I’ve been thinking a lot about Jon Lord these last few weeks, ever since the news was announced online on the 16th of July that he tragically had lost his recent battle with cancer and had sadly died.
So many thoughts immediately flood our brain. The obvious acute sense of loss for his wife, immediate family, friends & colleagues. The cutting short of a great talent. The fact he was still following his creative muse at age 71, working finally on a studio version of his famous ‘Concerto for Group and Orchestra’.
The passage of time & the potential fragility of life closer to home (my own parents are already both older than Jon was when he died).
The death of a friend or family member can trigger so many unexpected memories & emotions. Likewise strangely with someone we have never met in the flesh, but whose talents & work we have long enjoyed & admired.
Music like no other branch of the arts seems uniquely designed to trigger memory & feeling. For me in the case of Deep Purple & their assorted line-ups, their music has contributed hugely to what everyone calls these days ‘the soundtrack of my life’. And its certainly true that we do seem to remember images & moments from our past as vividly as if we had indeed watched them time & again on some vast internal screen.
I was fortunate enough to see Jon perform with Purple 4 times over the years. Each concert was extremely special in its own way but the occasion & (slightly hazy) memory i kept returning to in my mind recently was ‘The Battle Rages On’ tour from winter 1993.
My recall of gigs i’ve attended is normally pretty good & in certain instances borders on forensic! But those 2 nights at the Brixton Academy i was battling (ahem) with the flu. I should have been tucked up in a warm bed – instead I found myself down the front in a heaving, swaying, sweaty crowd of music fans! As if it wasn’t surreal enough having the feted & revered Mk2 line-up right up there in front of my eyes, my brain & body felt like they were on the verge of partial shutdown.
One moment that has strangely stayed vivid in my mind from those concerts was the band breaking into Anyone’s Daughter. The relaxed, improvisational feel of the intro before they launched into the main body of the song gave me a sense of the years falling away & being transported back to a show in the early 70s. To a time when the sheer joy of making music was their driving force, before the negativity started to tear them apart.
Very few of those present at Brixton knew of course that those UK shows in late 1993 would prove to be the very last on home soil featuring that most famous of line-ups. In time it became apparent the band had tackled those gigs already knowing of Ritchie Blackmore’s resignation & impending departure. And yet listening just this last week or so to recordings from that tour on the ‘Europe 1993’ live collection, the band were still capable of operating somewhere close to their imperious best. One of the smaller tragedies connected to Jon’s passing is that we will be denied the prospect, the sheer thrill of ever seeing again on stage together those 5 hugely gifted individuals.
Those years that seemed at times driven by equal parts creative genius & personal friction may with hindsight now appear all too brief, fleeting even. We the fans can be grateful though that within that time period they gave us some of the most inventive & downright thrilling music of the modern rock era.
Reason even more then for me to cherish the slightly fuzzy memories of 2 gloriously surreal & wonderful evenings in Brixton, London.
Jon Lord, your talent will be greatly missed ..
Signals get crossed 