Don Airey

Never a standard and never conventional, the keyboard to this day remains somewhat of an enigma on the rock scene. The genre that was pioneered by the guitarists and always held the guitar for its archetypal instrument, rock continues to view the keyboard with a peculiar mixture of reverence and incredulity. While there is nothing even the most artless of rock fans doesn’t know about the guitar now, the keyboard stays a riddle. The shadow of the piano’s formidable cousin, the organ, still looms large over the whole keyboard ethos, while the guitar, throughout history, has always been a party instrument – quintessentially secular, egalitarian, and infinitely more accessible.

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Don Airey understands all this, perhaps, better than most of his keyboard playing contemporaries. He, after all, was one of the few, along with Keith Emerson, Tony Banks, Rick Wakeman and Jon Lord, all classically trained, who helped to introduce the keyboard into progressive rock in the early ‘70s. Four decades on it seems only natural that Airey has now taken Lord’s place in Deep Purple after the veteran keyboardist retired in 2002. But while playing in a classic rock band, Airey even now continues to push and challenge the boundaries that supposedly exist between popular entertainment and earnest artistic striving inherent in his instrument.

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Airey’s new solo album A Light In The Sky, released earlier this year, sums up this approach perfectly, showcasing how he can use the extensive knowledge gained throughout his comprehensive career to produce an album that is both eclectic and focused. In a way it continues where Airey’s left off with his first solo record K2 released back in 1989, but it also digs deeper as well as wider. While K2 reflected the spirit of the time when the keyboard was reclaiming back its role of a solo instrument in rock, the new record speaks in a different voice. A voice that is miles away from the vast soundscape that resonated with the ‘80s stadium rock vibe, and which now offers something different, but by no means less appealing.

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A Light In The Sky is an erudite but at the same time instinctive, strident album which chooses a fluid, unpretentious tone to convey elegance and authority at the heart of Airey’s melodies and brilliance of his virtuosic technique. Apart from a few mandatory straight-ahead classic hard rock numbers, it also features some luminously clear pieces inspired by classical music, as well as jazz-rock compositions that remind of the experimentation of Colosseum II, a jazz-rock band Airey played in within the second half of the ‘70s.

Colosseum’s line-up which also included Jon Hisemean, Gary Moore and John Mole later became the core band that recorded Andrew Lloyd Webber's variations on a theme of Paganini, simply called Variations.

The breadth of Airey’s vision and the depth of his understanding of his instrument that the new record demonstrates so brilliantly, are rooted in the experience of almost four decades spent on the rock scene.

What has began from classical piano training at the age of seven through to receiving a music degree from the University of Nottingham and later a diploma at the Royal Northern College of music in the UK, was later destined to become an international career. At one time or another Airey has managed to work with almost all the key figures in hard rock, starting from Cozy Powell in 1974 to most recently playing on Judas Priest’s latest album Nostradamus. Between 1974 and now Airey seems to have worked with all the greats. He was a session musician on the 1978 Black Sabbath album Never Say Die before joining Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, played on Gary Moore’s solo debut Back On The Streets, and after leaving Rainbow joined Ozzy Osbourne, featuring on Bark At The Moon and Speak Of The Devil, as well as playing on Ozzy’s Diary of Madman 1981-82 tour. In 1987 he toured with Jethro Tull in support of Crest Of A Knave and that same year played on Whitesnake’s multi-platinum 1987 self-titled album.

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While the ‘90s saw Airey’s musical activity subdued due to family circumstances, joining Deep Purple in 2002 brought about plenty of changes. Since then he has recorded two albums with the iconic band, Bananas and Rapture Of The Deep, and tours with them non-stop.

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The discourse between playing an instrument of colossal classical legacy, but at the same time doing so on the rock scene, has, undoubtedly, shaped some of Airey’s key qualities. Just like in his music, in conversation he is elegant but accessible, astute but plain-spoken, and appears shrewdly perceptive while sharing insight into the nature of rock musicianship, as well as the general state of the music industry. And he doesn’t shy away from talking about things more profound. Astronomy being his hobby, he has some fascinating things to share about the world we live in and how sound could have been the integral part of the inception of the universe.

ALISSA ORDABAI: Are you on the road at the moment?

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DON AIREY: Yes, I’m out in Germany.

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AO: So how is this tour going?

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DA: It’s absolutely amazing. We in Deep Purple are absolutely gobsmacked with the response we’re getting. It’s great.

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AO: Does it feel a bit strange that Deep Purple these days is more than a band, it’s almost an institution?

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DA: [Laughs] Well, we should all be in an institution, I think. Yes, there’s, I think, a bit of that. What we can’t believe is the sea of young faces you see when you walk up on stage. That’s the real big surprise, it’s quite stunning, I have to say.

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AO: Is there a country where the response is particularly enthusiastic these days?

