’s, you know, he’s 44. So, I’ve been able to step back a bit and not be the new boy, finally. I mean, Ian Gillan’s actually talking to me now. [laughs]

The elder statesman! The last four Deep Purple albums have been lauded as amongst the band’s best in many, many years. That coincides of course, with you being on board and with Bob Ezrin as producer. What do you think this team has done to reinvigorate the band so much?

Well, Bob Ezrin just, he just encourages us to be ourselves. He said, “Don’t think of hit songs, don’t think of anything. Just be yourselves and do what you do, but do it to the best of your ability.” And he’s got the most astonishing way of getting the best out of people. You know, he’ll just stop things in [the middle of a take]. You know, we said [working together on] the first album, we said “this album should be called Stop!” ‘Cos the number of times, you know, you’re playing away and he yells, ‘STOP! No, this is not right guys, come on!’ And he doesn’t hang about getting the best out of you and he’s very uncompromising – but at the same time, you know, he’s the most helpful guy in the world as well. So, it was just what we needed. We were kind of drifting along, didn’t know who we were or what we were. We knew we were something because so many people were coming to the concerts. But he kind of crystallised everything for us. Yeah.

He has a reputation for having a sound in his head, doesn’t he? And wanting to capture that no matter what.

Yeah, yeah, he’s very much… You know, he’s after the live sound. That’s what he’s after. He doesn’t want anything that’s too manufactured. It’s got to be instant, and it’s got to be real. And you gotta know what you’re doing, you know, you gotta be able to play, or he’ll sort you out straight away! [laughs]

Deep Purple – Don Airey, Roger Glover, Ian Gillan, Simon McBride

Well, it’s working.

Yes. It’s tough with him sometimes. I mean we’ve just done another one with him. That’ll be out in…

Ohh, is that recorded? I’ve read that there was an album on the way but I wasn’t sure if you’d recorded it yet.

Yeah, it’s done. I think it’s going to be out sometime in the summer.

Lovely.

We haven’t got a title yet or anything, but it’s in the can.

Well, that leads me to this question – how much of yourself and your playing and songwriting style and sound have you been able to incorporate into Deep Purple, given that they’re so such an instantly recognisable sounding band?

I don’t know what it is. It all starts, we’ll just sit down and Ian [Paice] will start something. I don’t know how he does it, but instantly everybody joins in. So, there is a definite Purple way of doing things, which is different to anything I think I’ve ever experienced. So you mould your own capabilities, they get moulded by the, you know, the force that the band is. So, you have to change your ways a bit. You have to think differently. Yeah, it’s always a learning experience, you know, you always go there and it’s never easy.

But that’s where the art comes from, doesn’t it? It doesn’t come from being complacent.

No, no. The opposite, yeah.

And I think this is the longest you’ve ever been in one band, isn’t it?

Oh, by about 17 years, yeah. [chuckles]

Long long time.

I used to stay with a band – I thought three years was the maximum, you know, especially for a keyboard player. Things go wrong – you tend to get the blame for everything!

You’ve worked with some… some mercurial people, shall we say.

Yes, yes, you can say that.

We might come back to that later on, but let’s focus on this for now. When you did join Deep Purple, you were playing Jon Lord’s Hammond B3 for a while, I believe. And you had that restored at one point. Did you feel that joining the band was in any way compromising your abilities to have to sound like Jon?

Well… you know, it was the first thing on my mind. Jon was such a wonderful musician and Hammond organist – I mean, just incredible what he could do with that instrument. At first, I stood in for him. That’s how I got the gig at a moment’s notice, you know? And we had a quick run through, then I sat in the room with Steve Morse, ‘cos he wanted to teach me a song called The Well Dressed Guitar [from Rapture Of The Deep], which they wanted to play and Jon would never learn. So, I had to learn that, [then] I went on stage with Deep Purple in front of 30,000 people at this Thunderbird festival, thinking, ‘oh shit’ you know? But as soon as we started, I thought if I try to be like Jon, I won’t survive. You’ve just really got to be yourself – but to be yourself to the utmost. I always say that playing with Deep Purple, it’s like someone comes out with a big plank of wood, whacks you on the back of the head! [laughs] It’s a big wake up call.

Yeah, sure. When you did retire that famous Hammond organ – because you prefer the Hammond, is it the 100?

Yeah. A100. Jon’s was a C3. And it really was in the most dreadful state when I joined. I remember saying, ‘I know they’re all different, but I don’t think this is working properly.’ So when I joined the band and we got to L.A., I knew a guy there called Bill Axman, and I said to Bill, ‘we’ve got a couple of days off, I’m going to drop the Hammond off to you, do your thing.’ And it was full of wires and, you know, Jon had an RMI piano in there or something, so we just took everything out and kind of restored it to its former grandeur. And it worked properly. But it had a terrible end, that instrument, actually. It was in Russia – we were in a place called Sochi. And the guys unloaded it off the plane, it was first [thing] to come off before the ramp was down.

The guys on the plane just took it and pushed it down the ramp, but the ramp wasn’t there. So it, you know, it fell about 20 feet to the floor!

