Ian Gillan: “The band had collapsed financially, I couldn’t pay the wages”
There has never been a dull moment in Ian Gillan’s epic career.
“It’s hardly surprising,” the veteran singer agrees. “My first bands were The Moonshiners and The Javelins back in 1962 – so it’s been 45 years since I started.”
In a four-page Classic Rock feature, it’s impossible explore every last facet of Gillan’s chequered past. Instead we’ve chosen to concentrate on a specific period: 1976 to 1982, the years of his solo ventures with The Ian Gillan Band and Gillan.
Ian Gillan made his name in Deep Purple, of course, a group he left on two separate occasions – in 1973 and 1989. Not surprisingly each of these departures was an unhappy, not to say traumatic, affair. But it was the initial bust-up in the early 70s that really jolted him to the core.
Of course, the pull of the Purps is irresistible. Gillan has regularly revisited the line-up of the group that gave him his break in 1969, and today they are as strong as they ever were.
With his old jousting partner, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, well and truly out of the picture, Gillan – who rejoined Purple again in 1992 – now pulls the strings as their leader and figurehead. But back in 1973 it was a different story. When Purple’s classic Mk II line-up disintegrated for the first time, a pissed-off and disillusioned Gillan aimed to quit the music business for good.
“I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he recalls today. “I had more money than sense. Well, I didn’t actually have the money, it was held for me in various bank accounts. But all I had to do was ask for it.”
Glover – who had been in the Mk II Purps alongside Gillan, and who remains a member of the modern-day band – was staging his Butterfly Ball live show at London’s Royal Albert Hall on October 19, 1975. Ronnie James Dio, then of Ritchie’s Blackmore’s Rainbow, had pulled out and Glover needed a replacement singer urgently.
Gillan: “I agreed to help Roger out. Dio was supposed to do it but Ritchie told him he’d get fired from Rainbow if he did. So I’ve got Ritchie to thank for my return to music. The reception at the Albert Hall was so incredibly warm. I realised I really did enjoy singing. That was when I got the calling again. I returned home, took out my guitar, and I wrote three songs the next day. It was a renaissance for me.”
Recruiting guitarist Ray Fenwick, bassist John Gustafson, keyboard player Mike Moran and drummer Mark Nauseef, Gillan launched a new band under the bizarre moniker of Shand Grenade.
He laughs: “Fenwick and Gustafson invented that name. It was a twisted idea about trying to make Shangri-La explode! I went along with it, but soon they called me to a meeting. ‘No one seems to be interested in Shand Grenade,’ they said. ‘We’d better call it The Ian Gillan Band instead.’”
The IGB’s 1976 album Child In Time was centred on a reworked version of the title song made famous on Purple’s In Rock album, which itself had been partly recorded at De Lane Lea Studios. A minor success, Child In Time snuck into the chart at No.55. Moran soon bowed out of the group, to be replaced by Mickey Lee Soule and then Colin Towns, and somehow the music veered off into a convoluted jazz-rock direction. Gillan wasn’t best pleased but he went with the frenzied flow.
“I had a few moments when I tried to nudge the guys back into rock’n’roll. But they had dreams of becoming another Weather Report. I tried to get them to focus. I asked them: ‘Didn’t any of you ever listen to Louie Louie?’ It was rather peculiar doing jazzed-up versions of Smoke On The Water, I must admit.
“I can remember the very first gig I ever did with that band. It was in Scandinavia, and the audience went berserk as soon as we walked out on stage. The crowd was hyped up, ready to headbang and everything else. And our opening number went… dink-dink-adink, dink-dink-a-dink. It was a jazzy, funky thing. It was fun while it lasted but obviously it couldn’t continue.”
After Clear Air Turbulence and Scarabus (both released on Island in 1977), plus a couple of low-key live albums made in Japan, keyboardist Towns came up with a song called Fighting Man. He’d written it with the ‘old’ hard-rocking Ian Gillan firmly in mind.
“Gustafson and Fenwick were just so rude and dismissive about Fighting Man. It was then I realised that Towns was someone I could work with; someone who was incredibly talented and who wasn’t playing games. So I left the band. I didn’t have the guts to fire the rest of the guys. I left my own band.”
Gillan and Towns started again, and a revolving cast of musicians eventually stabilised when guitarist Bernie Tormé replaced Steve Byrd, and Mick Underwood, another old Episode Six man, succeeded Pete Barnacle on drums. With John McCoy on bass, the ‘classic’ Ian Gillan solo band line-up was complete.
But to the spiky-haired hordes in gob-encrusted Britain, Gillan – as they were now known – looked like a bunch of ridiculous misfits. McCoy was tall, bearded and lumbering; Underwood was just plain old; and Tormé was a flashy glam-punk with a pirate’s eye-patch and a lighting bolt transfer on his cheek. But somehow the band had chemistry… and a sense of humour, especially when McCoy strapped on a harness and flew above the stage in the live show. Wearing a suitably stoic expression, the great big bald one looked like a veritable Peter Pan-technicon.
Tormé, meanwhile, was Gillan’s secret weapon: “We were playing Slough College and as we were going out to get some fish and chips I heard this amazing Hendrixy guitar playing. I went back in and I saw this guy in the support band going through an incredible performance. He was eating his guitar, he was down on his knees, and he sounded amazing. It was Bernie Tormé – and he was in our band pretty quick. Some people said Bernie gave us punk credibility but I never really thought about that.”
An album called simply Gillan – although not recorded with all of the above mentioned members – was released in the Far East in autumn 1978. An updated version titled Mr Universe, and with contributions from the group’s brand new roster, emerged in Britain a year later. Albeit briefly.
Gillan: “Mr Universe did well for a week. We went through a list of record companies from A to Z but we couldn’t get a deal. Stiff Records told us to fuck off, and about six or seven other labels said the same thing. We had 28 shows in Britain sold out and no one wanted to know. We couldn’t get arrested. In the end we went back to ‘A’ again and signed to a tiny company called Acrobat.”
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