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DA: We’ve just been to Russia. We started this tour with three weeks in Russia.

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AO: Oh, they are huge fans over there, aren’t they?

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DA: Yes, they are.

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AO: Their President is as well, allegedly.

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DA: Well, we played for him earlier this year. There was a picture in the Economist of us shaking hands with Dmitri Medvedev, to the amazement of some of our fans. But we’ve got wonderful response in Moscow and St. Petersburg. When we get out there, we go deep into other regions. We play places like Kazan and Novosibirsk. Those are wonderful places.

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AO: I’ve seen you actually once in Kazakhstan. That was a couple of years back.

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DA: Have you? Ha-ha!

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AO: Over there people are incredibly enthusiastic about Deep Purple. It seems like to this day you are their favourite band.

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DA: We did an in-store appearance there in a record shop and it caused a traffic jam because so many people wanted to get in there. After about half an hour our manager shouted, “After three we get up and run!” Because the security couldn’t hold the crowd. So we just ran out of the back. And we had this terrible crash going on, people broke through and we had tables overturned. I loved it, though.

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AO: Sounds like the early days of the Beatles. Dangerous!

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DA: Yeah, it takes you by surprise sometimes.

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AO: In bands that have been around for decades, like Deep Purple or the Rolling Stones, the structure of operation can be quite rigid sometimes. Would you agree with that? And if you do, was that the part of the reason why you decided to release a solo album?

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DA: Well, you know, we’re a classic rock band. You really have to give people what they expect in that framework. I just really wanted to show the other side of me on the album A Light In The Sky. And I really wanted to get back to some of my works with a little bit of fusion here and there. And I really wanted to feature the Hammond, the Hammond organ. So that was the goal. And I wanted to pay tribute to people like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, the great jazz organist Jimmy Smith, to tip the hat off to Jon Lord, of course, and to the other one – to Keith Emerson. And I just tired to tell a story. I think if you make a keyboard album, people expect you to hang it on some conceptual hook. So the particular hook here is a journey through space. Through galaxies and from the Big Bang to the big crunch.

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AO: Some of your playing does sound jazzy, like on “Big Bang”, for example. Would you say that jazz in general has made a deeper impact on rock keyboard players as opposed to rock guitarists?

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DA: Oh, absolutely. Everyone I know who plays [keyboard] has grown up listening to jazz musicians like Jimmy Smith and Bill Evans, John Coltraine, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davies, of course. That’s what we would listen to. Bringing it into rock brings along its own problems, of course. Because you can’t play like that. But that’s the point from which you start. That was certainly the point which I have started from. I wanted to be a jazz musician.

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AO: Did you? Did you ever also have any ambitions to become a classical performer?

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DA: Well, I actually was classically trained and I went to a music college. So I got a degree in music, a diploma in piano playing, and I was all set to teach; I wasn’t good enough to be a concert pianist, really. But I think I was better than I thought I was, looking back. I just knew I wasn’t going to follow a teaching career. A call came out of the blue and I just took the chance and went on the road and that was it. This is where I’ve been ever since, [Laughs] for better or for worse.

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AO: To look at it from another angle, to what extent would you say keyboard players in rock are influenced by the guitar? Given that the pioneers of rock’n’roll were all predominantly guitar players and it was the guitar that gave birth to the genre?

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DA: Yeah, the guitar as well. You know, riffs don’t come out of pianos. The piano isn’t built for the production of heavy metal riffs. The guitar is. And all the great pioneers turned the volume controls up to ten, and that’s where it comes from. But at the same time you have to find a way of working with this, which is quite difficult to do. That’s what I really enjoy doing. Give me a great guitar player to work with and I’m a happy guy. That’s where the excitement comes from.

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AO: Some material on the album, for example, “Shooting Star” is quintessential early hard rock.

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DA: Yes.

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AO: Stylistically it could have been one of the tracks on Machinehead or Deep Purple In Rock.

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DA: Yes.

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AO: What is it about the classic British hard rock model that still inspires you?

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DA: I think it’s the sound. On “Shooting Star” what I was trying to do was just get a classic sound between the guitar and the others. There is a certain something when they gel. I had a very fine guitar player called Rob Harris whose day job is with Jamiroquai. He can turn it on when he wants. And there’s just something incredible about the sound of the guitar through a Marshall amp, or a sound of an old Hammond through an old Lesley. That particular track deliberately takes it back to the days of yore.

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AO: The album presents such a variety of hard rock and prog styles. Did you start off with a concept or did the album develop the way it did as you went along?

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DA: I had lots of disparate pieces of music that I really wanted to record. So it was about brining it into one framework. It came together very quickly. It was no problem just stringing it all together. There was no scratching of my head much. It just all came together very quickly. It really was a journey into space. That’s what I wanted to do—creating a picture in your mind of what it must be like in there.

