A Gypsy’s Kiss

The Zoo Crew has got "A Gypsy's Kiss" rolling across the speakers, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any stretch of time you already know what that means. Deep Purple, Perfect Strangers, Mark II back in the saddle after a long stretch apart, and a cut that never got the radio push of the title track or "Knocking at Your Back Door" but still hits like a bar fight that somehow turns into a carnival. Written by Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan and Roger Glover, it sits on side two of the 1984 reunion album, a little over four minutes of rockabilly snap that breaks into a frenzied run, then opens up for one of those multi-part instrumentals the old lineup used to treat like a second language. Blackmore tears across the top, Ian Paice throws rudiments underneath, and Jon Lord answers with both synth and Hammond. Folks who lived with Machine Head hear the family resemblance right away. It is not a copy. It is the same five people remembering how to argue in tune.

The whole record came out of a rented place called Horizons in Stowe, Vermont, with a mobile studio parked outside, cut between July and August of 1984 and produced by Glover because the band did not want a slick outside hand polishing the edges off. Gillan later told the story of those first hours in the basement. There was a log fire, three feet of snow outside, a lot of suspicion, and nobody in a hurry to pick up an instrument. They had a couple of beers. Then Paicey started tapping, a little shuffle showed up, and inside five minutes everybody had a smile. That is the room "A Gypsy's Kiss" came out of. Perfect Strangers, the title, was Gillan's oxymoron for the reunion itself. They were strangers walking in and something closer to a band walking out, and the fast ones on the album are where you can still hear the nerves turning into grin.

Blackmore had to fold Rainbow to make the reunion happen. He was the only one of the five leading a working band when the call came, and he was never the chatty one in the press. When he did talk, he was blunt. Rainbow, he told Sylvie Simmons, was total self-indulgence on his part. Purple was almost that, not quite. In another sit-down around the same stretch he said he would have liked the comeback to land as strong as Yes and 90125, then admitted they talked about outside producers and threw the idea out. They wanted an eighties version of Machine Head, not a glossy one, and they handed the chair to Glover. The end result went platinum in the States, only the second Purple studio album to do that after Machine Head, and the tour sold so hard they had to keep adding arena dates. "A Gypsy's Kiss" was never the single. It was the cut the faithful kept flipping to when the house got loud.

Gillan's lyric on this one is pure Gillan mischief. He stacks images like postcards from a fever: John San, Janette dancing in the sand, Gypsy Dan and his caravan, a Chinese fan, a senorita threatening to drag somebody's lungs out through their nose, space truckers, teamsters, John Wayne at the Alamo, Crazy Horse, Geronimo. The hook keeps coming back to the same picture. A gypsy's kiss, and all that power fades in the haze. Read it straight and it is a toast to restlessness, to the idea that authority is temporary and a little wildness will scramble the game. Read it the way Purple fans usually do and it is also Gillan having fun with language, half nursery rhyme and half barroom dare, the same man who once built "Space Truckin'" out of comic-book swagger. "We got rock and roll, and there's nothing they can do" is about as plain a mission statement as the Mark II lineup ever put on a record. Credit on the sleeve went to Blackmore, Glover and Gillan. The all-five-names argument that used to flare up in the seventies was still simmering in Vermont, and only a couple of tracks on the album carried every member's name.

Listeners who came in late sometimes file the song with the album's deep cuts and leave it there. That undersells the playing. The intro fools you with a loose, almost rockabilly bounce, then the beat snaps and the band is off. Lord's keyboard work moves from the dramatic color he brought to the rest of Perfect Strangers into a lead that trades with Blackmore instead of decorating him. Paice is the engine, busy without showing off for its own sake. Glover locks the floor so Gillan can bark, laugh, and lean into those nonsense syllables that somehow stick. On stage in the reunion years it sat comfortably next to the older fast ones, the kind of number that reminded a room why this particular five had been dangerous in the first place. Fans on the long-running Purple pages still split over it. Some call it a filler next to the title track. Others swear it is one of the immortal cuts on the record, the one that proved the chemistry had not rusted shut.

None of that chemistry showed up by accident, and the start of the band is a stranger tale than the reunion. In the spring of 1967, Chris Curtis, late of the Searchers, walked up to a London businessman named Tony Edwards and announced that Edwards could be the next Brian Epstein if he would manage him. Money got put up. A project called Roundabout was sketched, built around the idea of a band that could change players the way a stage revue changed sets. Curtis did not last. What lasted was the pairing he helped put in a room: keyboard man Jon Lord, already a serious player with classical leanings, and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, a session gunslinger who had done time in Hamburg and with the Outlaws and was not interested in being anybody's hired hand for long. They kept the plan and hired the rest themselves.

Blackmore had seen a Hertfordshire outfit called the Maze and pulled drummer Ian Paice and singer Rod Evans out of it. Bass went to Nick Simper, who had played with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and already crossed paths with Blackmore. By March of 1968 the five were set. They played a couple of warm-up shows in Scandinavia under the Roundabout name, then changed it. The story the band has told for years is that Deep Purple came from a song Blackmore's grandmother loved, the Nino Tempo and April Stevens hit of the same name. Simper thought it was an embarrassing name until he saw it in the charts. The first album, Shades of Deep Purple, arrived that summer, and a cover of Joe South's "Hush" went top five in America. Home in England they were still a rumor. Lord was already dreaming of rock and orchestra sharing a stage. Blackmore was already itching for something heavier than the pop-psych colors of that first lineup.

The heavier turn arrived in 1969, and it arrived as a pair. Blackmore's old Outlaws mate Mick Underwood was drumming with Episode Six and pointed him at their singer, Ian Gillan. Blackmore went to a youth club in Woodford, Essex, watched the set, and got up and jammed. Gillan came to the audition and brought the band's bass player, Roger Glover, along for cover. Glover and Gillan had started writing together. Glover later called those early songs awful. Blackmore liked that they were writing at all and took them both. Evans and Simper were out. The lineup that would cut In Rock, Fireball, Machine Head and Who Do We Think We Are was in, and the band that had been a sharp American one-hit story turned into the British hard rock outfit the rest of the world still argues about. Gillan and Glover left in 1973. Blackmore left in 1975. The group folded in 1976. When those five walked into the Vermont house in 1984, they were not kids inventing a name anymore. They were the same arguments, older, with a mobile truck in the drive and a fast little song about a gypsy's kiss waiting on the other side of the beer.

If you want the band's own word on where they stand, the official home is Deep Purple, the site the group owns. Their official Facebook page lives at Deep Purple on Facebook, the Instagram account is Deep Purple on Instagram, and the X account run by the band and management is Deep Purple on X. For the long memory, the fan-built pages at The Highway Star still carry the Perfect Strangers lyrics, the old arguments, and the gig notes, the original Deep Purple web home that grew out of the newsgroup days and never stopped. Spin "A Gypsy's Kiss" again when the room needs a shove. The power fades in the haze. The riff does not.