Roger Glover is ‘Dreading Life Without Deep Purple’
Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover said he was “dreading” the point at which the band bows out, but that he was aiming for another five years and new music before the end.
Their current tour is titled The Long Goodbye, but Glover suggested the emphasis is on “long” in a new interview with MusicRadar. Asked if Deep Purple's 2017 album Infinite was their final release, Glover replied, “No. All we’re doing [with the tour name] is putting our fans on notice that we’re in our seventies now. Ian Paice had a minor health hiccup a while back, but two weeks later we were back on tour. It was a minor thing, but it was a wake-up call. I hate to use that term, but that’s what it was. It was a warning."
He noted that the band "has been such a presence in our lives for 50 years that none of us want it to end, but the realization is there that sooner or later we are going to have to stop. I’d love to go on and make another album. Emotionally, we’re not ready to stop, so we could carry on for another four or five years.”
On the subject of what he’d do afterward, Glover said, “I know I’ll always been involved in music, as a writer and as a producer. To be honest, I’m dreading life without Deep Purple. I’m not looking forward to it at all. This has been my working life; I’ve never had a job. We don’t have a final time to stop in mind. I don’t know how much time I’ll have after the band, but I’ll carry on being creative.”
He also confirmed he’s been working on a memoir for several years and admitted it was taking time because he didn’t want to employ a ghost writer. “It’s not possible to capture what was in your mind at the time, because memories aren’t always reliable,” Glover noted. “I’ve found a load of diaries from the '60s, and I’ve kept a journal for the last 30 years or so. I just have to work out what I did in the '70s!”
One moment that could appear in his book took place in the ‘80s, when he was given the opportunity to buy back a bass he’d once sold and then regretted. “Someone had done a horrible paint job on it, and painted it purple,” he recalled. “A screw hole I had once made was there, so I knew it was mine – but when I picked it up, I felt no emotional connection with it at all. I asked [the current owner] how much he wanted for it, and he asked for £5000, which would be triple that amount today. I decided that I didn’t want it that badly!”