Deep Purple don’t want people to buy their newly released album, a dodgy live album recorded in 1993 as the Mk2c lineup of the band were in the final throes of disintegration. As quoted in The Guardian:
Speaking on this morning’s Today program on Radio 4, Gillan explained that tensions within the band led to a dreadful performance on the evening in question, saying, “It was one of the lowest points of my life – all of our lives, actually.”
Gillan believes his label Sony BMG were wrong to release the record and that they were “opportunist fat cats”.
It seems that every time a band changes labels, their old record company always churns out as much cynical cash-in product as they can get away with; too often they manage to find creative ways of ensuring the band don’t get a single penny of royalties from the sales. The other victims are the fans, especially new ones, who find themselves having to sift through dozens of dodgy compilations containing the same songs in different orders, or dubious-quality live recordings.
When the revolution comes, the cynical record company executives who oversee the production of this drek will be sent to the same re-education camp in Rotherham as the people who invented DRM.
One of the first examples of this I can remember was the amazing amount of dross-from-the-vaults that RCA shoveled into record stores right after Elvis’s death. Some of them were little more than repackagings of existing material; some of them were (as Dave Marsh put it) at least novel forms of butchery, like tracks where they removed Elvis’s instrumental backing and just left his voice and the sparsest possible accompaniment; some of them were just junk like Elvis Having Fun on Stage, the single biggest rip-off record from a major label apart from Lou Reed’s f-you to RCA, Metal Machine Music.
Keep up, Tim!
– or maybe it was the Guardian.
Five hours before you posted that, the BBC reported that the album was being withdrawn and Sony BMG were investigating how it had been re-issued without Gillan’s approval.
Yes, re-issued – the slightly weird thing is that the live album had been released before, apparently without objections from the band.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6400545.stm
OK, so what’s the odds that this is really a promotional stunt to sell tickets for the upcoming tour?