Articles

By Stefan Sojka

We are the robots.  A computer is messing with the electrical signals in our collective brain.  If we all become one whipped-up sweat drop then this is our heart calling... punters and players alike enjoying the binary finery of computer pulse orgies.

Out on the dance floor we're more wired than we think – while the DJs with their slick slabs of vinyl are widely celebrated as the lords of the dance, the difference between a good night out and a mind expanding experience is often in the hands of the (mostly) unseen wizards at the controls of some very serious light and sound technology.

Geoffrey Rose – Laser Special Events, Sydney

If the technical crews who work to create high energy at dance parties and raves around Australia were to select a Grand Master they would probably choose Geoffrey Rose of Laser Special Events.  A degree in Physics (UNSW) opened his mind to the magical properties of precisely filtered light and its potential to create eye dazzling art.

While his international reputation as a laser artist has been established at mainstream events such as the World Expo in Portugal, Rose gained underground credibility for his art with a very different audience in the rising dance party scene of Australia over the last decade.

His performances with the Laser Goddess (choreographer and dancer) Tracey Burke at numerous events such as Prodigy (State Sport Centre, Sydney), Eclipse (Illicit, Melbourne) and Red Raw (Metro, Melbourne) were about "Elevating of spirits and an appreciation for technical perfection – by taking technology out of the box of the computer and into real space."

Rose has used up to four technicolour lasers in these performances to hit 3" mirrors a hundred metres away on Burke's elaborate RoboGirl costumes and spin a web of light fantastic over mesmerised crowds: "(It's) the purity, the wrap-around effect encompassing the audience," he says, "And with Tracey, the perfection is humanised and reworked with fluid and organic elements."

The future of precise light according to Rose is a collision between lighting and laser technology: "Using lenses on lights like magnifying glasses to intensify it, rather than wasting light to create shapes and colours; creating structures in space with a control on intensity that normal lights allow -- a system with the control of a laser without the fragility and cost. Lasers are really laboratory instruments."

Favourite tech: Aquarius 2 laser system - English + scanning system with computer (worth $100,000) "It has live keyboard control so the operator can interact live and in total sync with the music rather than have preset programs."

Paul Chambers - Beyond the Brain, North Coast NSW

Paul Chambers has a techfetish: "My favourite technology is like my favourite techno music - the latest, freshest and juiciest gear I can find or afford to get my hands on. A lot of lasers, lights and sound are totally great but it's integrating them with other elements in unique combinations that I find exciting."
Chambers is at the leading edge of psycho-spiritual party production through bush trance events in the lush environs of Byron Bay, northern NSW. But it's not all psychedelic doof music and trippy lights up north. Chambers talks with equal enthusiasm about culture jam happenings like Thursday Plantation's Homecoming Ball, which will feature a string quartet before charging into full-blown techno, or the planned Industrial fashion show set to take place during Byron Bay's official New Year's Eve celebration this year.
Whether they're dancing to Vivaldi or DJ Visceral, Chambers hopes his productions "help people have a great time -- and that they can see and feel the connections between all the music and creative expression. The aim is to produce events that are both going-off parties and genuine works of art."
Travellers and locals in Northern NSW can look forward to more electrically-charged celebrations this summer which continue the mystical legend of the internationally famous Beyond the Brain parties.
Mention Beyond the Brain to any trance-traveller and you're likely to hear a passionate manifesto for the global community and the technology which makes it happen. Chambers can't stop smiling when he recounts his epiphany at a recent Beyond the Brain party which starred ethnobotanical guru Terence McKenna: "The event took on a life of its own -- it brought a dance party crew and much of the wider community together in a truly multi-dimensional, multi-media happening. I feel proud to have been a part of it."