And that was the end of it, really. I mean we’ve had it restored a bit and it’s nearly finished and we’ll give it back to Vicky this year sometime, but it was just sad.

Oh wow. So much history in that keyboard.

Yeah, right. Well, I think it belonged to Christine McVie – Jon bought it from Christine, from Fleetwood Mac, and she’d had it for, ooh, she’d had it for 10 or 12 years, you know? She bought it in ’62 or ‘63 when she was first playing with Chicken Shack. Yeah.

Chicken Shack – Amazing.

So, they’re amazing, these instruments. They go on longer than the players, you know. [both laugh]

Indeed! Was it fun recording the Turning To Crime album? Because you got to play something a little bit different for Deep Purple, a bit of boogie woogie piano for instance.

Well, that was a strange job. You know, we did it in lockdown. So, we were all in our home studios, and that’s how it was done. We decided what we were going to do, it was Bob Ezrin who really got the thing rolling, you know, ‘we can do this. We can do this.’ And once Paicey had kind of… I’d lay down a basic track with a drum machine and then you send it to Ian and see what he’d make of it, and of course, when the drums came back – ‘ohh God, this is really gonna work!’ you know. Yeah, I enjoyed playing the rock’n’roll piano bit – and that was all one take!

I just sent it to Bob – ‘What do you think of this?’ And he said, ‘we’re keeping it. It’s a keeper.’ I was, ‘really? Oh!”

That’s amazing because I listened to the album again this morning and yeah, it sounds pretty much live in the studio. It sounds great.

Yeah, yeah, but it couldn’t be, you know, so everybody just put their bits on separately and Bob Ezrin somehow managed to make it sound, you know – live.

Incredible. It’s certainly a long way from recording in the 70s with analogue tape and whatnot, isn’t it?

Yeah, I know which I prefer though.

Yeah, a little easier this way?

No, no. Well, it’s easier in some ways. It’s freed you up to play what you want because you can always replace it. But the pressure of tape was something that gave something to the music that you don’t get now. You know the when the red light was on. Ohh my God. And you’d play and the cans [headphones] weren’t so great. But when you got in the control room and you heard it back – ‘is that us?’

I mean, Paicey would say with tape, you’d sort out all the problems. Have you got problem with the song? Once you hear it back on tape it becomes very obvious. What needs doing or what? It’s not quite the same with digital, I don’t think.

When you replace a member of a band – for instance, Steve [Morse] stepping down and Simon coming in – does it dramatically change the way the rest of the band interact?

Absolutely. Yeah, it really does. I think I had quite an effect on the band, because Jon towards the end he just didn’t really want to be there anymore. You know, he wanted to do his orchestral thing. He wanted to do his solo thing. That was the way he was heading, you know, he was a very good arranger, and he’d never really done it properly, and that’s what he wanted to spend the rest of his career doing. So that’s what he did. I think he might have regretted it a little bit – but I didn’t regret it, not at all. [chuckles]

Deep Purple with Steve Morse (top left)

Definitely. Well, here you are, twenty-something years later. And your son Mike is the stage manager for the band, which is quite amazing. Are there pros and cons to working that closely with an immediate relative?

[Laughs] Well, he came in as my keyboard tech. In 2006, the guy I had decided he was gonna go and do lights for Uriah Heep. So I said ‘Mike, you may as well give it a go’ – because he was always helping me in the studio and I knew he had the aptitude, so I just dropped him off with the crew first night and said good luck, I’ll see you tomorrow at the rehearsal! I got to rehearsal and there was my keyboards all set up and I thought, ‘bloody hell, thirty years in this business and it’s the first time anybody’s got it dead right.’ It was just perfect. And of course, we had a guy on the crew called Michael Berger, who became KISS’s stage manager eventually, but Michael Berger was a bit of a mentor to Mike and showed him the ropes. So Mike’s always done very well on that side of things and he was more or less running it anyway. And when our stage manager, you know, kind of left, he was just the obvious choice. You know.

Right.

I didn’t put his name forward. It was, Roger! So yeah, so now Mike’s the boss and I’m working for him.

This is what I wondered, if there’s any kind of family frisson going on with people giving orders.

No, he is very diplomatic, Mike. It’s always a lovely moment when he comes to the dressing room door. He sticks his head in with a big smile and says, ‘gentlemen. It’s time to do it again’ and marches off to the stage.

Very nice. Way back when, when you first graduated, you played on cruise liners, I believe, for a year or so.

Yeah, I did. Yeah, yeah.

What did that teach you about playing to an audience and keeping them entertained that you still have on board today?

What it taught me was that the important thing is to be there on time. You know, you’d have three different gigs on the ship. You’d be playing in the second class lounge for coffee, and then you’d be playing in the first class lounge for afternoon tea, you know, when they still served it on British cruise liners… and then you’d be playing for dancing till three in the morning. So you were always moving your gear about. And so it was a good idea if it worked and you knew what you were doing.

