Even now, I have no idea how we got Vincent Price or Twiggy”: The night Roger Glover assembled three Deep Purple singers and a cast of stars for a performance based on an old children’s poem

When Roger Glover was asked to soundtrack a film based on a poem by a 19th century botanist, little did he know that soon it would become a one-off live extravaganza

Of all the many Deep Purple offshoots and projects, there’s none more fanciful or just plain quirky than Roger Glover’s The Butterfly Ball And The Grasshopper’s Feast. A poem for children written in 1802 by historian, art collector, botanist, sometime MP and occasional writer William Roscoe, The Butterfly Ball was adapted in 1973 into a then-popular book by author William Plomer and illustrator Alan Aldridge. Plomer died before it was published, but its success prompted Aldridge to conceive of expanding the idea into an album that would go on to soundtrack an animated film.

Initially, Aldridge imagined Pink Floyd as composers of the music to fit the theme of a woodland party for insects and other small animals. When that didn’t pan out, he approached first Jon Lord, who was too busy with Purple, and then the band’s just-departed bass player.

“It was something that just landed in my lap,” Glover acknowledges. “When I agreed to take it on, Alan said to me: ‘Listen to Benjamin Britten,’ so I got the inkling he wanted something orchestral and classical. I didn’t take that approach, though, because I’m not that kind of musician or writer. I write songs.