Club profile: ARQ, Sydney
Recently opened on Flinders Street (just off Sydney's gay strip Oxford Street) ARQ is a testament to what an almost religious dedication to hi-tech and massive amounts of money can score. A spokesperson for ARQ said the mega-million investment was aimed at "Enhancing the enjoyment of the music -- with a good operator and the best gear you can SEE the energy level. We use colour and varying tempos and key to control the intensity of the crowd." According to ARQ management, the moving head and mirror luminaires, strobes, pinspots, colour washes, lasers and the huge (7 1/2 tonne) hydraulic lighting sculpture will certainly give the crowd something to look at - "but the operator is the crucial element for optimising the energy".

Club profile: QBH, Melbourne

Melbourne's biggest nightclub is committed to mind-expansion through carefully controlled technology. Marcus Johns, General Manager, says you can have the best tools in the world, but they're useless if not used properly. "It's all in the operation," says Johns, "We can have people come here totally straight and just enjoy the lighting and the music and feel great. The show evolves over the night and from week to week -- so each time you come you get another presentation."
Johns believes the public's expected standard for sound has gone through the roof over the last five years with home stereos now featuring surround and mega bass. "They (dance audience) are now very sound aware, and understand the difference between good and bad acoustics.
QBH keeps its crowd pumping with high quality bass orientation through eight double woofer bass cabinets (1,600 watts each), clear Mids and Highs, an EV X-Array System with compressors and processors and Yamaha Equalisers. The whole system was designed in a CAD Architectural application with acoustic properties of the room mapped and speaker positions plotted to maximise efficiency and minimise dead spots and booming areas. Speakers were then hung exactly to spec.
Eye-candy is served up in super doses: Genesis 16 colour laser with Pentium computer control and Intelligent lighting running off another computer. Plus a 5 metre truss lighting ball (1.8 tonnes), Future Lights with 360 degree rotation, Ambient Lighting, dance mirrors. and miles of optical fibre lighting throughout the venue. "It's DMX compatible," explains Johns, "Meaning that the DJ and lighting guy can control it via computer and change the mood of the room. Starts off Red and moves through the spectrum throughout the night".

Oz - Squiffy Vision, NSW
Squiffy Vision creates melting moments with sound and vision at large events throughout Australia including Beyond the Brain, Earthcore and Thursday Plantation's Homecoming Ball. " We create environments that help people get past the drudgery of their ordinary mindstates by relaxing them or shocking them into being open to new mind states," says Squiffy Vision's Production Manager Oz, "Freedom means taking full responsibility for your life. The events we do are a communal vibe."
Oz works with 1970s gear mostly and Digital Video Animators Strobes, Quasars and lasers plus a subliminal neural trigger -- smell: "We use cold fan-forced smells to enhance different colour/sound harmonics," says Oz, "And oil on hot coals to take the audience on a journey."
Colour is an important ingredient too. Oz explains that colour light can balance the harmonics in a room: "Every note has a harmonic in beat, pitch and colour." It's all about deep pulse, binaural coding. Red = Lust or anger, "It depends which way you go especially the vocal and musical content," says Oz, "Shapes harmonise with colour, sound and our chakras. Subliminal and obvious effects are created to induce relaxed states in the audience. Part of the evolution of body/mind/spirit. Mass self organisation evolves to the point of sustainability -- and once people become self organised the mass self organises."