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AO: This concept of space travel, peering into space, trying to see what’s out there, is this something you’ve been interested in from twenty years back when your first solo album came out?

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DA: Yeah, the first album is called K2. You should go up K2 if you want to go up and see what’s in the space. [Laughs] Astronomy has always been a bit of a hobby. And I have a great interest. You know, when you’re on the road on these tours you have to find something to occupy your mind. So I have a suitcase full of books by Stephen Hawking, John Griffith, and Patrick Moore, you know, books that talk about where we come from. It’s a fascinating thing to study. That’s what basically informed the album, the fact that… you know, from the Big Bang to the big crunch and everything in between.

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AO: Ha-ha! Most tracks on this album are instrumental, but would it be correct to say that instrumental tracks can be narrative too? That a song does not necessarily have to have lyrics to tell a particular story?

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DA: Oh, yeah! The second track is called “Ripples in the Fabric of Time”. That refers to early on in the birth of the Universe when matter was evenly spaced, so something happened that caused matter to come together. Nobody can really say what it was. So I thought of a headline – a ripple that started this movement, that formed stars and matter and eventually us. That’s what it is about, a bit of improvisation, if you like, on that kind of idea.

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AO: Does thinking about things like that also make you think about the spiritual aspects of things? Like, ultimately, where we come from?

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DA: Well, absolutely, yes. There is a very spiritual side to the album. It’s about who are we, where we’ve come from, and what are we doing here on this tiny little planet, the only sentient beings in the Universe? What’s the purpose of this? There’s a track on the album called “Pale Blue Dot”, which is Carl Sagan’s name for the Earth. But there was a wonderful picture from the Cassini probe that recently went up, and in between the third and the fourth rings of Saturn there is a little blue dot. [Laughs] You can clearly see it – a tiny little microscopical one, a spec between the B and the E rings of Saturn. That’s us! It’s miraculous because as far as we know, there is nothing else in the Universe like us, there is no life anywhere else.

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AO: Do you believe that there could be life out there that we are not aware of?

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DA: I’m inclined to believe that in order for life on Earth to exist, the Universe has to be as big as it is for that chance to happen. I think we’re the only ones here in the whole Universe. That’s in the song “Love You Too Much”. One of the themes of that song is about how lonely it is in space because there’s nothing there. We are the only ones who observe it. And as John Griffith said in one of his recent books, it’s very interesting that humanity has evolved in this particular time in the history of the Universe. Because we are really observing something at the moment. Were we put here to observe it, the changes in the time of the universe? It’s just a thought; it doesn’t directly relate to music, but it’s something to write to, if you know what I mean. “Inspiring” is I think the word I’m looking for.

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AO: Yes. If you were given an answer to one question in the Universe, what would you ask?

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DA: There’s a line I wrote on the sleeve notes that comes from the Indian scriptures written three thousand years ago. It said, “It is said that the God himself is a musical note the sound of which pervades the entire Universe.” Maybe music existed before anything else. I don’t know. But it’s very funny, that line. I know a few professional astronomers, and I’ve mentioned this quote to them, and they said, “That is very interesting in terms of the physics of the Universe, the background radiation, that it comes from every direction in the whole of the Universe from the Big Bang.” So perhaps the Indian scriptures were writing about a fundamental law of physics some three thousand years ago! I don’t know what the hell it all means! [Laughs] There must be something that has created all this.

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AO: Would you call yourself a religious or a spiritual person?

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DA: I’m not religious, no. I think if you are a musician, you realise… You’ve created music, where did it come from? You are quite aware of the fact… I’ve seen some of the people I’ve worked with being quite aware of the fact that music didn’t come from them.

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AO: Oh, yes.

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DA: You are very aware of that. Someone like Gary Moore. He’s just incredibly… if you think about what Mozart’s accomplished in his life. Mozart’s got two hundred and twenty albums released after his death. And he died when he was 36.

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AO: Yes.

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DA: It’s humbling when you think about something like that.

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AO: This topic comes up quite often when you discuss issues that touch upon conceit among rock musicians. And a lot of people say that there can be no basis for conceit because they don’t see themselves as the ultimate creators of the music that they perform.

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DA: Yes, what affects people’s ego is the pressure. That is hard to cope with. Just the pressure of the fact that you are always away from home, you’re always a stranger wherever you go, and then you can’t go out very often because people will recognise you. So it becomes a bit of a prison. And then you’re playing to big audiences every night – that’s a lot of pressure. It’s not something that someone down the pub has to deal with. It’s a different way of living, and it can cause problems.

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AO: Given twenty years of experience between your two solo albums, would you say that A Light In The Sky was easier to write than K2?

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DA: They all seemed hard. People say to me, “What’s the easiest session you’ve ever done?” And I can’t ever recall an easy recording session. There is no such thing. They are all difficult. You have to keep the standard up. You can’t do it badly or record bad music; it has to be the very best thing you can come up with. That’s what you do. You keep your nose to the grindstone. You keep doing the best you can all the time.

