Deep Purple: Machine Head [RHINO]

Why you'll love it

This remastered 180g pressing comes in a gatefold jacket with a 12x24 fold-out lyric poster. Machine Head topped the UK chart, became Deep Purple's most commercially successful album and helped shape heavy metal.

This edition

• Remastered
• 180g vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• Fold-out lyric poster
• Pressed in the USA
• Stereo mix

About the album

Few albums owe quite so much to a flare gun. In December 1971 Deep Purple took the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio to Montreux, Switzerland, and block-booked the Montreux Casino, which burned to the ground during a Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention concert just before the sessions, after an audience member fired a flare into the ceiling. A week of searching followed, including a stint at a nearby theatre cut short by noise complaints, before they set up in the Grand Hotel, closed for the winter, and turned it into a live room.

The Mark II line-up of Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Jon Lord and Ian Paice wanted a studio record that sounded like their live show, and they got one. "Highway Star" roars out of the gate, "Lazy" lets Lord's organ and Blackmore's guitar swing, "Pictures of Home" gallops, and "Space Truckin'" closes in style. The fire itself became the story told in "Smoke on the Water."

The band had road-tested "Highway Star" and "Lazy" on a UK tour that autumn, and the album has been reissued many times since. That riff remains the first thing played in every guitar shop on earth, usually within a minute of the door opening; we've asked our staff to stop, with mixed results.

Also at Kops: more Deep Purple on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Purple / Warner Records (cat# R1 75622), a reissue of the 1972 album.