Di James - 4th Dimension Vision Mixing
4di@hypergeek.com.au

Di James mixes vision -- video and still images -- in synergy with the music booming out of soundsystems at underground events such as ODD at Centrepoint in Sydney, Koxbox at Sydney Uni's Wentworth Building and numerous events on the north coast.
What is the 4th Dimension? Imagine a DJ cutting and fading several tracks to create new patterns -- but instead of dropping vinyl or CDs James blends vision live alongside the DJs: "For me, it's a synchronisation of sound and vision to create a space where people feel free to cut loose and immerse themselves in the environment", she says.
Working with a base (bass) of VHS videos she develops in preproduction, James delivers lush 3D animations and a live video feed of the crowd into her mixing desk then out to a projector and its huge screens above the dance floor.
Right now she owns a couple of monitors, a VCR and a VHS video camera -- down from the 4 VCRs and an MX-12 mixer she worked with in Byron Bay. According to Di, vision mixing at parties is still an under-used medium and thus promoters rarely budget for its worth in creating the vibe. "I have to hire most of my equipment when I perform in Sydney," says James, "and the repairs and servicing of this equipment is expensive due to its hitech nature. But, on my big wish list there is a DLP projector, an MX-50 vision mixer, DVD players instead of VCR players, small LCD monitors, a digital video camera and a Non Linear Editing system with a firewire card for pre- and post- production. AND a sponsor!"
Drawn to her art as a means of directly enhancing party goers' moods in real time (rather than the static nature of paintings or the linear flow of film), James believes many of her images mightn't be immediately registered in the audience's mind during the event "but may provide a trigger for a later response to viewing similar imagery. Ultimately the aim is to broaden the person's perceptions of themselves and the universe. People from many indigenous cultures have had traditions of shamanic dancing. And hell, dancing's good exercise."

Urs -- Happy People Productions, Mullumbimby, NSW
www.millenni-yum.com

Whether he's dancing and trancing on the beaches of Goa (India) and Kho Phangan (Thailand) or in Mother Nature's finest playgrounds in Switzerland and Byron Bay, Urs believes the Happy People need powerful bass for a smiling face: "I wouldn't mind a couple more bass bins (sub woofers) so we make even more sound -- the louder we play the better god can hear us!"
You can imagine the dancing in Heaven when the Happy System starts pumping: 16 JBL 15 inch bass bins , 8 AT C 10inch drivers, 8 JBL horns , and 8 JBL bullets --- a compact system by club standards, but powerful all the same. Urs smiles as he explains his list of other toys: "This shows you that we are running this rig with active 4 way crossovers powered with 2 x 3K and 2 x 2K QSCs, 2 x 0.5K Jeils for the tops, a Klark 40 channel graphic mixer and a DBX 1066 compressor gate -- they're all there to make sure we have best HIFY STEREO."
Urs' passion for powerful technology began at formative full moon parties on the beaches of Goa, where he tuned in with up to 5000 "drunken, stoned and tripping hippies and Indians partying together on the beach in South Anjuna". Inspired by these wild beach frolics Urs developed his DJ and promoting skills in Switzerland before landing back on Goan beaches in the early 80s with new sounds to help the hippies and Indians find joy through dance. "(I played at) India's first night club Flying Dragon Jungle Express -- the disco fever was on in Europe and so we disturbed the hippies with their reggae and salsa but in no time they adapted to the new trend and Goa was on the way to becoming the Mecca for experimental dance music." During the last two decades Urs and his Happy People have played for all kinds of crowds, from 100 to 200 in Boracay, several thousands at Australian events such as Green Magiq and Trance-Zen-Dance, right up to 20,000 at the Zoom parties in Switzerland. This New Year you'll find the Happy People in Byron for the Millenni-Yum Clockbuster Groove: "Hope to meet you some time on a rocking dance floor for Happy People Productions and the Millenni-Yum crew, love URS."

By Stefan Sojka

1. What is your take on how we arrive at being artists? Do you think it's natural, we are born with it, or do you think its a choice? (I am not talking about professional artists here).

There are many reasons to be sure, and I have observed many of these reasons in myself and others I have met. They range from a desire to express the creative muse that burns within, to a childish or narcissistic need to be liked. Because pop music appears to be an easy road to fame and fortune i.e. write a three chord song and become a mega star, many people I have known become caught up in that illusion, rather than actually perfecting the craft, and learning the professional skills to survive in the music business, because it is a business, and all the three chord mega stars are merely fodder for the manufacturers of their music.
For every rich and famous songwriter there are a lot of fairly well-off unknowns and probably 1,000 unknown amateurs, so anyone contemplating song writing should understand the odds, no matter what their motivation is. These days it seems everyone is having their creativity encouraged, and the tools are so accessible, so really being an artist is becoming a more and more common thing. Being a good artist that anyone gives a damn about experiencing your artistic output is another issue altogether.