And it taught me to have plenty of songs. I mean, we used to have 200 tunes in the band. So when I wasn’t playing, I was always writing out stuff. It was a great learning experience, you know, because we had guests come on – famous singers. We had Lita Roza, who they called Britain’s answer to Ella Fitzgerald. Absolutely wonderful jazz singer. And. Norrie Paramor came on with a band of stellar London session musicians – Harry Stoneham was the keyboard player. There were all these famous brass players and we’d jam with them, you know, they’d get us up to jam and it was a wonderful experience, and of course you saw the world. So we were spoilt.

And I got to visit Australia! That was four days in Sydney. I remember I went to the Blue Mountains, I went to the zoo, I took a trip around the harbour. Went to the Opera House. You know, it was just wow…

Nice. What year would that have been roughly?

It was ‘72.

Yeah, right. Very cool. You’ve worked with an amazing array of acts over the years of. Is there anyone that you wish you could have spent a bit more time with and done a bit more creating with?

I once had the great privilege of working with Jack Bruce on an album with Cozy Powell, called Over The Top.

Me and Cozy were writing material and he said, ‘who shall we get in on bass?’ Oh, I don’t know. So he just phoned Jack up and Jack was there like a flash! And what a wonderful person, I mean, individual, kind of Glaswegian, hard-nosed Scot – but one of one of the most brilliant musicians I’ve ever worked with. He was frightening, in the most delightful way!

And that was the only thing I ever worked with him on. We did a couple of TV shows as well, on the back of the album – we did the Old Grey Whistle Test, and we did something else, and it was it was always such a pleasure. Working with Jack, I remember we were a number short on one of the TV shows. What should we do? And I said to Jack, ‘shall we do Ticket To Waterfalls?’ which is from his first solo album, Songs For A Tailor. He was just amazed that we knew it.

But it was Cozy and I’s favourite album! The guitarist was Clem Clempson. I think we had one run through of Ticket To Waterfalls and then we are playing this wonderful song. I think Clem and Jack ended up working together quite extensively.

I saw him subsequently live a few times, but never had the great privilege of playing with him again. Playing with Bruce was like having a hound dog – a hound from hell – snapping at the heels.

Musically, you mean, of course [laughs]

Yeah.

You worked for several years on and off with Ozzy Osbourne of course, during the peak of his notorious stages of wild madness…

Yeah, that’s right.

How do you deal with working with someone who you don’t know from day to day what madness is going to go on? Did you indulge in all of that craziness as well, or did you just sort of sit back and observe?

Ohh, there was a lot of press. It was useful for getting press, but I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a more monastic band than that!

Really?!

There were no drinks backstage. Very, very few guests. No girls allowed, really. Sharon ran a very tight ship – straight on the tour bus after the gig and off to the next gig, you know. It was the exact opposite of what you think. Except on days off Ozzy used to unwind… a little bit sometimes…

‘Unwind’. Is that a euphemism?

Well, it was just… there was a lot of publicity in it, and there was a lot of exaggeration. I mean, in the four years I was with him, we only ever missed one gig. We were never late. We missed a gig in Bakersfield, California, ‘cos he just refused to do it. I don’t know, I think he was just putting his – he thought Sharon was getting a bit uppity, so he just put his foot down.

Circa 1982 – Don Airey, Rudy Sarvo, Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Rhoads, Tommy Aldridge

Of course, those times were marked by tragedy, with the loss of Randy Rhodes. Horrible. And you were one of the only witnesses to the crash, I believe.

Well, I was one of them. Yeah, I don’t… I don’t really talk about it, you know.

No, of course.

It’s living with me every day since. He… he was a lovely guy, Randy. He was an absolutely fantastic musician too…

I’ve never read a bad word said about him, personally, never read a single bad word.

He was funny as well. You know, for a Californian, he really was funny. You know, very witty, had a great sense of humour. I remember once we were sitting in a hotel in Providence and the tour bus didn’t arrive, and Sharon was in New York. What’s going to happen? It was before mobile phones and all that, you know, we didn’t know who to ring, so at random [we hear] ‘Oh, I know what to do!’ So Randy went off… and he came back with a tray with ten Long Island iced teas on it – you know the cocktail? Ten of them! And he goes, ‘this should help.’ So we started tucking into these Long Island iced teas. Two each. No sooner had we finished them than the tour bus pulls up! So, it all worked itself out lovely. He sorted it again, Randy. Well done.

Lovely. Well, that was a terrible loss and my commiserations to you. It must have been horrible being there at the time.

Yeah, yeah.

You are to my mind the only person who has performed at Eurovision on a winning song [with Katrina & the Waves conducting the strings for Love Shine A Light], recorded with Andrew Lloyd Webber, and played with the likes of Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Ozzy, Whitesnake, Jethro Tull, etc etc – that sheer eclecticism, is that something you’ve deliberately fostered in your career?

Well, I kind of started off as a classical pianist. You know, that’s what I’d hoped to be. But my God, that’s a tough, tough business to get into and I wasn’t remotely good enough to be there, but I was very interested in jazz. And I was very interested in how it all worked. And I’ve always written music out for people – it’s good to have a few strings to your bow, you know.