Top 77 Ian Gillan Quotes

We’ve never gone into the studio with prepared material… we never have.

One of my greatest pleasures is writing on my Web site.

We have been called old rockers, rock pensioners, and dinosaurs.

The Hall Of Fame thing, it’s an American thing. We don’t have that in England or Germany or Australia or Russia or anywhere in the world apart from America. And it’s an institution. What’s that got to do with rock and roll?

I know the guys in Metallica. I’m very honored that they were influenced by Deep Purple when they started, and they’ve always been very kind to us.

I’ve tried to avoid the rock & roll highway and have taken the scenic route. I think all the guys have been more concerned with the music and the band’s legacy than with the commercial aspects of life.

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.

The band’s a really close-knit family. We’ve got fantastically good friendships and relationships that have developed after all these years.

I used to do interviews – I still do – interviews every day, all day. And you go from maybe doing a couple of professional interviews, where you can hear the sound right, to everyone else sounds like they’re at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

When I was in my formative years, I rejected Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, and Dean Martin. I now realise they were all great artists, but at the time, as a young man, you have to clear the decks.

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.

Singles – we hated it, going on ‘Top Of The Pops’ and all that rubbish.

Infinity is almost impossible for an eight-year-old to grasp. It’s an inquiring age, and you’re beginning to shape your thoughts and questions about life in general at that stage.

I’ve been in music all my life.

I sang ‘Nessun Dorma’ twice with Pavarotti, and he told me he’d heard ‘Smoke’ about five or six times, and every time was different. He was so jealous because if he deviated one jot from the traditional interpretation of the famous arias, he’d be crucified. We have the freedom.

The people who come to Purple shows are there for the music.

I hate it in America where the protocol seems to be you are expected to tip regardless of the quality of service. I like to tip when it’s not being demanded of me, and if the service has been good, I tip quite generously.

I think you function much better when you trust people and when you’ve got a sort of relationship where you can develop ideas within a framework.

My first contract was in 1965. There were six of us in this band – my band before Deep Purple – six in the band plus management, and the entire royalty rate was three-fourths of 1 percent.

No matter what I do, I’ve always recognized that Deep Purple is primarily an instrumental band. That’s where all the music comes from in rehearsals – it all stems from the music.

My father was a storekeeper at a factory in west London.

I remember my uncle, who was a jazz pianist, when we did Deep Purple ‘In Rock,’ he ran from the room screaming, holding his ears: ‘I can’t hear anything. I can’t hear any instruments.’ And I was rubbing my hands going, ‘Great.’

It means a lot to a lot of people, ‘Smoke On The Water.’

We soaked up everything from Beethoven to Chopin to Jimi Hendrix to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.

I don’t think happiness comes with money, but if you are hungry, you can’t be as happy as if you aren’t hungry.

I write every day.

When I’m writing with Tony Iommi, for example, still it’s very easy. We go in, and I know exactly what his style is. It’s very distinctive, and you know exactly what he’s looking for, and we know exactly where we’re going from the first chord.

I’ve always been optimistic – I always expect the sun to come out.

What happens is we finish the show, have a couple of drinks, go back to the hotel, talk, and that’s it.

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.

For a rock band, I didn’t see the point in live albums. To my mind, you’ve got to be there.

We were the first generation of rock & roll, but life goes on.

When you think about it, we sold about 120 million records, which relates to about £1.2 billion in the U.K. economy. We’ve seen very little of that.

If you start adapting to audiences, you’re really second-guessing the situation, and it becomes a bit more like cabaret.

Glenn Hughes is one of the most naturally talented musicians, but he’s still copying Steve Wonder to this day, so I can’t call him a bona fide member of Deep Purple.

I was in a band called Episode Six with Roger Glover, which was more of a harmony band, really. At one gig, there were a few dodgy characters leaning up against the wall of the venue – and we ended up joining their band. Purple was the talk of every musician in the country – they had something new and very exciting.

If you’ve got a wound, and it’s just about to heal up, and it’s got a nice scab on it, and you think in two or three days, that’s gonna be completely healed, then somebody comes along and pokes it with a stick, and it opens up again. And that’s what happens with the Ritchie-and-Deep Purple situation.

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.

I once wrote a song called ‘No Laughing in Heaven,’ which was about not wanting to go to Heaven due to the company I’d be keeping, and with a few exceptions, the Hall of Fame is pretty much the same thing.

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.

I assume I must have a pension, but I don’t know for sure. I have heard of ISAs, but I can’t tell you if I have any.

I love extended solos. I used to like them in the old days a lot, because it used to give me time to go to the pub for a drink.

The thing to remember when you’re re-recording pieces from the past is that you have to have respect for the original performances, recordings, and arrangements.

I don’t think we were anti-commercial. But we were anti-contrivance, and like Zeppelin, we found dignity through the music we were playing.

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.

I have heard that my Wikipedia entry is completely incorrect, but then again, so is everyone else’s. I haven’t bothered about that.

It’s a fine line between self-assuredness and arrogance.

I like walking and hiking, and many of the ideas for songs have germinated from this.

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.

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.

The only advice I can give is to absorb as much as you can from as wide a spectrum as you can. If you’re in a rock band and only soak up Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple kind of beginnings, then you’re not going to have much leeway.

I don’t think anyone likes to be pushed around.

There used to be a time when people used to hold up cigarette lighters and candles at concerts, and the place was aglow to celebrate the end of the evening, or during a slow song, there was this congregational euphoria that used to exist. It still does, but now it’s a question of iPhones being held up.

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.

I’m completely irresponsible, I’m afraid. I’m ignorant about money as a commodity – I have never really understood it.

I’m very grateful for the other bands and artists that stood up for us with a view to our induction – that’s nice of them. But I wish that the Hall Of Fame had had the discretion to ask us first. It’s now become a debate in which we are too late to have the final word.

Life’s not so rocky now. It was very volatile when you’re young: you’ve got no experience. Your sense of disappointment is far greater; your sense of success is overwhelming. And then you’ve got the emotional conflict within any group that you’re not mature enough to deal with until you get older. It levels out.

Things evolve. People mature.

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.