I got into music to 1) express myself freely, 2) To make money doing that and 3) to get laid.
My grandfather was a very successful composer, writing music for Hollywood films, including a couple of Alfred Hitchcock movies. He was head of Warner Bros Music Dept and BBC Music Department in England for many years. My uncles also were talented musicians and writers. So I guess talent could be a slightly genetic thing. I started playing and writing at a very early age, and naturally fell into playing in bands in school and after school. After initial immediate success that I had in my local region as a performer of my own music, the band split up, and I found myself forced to continue performing to earn a living to get by financially, as it was 1) easy and 2) what I enjoyed doing 3) made it easier to pick up girls. Things have changed a little since then. My creative muse burns stronger than ever, but my need to earn a living out of music is dwindling.
Unfortunately, without the right vehicle for my own music, since chemistry is such an important aspect of the success of a combo, I had to play predominantly cover versions to make money. This did allow a great training ground to learn the styles and feels of a great variety of music, which I can now draw upon in my writing and performing. So I guess you could say I was born a gifted musician, but I fell into being a career performer, through lack of options at the time. There was no Internet, multimedia or JJJ Unearthed back then. I had no financial support from my family at the time and music is an expensive hobby, so I had to keep making the good money playing covers to buy all the professional equipment to make the sounds I wanted.

Music is about the only career, besides maybe radio, film, TV or advertising, that you can take recreational drugs on the job and actually enhance your job skill set and get promoted and more popular just for being wasted. Jimi Hendrix, Oasis, The Beatles, Eric Clapton, the list is endless. Given this fact, I have been very conscious not to fall into this trap, and have only used drugs for creative purposes in extreme moderation.
I have seen many musicians get hooked on all kinds of drugs, because their heroes were doing it, but they forgot that their hereos actually practiced and perfected their craft long before embarking on a career of being shit-faced all the time. It is easy to become an artistic drug addict rather than a drug-taking artist. Certain drugs can enhance the perception of music, which is why so many of the greats have indulged, but the techniques of playing instruments and recording music become rather more difficult when intoxicated. The exception to this would be the "uppers", like speed, cocaine and ecstasy. It is common knowledge that many a studio musician has a line of something to give them the "edge" when they are laying down their tracks. Now with Techno and Rave music being so popular, both the creators of the music and the listeners are indulging, and in fact some of the musical styles of today have actually been designed to be experienced exclusively in enhanced states of consciousness. It is no different to the drinking songs of the past, ("Red Red Wine" or the jazz styles that were developed while everyone was into the whacky weed, but nowadays the choices are far more diverse, making it much harder to 1) know what is right for you and 2) not let the drugs take over. Of course you can still make music without drugs, and that is probably the best thing to do, and the highest standard to achieve, but it is almost a given that somewhere along the manufacturing chain in the recording business, there is a drug-user contributing to your career. I include alcohol in this, since alcohol is a strong drug. The legality or illegality of drugs is irrelavant, I think, in a discussion about art and life.

2. Do you think that there is a difference between art and craft? This might be good for the songwriters to write back - do you think that songwriting is an art or a craft which you apply skills you know to do the task? Is it a mix of both?

Yes. The art is the inspiration and the deep inner voice or urge to express something important to the world in a musical and/or lyrical form, and the craft is the ability to not make it sound like crap. Some songwriters have a high degree of art and a low degree of craft, and others vice versa, but with the appropriate combination, a successful mix can be achieved. Nick Cave, for example is highly regarded by many as an "artist" without playing more than a few chords and never training his voice, whilst Stock, Aitken and Waterman can have world-wide hits that everybody loves, simply by contriving the entire thing. I have no doubt that there is an ART to what they do as well, but it is the polish of their craft that makes their brand of music work. I like to think that I have a very even balance of art and craft. I have been playing and learning instruments all my life, trained my voice and learned how to perform through acting classes, but I have always believed in my inner heart-felt urge to create and express something meaningful to make me a complete performer. Even while playing covers, I like to think that I bring my own emotions and expression to all the songs I sing, whilst also doing very authentic technical "covers" of the musical elements of the songs. Now that I am more focussed on performing my own music, this is becoming more and more apparent. The technical side comes easy, and it is the artistic side that I am really trying to capture. It also requires a great degree of artistic empathy from the engineers and musicians I work with to make this happen. I have recorded songs with highly technically proficient musicians and audio engineers that sound rather flat, and others with less proficient people that sound great.

