Deep Purple, Burn

Burn was the first effort from Mark III Deep Purple, which included Coverdale on vocals and Glenn Hughes, replacing Gillan and Glover respectively, booted out in a coup instigated by Blackmore.

The result was a slightly different feel in terms of music, style and certainly production, the whole thing sounding a little more distant than other rock albums.

Coverdale's vocal style was more restricted and he therefore opted to take a more bluesey approach to singing, keeping within a fairly limited low range. No harm in that, and indeed Mistreated, an admirably simple blues progression, really is one of the highlights of the album, and goes on to be probably the best live work this version of the band performed (check out the version on Deep Purple's album 'Made In Europe').

The other heavily blues-influenced effort is Might Just Take Your Life, where Lord takes a more central role and Blackmore almost seems surplus to need. A nice song without being anywhere near a classic, but worth getting if only for the astonishingly cool opening organ riff. What a shame about Paice's snare sound throughout the album, which was horrible.

You Fool No-One is a superb song, and illustrates the new members vocal skills extremely well; but it is a pale comparison of the live version, again only truly coming to life on Made In Europe (drum solo notwithstanding), where the fantastic opening and sublime guitarwork make it a true classic.

Speaking personally, it is Paice's drum work, together with the peerless efforts by both Blackmore and Lord on the title track that makes Burn the album that it is. An absolute onslaught of musicianship, in a straight 2/4 beat with a fabulously simple controlling riff, and a by-now-trademark classicalesque solo arrangement, it's easily (and I mean by a country-mile) the best piece of music Purple came up with after Glover's songwriting responsibilities were deemed redundant. To this day I don't know who came up with the arrangement for the song, which itself is quite simple, but the outcome is breathtaking.

Unfortunately, the pinnacle of the song Burn stands a lonely tall summit against a backdrop of stuttering mediocrity. Mistreated and MJTYL aside, the rest of the album is a band either finding their feet, to put a positive spin on it, or a band that frankly had run out of ideas and was just squeezing one last semi-decent album out. Worse still, this was at a time when an expectant public, now equally supportive either sides of the Atlantic, was looking eagerly forward to each new release. Burn did well initially as a release (based on this fervour, presumably), but got nowhere near the volume of sales that In Rock and Machine Head achieved.

For the die-hards, it turns out the next album, Stormbringer, was just around the corner, which wasn't any better, before Blackmore finally bailed out, and things (for lots of reasons) started to get significantly worse. So we might be forgiven for thinking that Burn might have been the start of the descent for DP, and that the new faces were just papering over the cracks that ran into the foundations of the group and not just at the surface.

Blackmore was quoted once as wanting to team up (with Paice alone) with Phil Lynnot to form a rock trio. That would have been interesting, but what it also tells us was that probably from 73/74 onwards DP's guitarist's heart just wasn't in it as much as it was up to and including Machine Head. For my money, you can sense this in the music.

This is a good album make no mistake, but it suffers by being compared against the truly great output of Mark II, which it never quite lived up to.