Ian Gillan

Musician

1945-08-19

Quotes by Ian Gillan

• The one thing nobody was taught was how to deal with success, and I think that happens to everyone who makes it at a young age.

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• If you think of a solo artist, you normally know them by their name; you don't normally describe their kind of music. You just say, 'It's so and so, or it's so and so.' But with bands, everyone feels an obligation to categorize them.

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• There's very little you can do these days about having any impact at a launch for a record unless you keep it very secret, because communications are so immediate, and YouTube and everything else kind of spoils the party.

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• Rock music had its own constituency, its own steering wheel. It was beyond the control of the establishment, and we saw TV as the enemy.

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• Purple - I mean, the music and the influence and the subliminal touches range from orchestral conversation to jazz to blues and soul and God knows what. It's a vast range of expressions.

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• I've played football with George Best, the greatest footballer that ever lived. That doesn't make me a footballer. And I've sung a duet with Pavarotti. That doesn't make me an opera singer. I can write and I have a story to tell, but I'm not going to make a career out of it.

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• In the early Seventies, I bought a dilapidated hotel in north Stoke for about �100,000 and spent the same amount again renovating it, putting in a guitar-shaped swimming pool, painting the bathrooms purple, and installing gold dolphin taps.

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• I know in my heart of hearts that Ritchie Blackmore is one of the great guitar players of all time. He's a fabulous technician, and he's got incredible skills, and he was a great showman.

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• I grew up moving from one council flat to another and finished up in a three-bedroom semi-detached on a council estate in Cranford, a suburb of Hounslow. This was in the days when there was still rationing, and we had to be thrifty.

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• My grandad was an opera singer, my uncle a jazz musician; I was a boy soprano in the church choir. But the first performance with Deep Purple was something I'll never forget. All elements were working brilliantly.

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• In Poland, the whole saying is, 'You've got one eye to Morocco and the other to the Caucasus.' That's the heart of the culture. In England, they say it less romantic: 'You've got a wandering eye.' The saying means my main stream in life must be Deep Purple. That's my main job. Then every now, and I can wander off and have one eye to Morocco.

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• 'Smoke On The Water' was ignored by everybody to begin with. We only did it in the shows because it was a filler track from 'Machine Head.' But then, one radio station picked up on it, and Warner Bros. edited it down to about three and a half minutes. It then started getting played by lots of different radio stations.

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• I do ironing not only for myself but for everyone at home, everyone in the studio if they want it, and if I run out of ironing to do, I put everything back in the washing machine and get it out again clean so I have some ironing to do.

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• There's a wonderful woodland, spiritual song I wrote in Undercliff in Lyme Regis, and I used to walk up there with my dog and always come back with an idea.

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