3. Why did you become a professional artist? What made you decide that you wanted to make a living out of your art? Do you see the word 'profession' as including more than just 'making money'?

See above. I was forced to make a living out of it. I think that had I made a living from something else, I may have been an amateur artist for just as long, as you don't make a good living out of art until you begin achieving some kind of popular success. Sure I could have done a few festivals and gigs here and there. Over the years, I have probably made more money out of music than most other performers and artists, including many big stars.
Of course profession means more than just making money. There are a lot of rich people who aren't necessarily that professional. It comes down to who you are. Being easy to get along with, not burning too many bridges, showing dedication and a belief in what you do, not giving up too easily, continuing even though things don't go exactly as you had envisaged, and being open to strategic alliances. A lot of artists are so self-absorbed they forget that it takes a huge network of people to create success. They think that they can just be extremely talented and money and fame will naturally flow from that.

I always look at the "thank you" notes on albums to see just how many people made it happen. It is usually quite a large number. Family, friends, fans, believers, empathisers and good business people. It is much easier to make it big if other people think they can make money out of you too, and I think it is the challenge of every artist in this capitalist society, if they want to succeed, to convince at least one other person, who is not an artist, that money can be made if they support your activities. The exception is, of course, if you can convince someone that by supporting you they might lose money, but it is a good tax write-off and they will get the satisfaction of being able to tell their friends they are your patron. I think this happens quite a bit, maybe in Europe more than in Australia, though I have seen examples of it here. Wealthy people who have paid large sums of money to help someone record a CD without really caring if it sold any copies - they can pull it out at diner parties and talk about how they made it happen, and that is enough for them, and a great learning experience for the artist.

4. What is your take on this term 'work and play is one'. That is, by making your passion, your art, your business and life, how do you feel about saying that work and play is one thing for you?

There are aspects that may not be enjoyable, like bills, fixing gear, doing tax, but in the big picture, it is all worth it if my dreams are being fulfilled. I tend to enjoy what I do, and the things I don't enjoy are made less painful by knowing that they are all contributing to my success. Recently I stopped enjoying playing cover songs in pubs, so I have stopped doing that. I need to know that what I am doing for a living is an enjoyable experience.

5. If you were to send a message to people endeavouring to become a professional artist, what would be your message about turning your art into good business practice? i.e the notion of being a good business person as well as being an artist.

I would suggest that anyone who wants to succeed in any field should probably study business and marketing as well as their chosen field. I would also strongly suggest they consider taking courses in personal growth, as quite often the biggest restrictions to success are the ones we place on ourselves. The world is full of millions of opportunities, but often fear or other blocks to our true purpose prevent us from seeing the right path. In the mean time, I would suggest that they get as much experience as they can in a whole range of things, from working in groups or teams, to performing in various formats, to spending time with other more successful people. Look at those that you admire and ask yourself 1) Why do I admire that person and 2) What is it about me that recognises that in them. Sometimes we admire people for the wrong reasons and we really can never hope to be like them, so we might need to look for better heroes. We forget the fact that their life is unique and the circumstances that brought them their success are entirely different to our own. Maybe you like their style, and you like to do a similar style of expression, but how you succeed might be an entirely different path.

