Deep Purple

Deep Purple started in 1968 as a psychedelic, progressive outfit with a taste for the grand gesture: Rod Evans singing, Ritchie Blackmore on guitar, Nick Simper on bass, Jon Lord on organ and keyboards and Ian Paice on drums, with "Hush" on Shades of Deep Purple as their calling card.

After 3 albums, Evans and Simper were shown the door in 1969, Ian Gillan and Roger Glover came in, and the Mark II lineup was born. They worked the orchestral itch out of their system with Concerto for Group and Orchestra that year, then plugged in and turned everything up for Deep Purple in Rock in 1970: Blackmore's guitar slashing, Lord's organ growling like an overheated engine, Paice hitting like a pile driver and Gillan screaming right off the top of the scale on "Child in Time".

Fireball, Machine Head and Who Do We Think We Are followed, along with the live Made in Japan in 1972, and together they helped pour the concrete for hard rock and heavy metal. "Smoke on the Water", "Highway Star", "Lazy" and "Space Truckin" all came off Machine Head. They played it loud, too: the 1975 Guinness Book of World Records named them the loudest band on the globe after a 1972 show at London's Rainbow Theatre. With Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, they made up the heaviest trinity of British rock in the early '70s.

Gillan and Glover left in 1973, and David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes stepped in for Burn and Stormbringer, both in 1974. Blackmore quit in 1975 over musical differences, Tommy Bolin took his place for Come Taste the Band, and in July 1976 the band folded; Bolin died of an overdose 5 months later. Mark II reunited in 1984 for Perfect Strangers, and the lineup has shuffled ever since: Joe Lynn Turner in for Gillan, Gillan back again, Joe Satriani and then Steve Morse after Blackmore's second exit in 1993, Don Airey for Lord in 2002 and Simon McBride for Morse in 2022, with Paice the last original standing. Their offshoots include Rainbow, Whitesnake and Gillan, they have sold more than 100 million records, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted them in 2016. On the countdowns, it is "Child in Time", not the obvious riff, that listeners crown.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.