Ian Gillan with Deep Purple during a performance at the Rock Imperium Fest 2023 in Cartagena, Spain. The band were one of the headliners of the festival, along with Kiss, Europe, Skid Row and Helloween.
(J.M.B/EUROPA PRESS VIA GETTY IMAGES)The cheeky wordsmiths in Deep Purple are at it again, following up records like Who Do We Think We Are, Come Taste the Band, Purpendicular, Bananas, Now What?! and Whoosh! with their most incendiary bit of album titling yet. Because the band’s 23rd album is called =1, and if you don’t like the title, wait until you see the cover.
But it all makes sense, as far as historic howler Ian Gillan is concerned. “I had half ... well, two-thirds of the album finished,” begins Gillan, between bouts of getting in tour shape for the band’s upcoming paired bill with progressive rock giants Yes. “But I didn’t feel rooted, if you know what I mean. I didn’t feel all the songs were coming from the same place. Not that I wanted it to be conceptual, but they didn’t have that cohesion. So I did the usual and scrapped everything, tore it up and started again. It had been just driving me nuts every day with the bureaucracy that exists. Just to walk through a door, just to look at something in a shop window just to buy something or to deal with any large organization, this relentless question. I mean, I just want to buy something, but I have to go around the block three times. So I did an equation, a ridiculously long equation, that quite simply equaled one. And I thought, all that nonsense just to reach the target. And so that idea kind of developed from there. Then I thought, that would look good