Another thing about learning about yourself is that you need to try to understand how the world sees you, because that often determines your success. If you dream of being a catwalk model but you are butt-ugly, chances are you may need to rethink. The same goes for Music. If your voice sounds like Barry White, but you dream of singing songs like Jon Anderson, from the band "Yes", think again. A tenor voice and a baritone voice and a bass voice have distinctive qualities and are perceived by audiences differently. Maybe you will never sing like you thought you could, but you might write great songs, or you might be a great organiser of people. You need to find out who you are and where you fit in, and you need to be happy with who you are. There is no point resenting the fact that you have a bass voice or freckles or lanky legs. You need to find your strengths and capitalise on them. I have seen people waste a lot of years under the illusion that they are going to become something that they never could become in the first place. It takes a long time sometimes to realise who you are and go with it! (Unless you are a twin.)

My other advice would be - listen to the "Sunscreen Song"!! Whatever you do.. listen to the Sunscreen Song…

6. What would be your other messages to send to those endeavouring in your chosen field of art? (tips, what to do, how to do it, which pitfalls to avoid)

Don't think that drugs or lifestyles alone will make you successful. They may inspire you, but they can hinder your professional path as much as they may be able to help it. I am sure that many stars of today are stars because they shared a line of something with a big-time producer, but for every one of those, there are ten thousand people in de-tox, AA, NA, or simply just not cutting the mustard. Be wary of the people you choose to work with. Do all you can to choose people that you can feel a real positive synergy with, rather than sharing the same desire to be rich and famous, the same bars, TV shows or strip clubs, or anything equally as shallow. If you feel like there is a lot of negativity in a working relationship - get out! There is no need for it, and it will hold you back. There is no excuse now as it is now possible to network around the world to find the right chemistry. Make the most of all your positive contacts. People who like what you do - you should keep them informed because one day they may be the one who introduces you to the person that gets you the break you need. It may not be tomorrow - it could be in 10 or 20 years from now.

Be patient. Be flexible enough to re-evaluate your objectives constantly. If your dream is to write a song - record it - become a superstar, maybe you need to be able to let other activities in, like learning your instrument, practicing your art, and discovering yourself. Life is full of miracles, but they don't always go at the pace you think you can dictate at a young age. You can certainly do all you can to make good things happen, but sometimes it is the combination of all your efforts combined with a chance meeting, or even a nasty accident that may help your dreams to begin truly unfolding. The entire universe is huge chance machine, with a nice bit of control somehow designed into everything - including us.

7. What does the word 'success' mean to you in theory? And do you see yourself as a successful professional artist? why?

Success is a constantly evolving thing. It is not a day that you look forward to that you can say "oh now I'm successful" You have to be successful every day to reach the dizzy heights of success you might dream about. I was successful when I was 6 years old. I sang a song and the audience clapped. I was successful at 20 when I auditioned for a band and they chose me. Every event has a number of outcomes. Sometimes it takes huge failures to lead you to ultimate success. I think the world at large will tell you that you are a success by giving you awards and money and accolades, but as we all know, many people who achieve all these things are miserable failures at life. Once the awards ceremony is over, the next hopeful is coming from behind trying to win. Success is the ability to ride the waves of life through thick and thin and be able to say that you are remaining true to yourself as best you can, and creating opportunities for yourself to express that which you really believe you must express. That kind of success will be shared by your friends and family and will be felt as a deeper, more lasting success. You can sit at your breakfast table each day and smile and say to yourself - yep, I'm doing it!!

8. Do you see any specific problems in your chosen field? (the hurdles to pass, society's ignorant views, overcoming perceptions and judgements, any others?)