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AO: You were going to take the album on the European tour at the end of September.

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DA: No, I had to cancel that because the Deep Purple schedule has changed. But I’m going out in January. I’m doing eight gigs in January in Europe. There are a couple in Switzerland, Austria, then we are doing three or four in Germany, and then Holland and Belgium.

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AO: Who will be the musicians?

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DA: The musicians will hopefully be those who have been playing on the album – Rob Harris on guitar, Darrin Mooney on drums, Laurence Cottle on bass and Carl Sentance on vocals.

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AO: What aspects, do you think, need to coincide for a good show to happen?

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DA: With a show, playing is easy. It’s getting there and getting back that is the hard bit. If you can master that, then you’re half way there. Just the logistics of it that is quite testing, simple things like getting a bus load of people and their gear from one place to another and getting all the gear up in time and getting it to work. The logistical part of the music business is challenging to say the least.

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AO: Didn’t Charlie Watts say once that 80% of his time in the Rolling Stones was waiting around?

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DA: That’s right, “Five years of work and twenty years of hanging about.” It’s absolutely true.

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AO: I have one last question and it’s a bit fiddly. Tell me, what is your take on the changes that are happening in the music industry right now – new ways in which fans relate to bands, sites like MySpace and YouTube – do you welcome all that or do you have your reservations?

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DA: I don’t think there’s anything you can do to stop it. I was talking to Jon Lord about it the other day, and he said, “I believe you can now see the creation of the Earth now on YouTube.” [Laughs] You know, everything’s on YouTube. It’s something on the screen. It’s virtual reality, it isn’t reality. And that’s why I think bands like Purple are doing so well because we offer something that is absolutely real. It’s five guys on stage playing as if their lives depend on it. But I think it’s broken the stranglehold the music business had on music. Bands like Purple were thrown on the scrap heap pretty much by the music business and the music business didn’t embrace the new technology, it started using machines to make music… It deserves what’s happening to it. There is no one more delighted than me over this breakdown.

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AO: Really?

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DA: Certainly. Because they never cared about the music or the audience. They just tried to force-feed very dubious product to the audience. And I’m glad that that stranglehold is gone. And I’m very glad that heavy rock hasn’t died, that people are still holding up the flag for it.

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AO: What’s your take on free downloading? Do you welcome that as well?

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DA: Not really, no. And I don’t really think that YouTube is such a great thing. You know, you can find there some of my very favourite musicians like John McLaughlin or Jeff Beck, and I am loathe to think that I could hear versions of bootlegs, which is something that you treasure, and now you can just go down YouTube to see anything you want by them. To me it’s a bit too much. I don’t really want to hear everything that Jeff Beck has played.

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AO: It takes the magic out of things a bit.

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DA: It does a bit for the uninitiated, but for someone like me, nothing that he’ll ever play is going to change it, because John McLaughlin, for example, is a great musician. But I think that’s why concerts are becoming more important. It’s funny, I bumped into, as you do, walking back to your hotel room, in the Kempinsky Hotel in Moscow, there was a sign that was saying “Russian Financial Crisis Conference This Way”, and suddenly I saw Peter Mandelson (a British government minister) coming towards me.

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AO: Really? Oh, god!

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DA: I’m quite an admirer, actually.

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AO: That must have been unexpected! To see Mandy as you walk to your hotel room!

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DA: [Laughs] Well, he was just walking down the corridor, and I went, “Oh, Peter Mandelson!”, and he looks at me, and I say, “Oh, you don’t know me, I’m Don, I play with the band Deep Purple.” He said, “Oh, we’re coming tonight!” He said his dinner finished at nine and then they were coming straight down to the gig. I said, “I think we are finished by now.” Because it was early shows in Russia. Well, anyway, the next morning I’m sitting at breakfast and then he comes down and he sits at the next table and he kind of looks at me, and then he goes, “Ah, how did the show go?” So I’m chatting to him about the show, and then I ask him how his meetings went, and he says, “Oh, could have been better, but… you know…” I said later to the band, when I found them, “You know, I’ve had breakfast with Peter Mandelson!” [Laughs] It’s an amazing life we lead!

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AO: In the current climate Deep Purple is probably the only human link that’s still intact between the two countries.

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DA: Ha-ha!

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AO: Politicians should be grateful that you are the only real diplomatic link that works these days.

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DA: Ha-ha-ha!

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AO: Well, thank you for a great interview and good luck with the rest of the shows and the solo dates in the new year!

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DA: Right! It was very nice talking to you, Alissa!

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AO: Excellent, thank you.

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DA: OK, all the best!

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AO: Thank you.

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First published in Crusher magazine in November 2010.