Los Angeles / give me Norfolk, Virginia / dial one oh four ten oh nine / tell the folks back home th...
Los Angeles / give me Norfolk, Virginia / dial one oh four ten oh nine / tell the folks back home this is the promised land calling / and the poor boy is on / the line
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First released in 1971, Fireball was the follow up to "In Rock" and is seen as part two of a trilogy of classic British progressive rock albums from Deep Purple, sandwiched between 1970's In Rock and 1972's Machine Head. Thought for today: other than Zeppelin's IV, Houses Of The Holy and Physical Graffiti, has any other band ever come out with three great albums one after the other? I doubt it very much. Coldplay fans there's the door, you ain't invited to this party.
This is the hallowed Mark II line up of the two Ians, (Paice and Gillan), Richie Blackmore, Jon Lord and Roger Glover. All equally brilliant musicians, unfortunately soon the egos would take over and the band would split into two camps, leading to their eventual self-destruction after 1973's Who Do We Think We Are, a very good album but not quite up the level of the earlier three.
I got this at HMV for the ridiculously small amount of £3.99, it came out in 1996 as the 25th anniversary rerelease. As with the earlier anniversary editions
of their back catalogue, it has a 28 page booklet detailing the background to the album, how the songs were put together, and clippings from the press at the time. Roger Glover also reminisces about the making of the album, from which it appears that the band did not seem to think this album as their best, being rather rushed!! . It's worth the entrance fee on its own, even without listening to the music, but hey you don't buy Fireball just to read how it was made do ya. So you get the original 7 tracks of the vinyl, plus nine extra cuts.
THE ORIGINAL ALBUM The title bursts out of the speakers; it's all urgency, seemingly everyone playing different lines - Glover's bass is all over the place and Paice's drumming is thrashing about trying to keep up - but somehow it all works. Apparently this was taken at such a fast speed in the studio that they had difficulty playing it live. The slower No No No, with Ian Gillan's world weary lyric about the state of the world at the death of the hippy era (have we got our freedom? No no no....) allows Blackmore to lay down some considered licks. Poison in the rain, but they say no, no no. Not us.
Demon's Eye shows the band's funkier side with a Blackmore riff and Jon Lord keyboard backing. They used to write songs from jamming first then adding the lyrics - this is a good example of that, and Gillan gets to stretch the vocal on the bridge. The really strange Country & Western sound of Anyone's Daughter throws you right off the track. I think it was recorded as kind of a joke track but shows that the group were pretty much capable of playing any kind of style. Very tongue in cheek.
The Mule, nominally an instrumental though it does have some lyrics at the start, is a five minute spree of physchadelia, echoing Strawberry Fields Together in spirit but with the added backbone of some dead straight Paice drumming.
Fools is my favourite track on here: a thick Blackmore riff leads the band through an urgent Gillan lyric, his finest performance of the album. Paice's stop start drumming carries the show on and this is eight minutes of sheer bloody brilliant rock music. No One Came finishes the show off, a solid driving hard number where the band are playing so together it's a delight to listen to. I'd never really thought of Ian Gillan as a thinking sort of writer but in this song as on a few others he sings intelligent material instead of the usual "ooh baby" kind of stuff you'd expect. Nice one.
THE BONUS TRACKS
Strange Kind Of Woman - the single taken early in 1971 (not on the original album) here given a 1996 remix - this simply has a more upfront production, with the guitars more to the fore.
I'm Alone - b side of SKOW. Urgent paced number with 100 mph keyboard work.
Freedom and Slow Train - both outtakes from the original sessions. The latter is much better than the former, a hard driving tune as opposed to a rather standard number.
Original LP tracks Demon's Eye and No One Came are given a polish in the same vein as Strange Kind Of Woman. Fireball is run through as an instrumental, but by far the best of the lot is the Noise Abatement Society Tapes, where during a studio warm up Lord, Paice and Blackmore run through the themes from the TV shows Robin Hood and the William Tell Overture, keeping it going right to the end until it falls apart, all in good fun of course.
Yeah good album, given a very slick and professional upgrade for the CD release. Musically I think it shows the mighty Purple at their most diverse and intelligent, Paice's drumming here is outstanding throughout and Gillan never sounded better. Very very very very very very good.
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Just about as good as it gets in the murky world of rock.
silver-fir4 07.06.2006 01:48
Really a great record. The most progressive and underappreciated (beside the also fabolous "Who do we think we are". A lot of bonus-tracks like "Strange Kind of Woman" and some heavy-psychedelic tracks. "The Mule" is a bold experience into shimmering Pink Floyd-like psychedlia, with an oriental touch ... the title track was better than the success "Black Night" a year ago ... but strange enough not too successfor. Very hard and fast appealing Song. Also slow tracks like the classical-organ-driven "Fools" were included. Fools was used in a mysterious dark part of the german crime serie "Der Kommissar" in a eerie way ... Great record and exceptional review Tomas
Vodkaboy 30.04.2006 17:49
I've got the 25th of In Rock and Machine Head, might have to get this one too.
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