The fact that everything is market driven. The fact that what might be popular today might not be popular by the time I manage to do it. The fact that it relies heavily on the subjective perceptions of others (this is both good and bad, as all politicians know :-). The fact that it is so competitive. The fact that the glamour can attract a lot of the wrong kind of people into the business. The fact that the media play a large part in deciding someone's success. Now that the internet is here, the fact that everyone thinks they can find an audience, which creates an ocean of flotsam for web-surfers to generally avoid. It makes it harder now to rise to the surface. There are certainly more opportunities, but the emphasis is on "doing it" rather than "doing it well".... and even if you do it well, there are thousands of others who do it well as well! It is hard to see the big picture of art as an endless output of some particular humans for other particular humans to absorb, and surrounding the artists is a huge layer of other particular humans who need to make money from the art. Some of these humans are the same person, naturally! (like you, Gilli :-) These include music shop owners, teachers, record shops, radio stations, publishers, second hand dealers, recording studio owners.... It is hard to see your art as being part of a food chain, but that's what it is. It is up to you to work out how you are going to prosper given this situation, or maybe how you are going to reject it all and create your own machine. That is what I am trying to do, but I know I must operate within the parameters of the global economy, to some extent.

9. Do you see yourself as a student of life? Why? Can you offer any guidance about learning and study in your chosen field?

Yes. That is axiomatic. While you are alive, you are learning. I choose to heed my lessons as much as I can, while others may ignore them, but that is a lesson in itself. If you ignore your bronchitis from smoking for long enough it will turn into emphysema. You will be on your death bed saying "oh yeah, I just realised that smoking does kill". In the more day-to-day things, I learn with every encounter I have with other humans as well as encounters with books, music, internet, nature, inanimate objects, and even with myself, by looking inward and learning what makes me tick.

I suggest people attend personal growth courses - not with any committed belief in their effectiveness, but just with their ability to make you think about things a little differently. I encourage people to learn what things have affected them profoundly in their lives and ask if the effects have been positive or negative. If they have been negative, such as abusive childhoods, being a victim of a crime etc, you need to look at ways to fully come to terms with these things, use the emotional energy created by them in a positive way ie Write a song about it. It doesn't have to be a good song, but it is important that you get the feeling out, so these harmful experiences don't tarnish your life in other ways.

Read a lot. Read autobiographies. Read non-fiction books to help you understand humanity and society so you don't fall innocent prey to its ways, benign as they may be. E.g. if your teacher told you that you have to get a steady job, maybe you don't, but you won't know until you understand why he believed you did.

10. Where do you see the road in the future for the professional artist in your chosen field?

Many more opportunities and many more challenges. A wider playing field, but a far more level one, so the old idea of becoming a star may not be so realistic, but succeeding in life may be well within everybody's grasp. Musicians and artists have a new opportunity to do what the artists of the 60's did, which is change the consciousness of the world with their thoughts. The pen is mightier than the sword, and if you put it to a catchy tune, everyone can sing along. We can all see the planet now from a new perspective, with the information age, satellites and statistical analysis providing clear images and facts about what the hell is going on here. It is kind of scary and kind of awesome that we are all stuck on this planet together and ultimately no matter what God we believe in, if divine intervention doesn't take place, we are 100% responsible as a collective global society to manage the affairs of earth. The thoughts and feelings of the gifted people - the artists, the emotionally intelligent and empathic, expressive souls are hugely important at this time to help steer the human ethos as we evolve in harmony with technology and try to find harmony among ourselves. The artists must first understand themselves and how they fit into this global consciousness, and then they must try to find their own unique voice and create their own stage from which to resonate from. This may be a web site, it may be a newsgroup, it may be a lunch time concert or a march through the streets. It may be my forming alliances with non-musical people that are thinking and working along the same lines, such as social workers, activists, political lobby groups. All th while, though, there is still a need for those to sing and perform the more shallow pop music to keep the less enlightened souls happy, while the evolution takes shape and scoops them up somewhere down the track. If you are an artists and the best you can come up with is "I Love you baby, stay with me, lets go and sniff some flowers in the park, and drink some wine" go for it!! Your three minutes of frivolity will cheer someone up, I'm sure! Music is still about making people feel good after all, even though it is also a powerful force for making people think.

11. Any more info about you? What you are doing? What your goals are? What you've attained?

I am recording my own music. I am writing for a few magazines. I am performing - entertaining people at special events. I am developing new ideas and inventions. I run a Singles Site on the internet www.cyrius.com.au/singles/ I am training to be a radio and TV presenter.

