The Deep Purple Of ________

 

The improbable existence of this book of scholarly essays on Deep Purple made me re-contemplate their deep uncompellingness....  how they run a distant third to Led Zep and Sabbath....

And then to wonder what other examples of this clustering and ranking could be found across music history...

The obvious one is Beatles and Stones with The Who trailing some distance in achievement / charisma

In baggy, The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays out front... with The Charlatans far behind (and funnily enough their big hit "The Only One I Know" owes more than a little to DeePurp's "Hush")

(although the Inspiral Carpets could also be a contender for Distant Third)

Britpop is slightly different as there's a Top 3 - Oasis Blur Pulp - with Elastica trailing at fourth (but I prefer them to Oasis and Blur) 

Does it work with IDM?  Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and (for me at least) Autechre trailing in third. 

For a true parallel with the Led Zep / Sabbath / Deep Purple relationship, there would need to be a sense of redundancy - that there is no function for the #3 band, since whatever it is they are bringing to the table, it's done better in one or others of its facets by the top two preeminent bands.

In other scenarios, the ranking is based less on this idea of overlap-induced redundancy and more about a level of quality and consummate achievement. e.g. 

Manchester postpunk - The Fall and Joy Division, with A Certain Ratio in third (as a largely unrealised proposition, based on the recordings at least.... 

Postcard -  Orange Juice and Josef K, with Aztec Camera far behind

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There must be "Deep Purples" of funk, of reggae...

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Of course fandom and taste being quirky, you can find yourself perversely more taken with  or invested in the bands that are objectively much further down the rankings.... John's Children and The Eyes mean more to me than The Who ever will... Budgie, with just two songs ("Whisky River" and "Hot as Docker's Armpit"), have given me more pleasure than Deep Purple

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Rainbow - as once discussed here I vaguely recall - are a whole other order of inessentialness - no sense of a vacuum being filled, a need supplied

Very much a case of "if they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to invent them"

That said I vaguely recall someone here asserting value and interest for the first two Rainbow albums

And someone else piping up in favor of "Since You've Been Gone"

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The Deep Purple delta of undistinguishedness - Rainbow,  Ian Gillan, Whitesnake

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I used to have a Deep Purple box set (sent unsolicited by a big record company in those days of major label largesse). And one thing of mild interest gleaned from the sleeve note essay was that Deep Purple were a singles band, unlike Sabbath and Led Zep (who never released a single, right?). Consequently they had a large number of hit singles and appearances on Top of the Pops. And their stuff is quite catchy and also quite groovy - metal as dance music. 

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It was the scholarly tome that made me think of the mysterious nullity of Deep Purple (one of those names that you saw scrawled on desks a lot, growing up in the 1970s.... and one of the names that first puzzled me as rock-innocent child... another was Bread... I used to be transfixed by the cover of a Bread album which was in one of those spinners full of LPs in an electrical goods shop on Berkhamsted high street... )

But something else swam into my ken recently that was Deep Purple related... one of the YouTube programs I've been slamming into my veins to keep me sedated through the last crazy weeks...

I don't know why it's Ritchie Blackmore Presenting this on his YouTube channel - since he's not in it, it's Jon Lord repping for DeepPurp.... but what a pleasant laidback sort of conversation.... love the mustachioed ultra-chill presenter... Speakeasy, wot a title 

Ritchie Blackmore is considered one of the Great Guitarists, isn't he? He's included in this book Big Noises by the late Geoff Nicholson, a very entertaining collection of short essays on loud, flashy guitarists

I just can't hear it.