When Deep Purple tour Australia for the Pandemonium Festival in April, there will go on before Alice Cooper and they are fine with that.
Ian Paice tells Noise11.com, “There are two bands that are the hardest bands in the world to follow. Alice is one, because it is pure, glorious theatre with some good musicians and Status Quo is the other one. They’ve had about 5000 hits. They sound very similar but they just go hit, hit, hit, hit, hit. Those two are a nightmare to follow. I don’t care if Alice goes on after us. That is fine and dandy”.
Deep Purple have headlined festival for 50 years but Ian says Purple only care about the music. “We do shows like the ones coming up in Australia where we don’t care if we headline or are second on the bill or whatever. The ego days have gone. We are happy that we can go on stage and have a lot of fun and dare the next band to go on after us,” he says.
The Pandemonium Festival will also feature Wolfmother, the Australia band influenced by Deep Purple. “Lots of bands were influenced by Purple and Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull and Free,” he says. “You could name an explosion of music that came out in the UK at that time. It took over the world. Its not surprising that the heritage moved on even two or three generations later. Those records are immortal. People hear them for the first time and there is still a sort of a wonderful human magic to them. They are not perfect but they are perfect.”
Watch the Noise11 interview with Ian Paice of Deep Purple:
