Deep Purple @ Star Vista

Saw Deep purple for the third time and I must say this was the best. The first time was in 1998 in Boston, which was an epic concert. It had opened with Dream Theater (back when they weren't that famous) , moving on to purple and ending with Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Needless to say I don't remember anything from that show except the ELP material, it blew me completely to see Keith Emerson keyboard/grand piano theatrics in real time. He did the whole routine of playing the keyboard backwards while sitting on top of the grand piano...deep purple was somehow lost in that show.

The next one was in 2009, in Singapore at the indoor stadium. Here, the acoustics let them down I thought, or maybe we had cheap seats (only 120 sing dollars a pop). Song selection was a bit less classical, but they ended with smoke on the water and all was well with the audience. The keyboardist was tight but underplayed by purple standards.

This show was at an awesome new indoor venue with great sound. To top that they started the show with "fireball" which is not their most popular track but is one of my favourites for the sheer articulation of velocity. They usually never play this one live and to think they pulled it off at their age now was rather humbling. Also, they played my all time favourites purple tune, "lazy", and I was proud of this keyboardist. He was virtuoso ness that did Jon lord justice and the keyboard was really loud in the mix and essentially lacing the rhythm section with a hammond organny leitmotif throughout the show. I noticed he played a Hammond organ and 2 kurzweils. Gillan's voice showed some signs of wear and tear at the über high end wailing region, other than that this band played like they were in their twenties.

It is stating the obvious over and over again, but no one displays this calibre of musicianship these days. My French colleague had brought his 13 year old who was miming lyrics to relatively obscure tracks and I asked afterwards what he thought, and he said the same thing. It was a bit reassuring to see that musicianship might still be appreciated by the current crop of coming of age kids, but I doubt there will be any musicians of this calibre left to play. Nowadays you can make music with a laptop, free software and plugins, and what gets sold is what is hooky and contemporary sounding. No commercial basis for musicianship to prosper. Only banking and even that is now on thin ice. Personally, I can only hope there is a revolution in popular music and we are transported back to the 70s, only with better sound and mixing technology.

Lets see how it goes.