Glenn Hughes Plays Classic Deep Purple Live / Laurence Jones
London Camden Electric Ballroomn
Hughes and his band roll back the years and party like it’s the 70s all over again, with a guest spot from Joe Bonamassa.
Laurence Jones just loves playing blues guitar – the sounds it makes, the expression it allows him. And he is very good at it. But unless you like your guitar heroes to resemble that nice young man who works in the bank, he isn’t going to change the world. His own songs, although delivered by an excellent band including two fine (if rarely singing) backing singers, are straitjacketed by conventions. So where Laurence Jones really shines is when he’s interpreting others’ material. He does Hendrix bold as brass, funkily rejuvenating All Along The Watchtower almost as significantly as Jimi himself reanimating the Dylan folk song. His set-closer Creedence Clearwater’s Fortunate Son, gets similarly stunning treatment. Ultimately, it’s impossible not to be impressed.
While Jones is impressive, Glenn Hughes is stellar. It’s taken him a while to fully embrace his Deep Purple past, but he’s now midway through a two-year spin around the globe billed as Glenn Hughes plays Classic Deep Purple Live. It’s both odd and natural that he‘s finally got around to it. For many, his time in the band (1973-76) was a misstep that saw them lurch in a funky direction (first on Burn, then more so on Stormbringer, both released in 1974, the latter leading to the departure of Ritchie Blackmore) and led to a demise after a star-crossed liaison with Blackmore’s replacement Tommy Bolin, who shone on 1976‘s Come Taste The Band but frequently struggled with a drug habit while touring it). For others, the three albums are more celebrated, having launched the career of David Coverdale (whose own, poorly received, Purple tribute makes him the elephant in the room).
From the tour title and psychedelic posters showing a 70s-vintage Hughes, it should be obvious that this would be a fully retro experience.
Playing against a backdrop of the tour poster and with a hippielooking Hughes sporting a pair of abundant sideburns, it is quickly apparent that tonight is not about re-imagining classic old songs, but about delivering them as they would have been played four decades ago. Which means extended solo spots in You Fool No One for Jesper ‘Jay Boe’ Hansen (as Jon Lord), Soren Anderson (as Blackmore) and drummer Fernando Escobedo (with the hardest job of the evening, as Ian Paice).
These indulgences mean that in the 85 minutes the band are on stage before the encores, a DJ could have played all of Burn and Come Taste The Band, plus the title-track of Stormbringer, to entertain us with 19 songs. Meanwhile, the band get through just seven – indisputably the full-on Deep Purple experience.
They begin with Stormbringer, the best song from the weakest of the three albums Hughes made with Purple. (Proving that Hughes knows this, the only other song from that album is the intro to High Ball Shooter thrown into the You Fool No One melange – along with a snatch of their old encore standard Don Nix’s Going Down.) Next, the first two of the five songs they play from Burn: a mighty Might Just Take Your
Life then Sail Away – a brilliant song that Purple never performed live back in the day.
After gushingly reminding us of his love for Bolin, we get their funk-metal masterpiece Gettin’ Tighter and the brooding You Keep On Moving. On these, Sorensen switches gears effortlessly, playing Bolin as well as he did Blackmore, and making this show work in a way it just shouldn’t. In reality, we’re watching a bassist and second singer plus a three-piece covers band, delivering a set by a mid-70s quintet, while the original singer is at home in Lake Tahoe. Hughes is once again proving he is one of rock’s greatest singers, and his band are absolutely nailing it.
It’s fair to say attention drifts from some in this uncomfortably warm and scruffy venue once it becomes apparent – after Hughes leaves the stage, having suggested “the love in the room” will forgive the extended You Fool No One – that he’s asking us to suspend disbelief and imagine that we really are at a Deep Purple show four decades ago. A rising hubbub of conversations says not everyone is convinced. But when the quartet reassemble 20 minutes or so later and Sorensen plays the familiar blues licks that Blackmore used to play to introduce Smoke On The Water, everyone is back on side. Although Hughes had no part in the song’s creation, he’s right to include this Mark II classic, and the band play it now as Mark III did then.
That really ought to have been the best way to end the set proper, but Hughes has one more ace up his sleeve – stepping into the orange back-lights to sing Georgia On My Mind, a song burned into a young Hughes’s soul when Ray Charles covered it in 1960. Hughes did it on stage with Purple as a much younger man, believing then – as we now know to be true – that he could sing both rock and soul. All those years ago, though, as bootlegs prove, he had too much cocaine and no filter. Tonight he sings it awesomely, with an almost surreal beauty, reaching high notes few other 66-year-olds would attempt, let alone embrace with such grace. It’s a neck-hairs-to-attention moment that we need a pre-encore break to fully process.
The band return to the stage and trample us with Burn, a thoroughbred beneath a warhorse riff, before Sorensen melts into the shadows and Hughes welcomes “my brother” Joe Bonamassa to play Mistreated. It’s a song he knows well from playing with Hughes in Black Country Communion, but tonight he delivers it with a barely restrained fury extending – at Hughes’s bidding – into a call-and-response ending. After that, JB stays and Sorensen returns for the finalé with another older Purple standard, Highway Star, on which Hughes hands his bass to a denim-clad mystery man and prowls the lip of the stage like the frontman he strangely never was. Four decades or two hours
– it’s difficult to tell which just passed by.