I am net­working with a large number of people to attain my objectives. These are to establish a successful business which will fund my other ventures, to get my music played to a wider audience, to market my board game, to write books, to have films made from my ideas, to develop products that encourage a sustainable future for the planet. To work towards healing the wrongs and the pains of the past - war and child abuse in particular. At this point I have completed 20 years as a successful live performer. I am being published in three different national publications as a writer. My web site has thousands of members and is growing rapidly, my web design business is growing, and I am about to go and record some more songs with my band, Avatar Crash.

By Stefan Sojka

SS: It's the club lounge

JL: If you pay $50 extra for your room, you get to come in here and drink free coffee.

SS: The Website is quite good

JL: Highway star it's called

SS: The gig last night - you video'd it?

JL: Some reason - somebody thought it might be an idea. I forget within about two minutes of being on stage. Coz in the end - a live show - you're there because people are paying money to see a live show, and if you allow a camera to interfere with that, you are doing yourself no favours and you are doing the people who payed money no favours.

SS: It was a great show.

JL: We told the camera people to shoot in the light - no extra lights for the cameras - normal stage set up

SS: And the crowds are enjoying the show - the youngies

JL: There's a few youngies - not quite so many as we are used to - mainland Europe and South America - it’s a very young audience. We just did a month in South America ten days before we got here. And I would say 90-95% of the audience was under 19 7,8,9,10,000 people. It's a less "sophisticated" audience for a rock gig as say Europe or North America. Where there are less sophisticated audiences, they tend to be younger audiences, because they are just plugging into it.

SS: And they are more open to the energy of it.

JL: Very much so - it was a very noisy audience, whereas here there are a lot of people who saw us last time round in 1984 or were too young to see us in 1984 and so it tend to be more of a sit-down audience, which is a little disconcerting when you come out of three or four weeks in a straight on rock and roll place. But it's alright.

SS: The new album, Abandon - it’s a very classic deep purple sound - all the things that people expect to hear from deep purple, I guess

JL: Yeah, well, it was made - we've done two since Steve's been in the band. The first one was made over quite a long period of time. We wrote an enormous amount of material, coz we were trying to work out what we could do with Steve in the band. How he would change us, and how

Takes sunnies off

Ali: There's a filter on the lens, so don't worry about it (note, it's called a lens cap! None of the photos taken by the photographer hired for this interview turned out)

JL: Bless your heart!

SS: With each line up change you must go through some kind of metamorphosis.

JL: Yeah with something as fundamental as the change in guitar, and not just a change in guitar - but a change of Ritchie Blackmore a founder member along with me, and a man who has arguably invented a style of guitar. It was a huge change and we did some gigs with Steve at the end of 94 and um, to really see how it was Coz he said "I don't want to join the band unless I feel happy and I don’t want to join the band if they don’t feel happy

SS: He's got his own thing, but it's also a hard act to follow

JL: Absolutely, he had and he still has his own life as a guitarist

So we did these gigs with him, and it was great - and we loved it. And so when we went into the studio, we tried to do the same thing, which was to explore.

SS: He's certainly fitting in well.

This is a very long answer to a very short question..
Whereas with Abandon, we did it very quickly - two reasons
1)We wanted to see quite how a very straight ahead rock and roll album sounded

Just jammin

Yeah that’s really what it was - just jammed songs, very quickly done, quickly written, quickly recorded -
2)because we didn’t really have much time anyway coz the management had us out on the road again

SS: So you are still being whipped along by the record companies?

JL: Well, it's coz we allowed it to happen. Because we like it. The best thing about rock and roll is playing the live gigs.

SS: So you still using the hammond leslie thing?

JL: Yeah - Yeah I got a C3 which I've had for 24 years, two Leslies

SS: And you are going through distortions and that sort of thing..

JL: Well Ive got out of that. I did it in the 80's. I put preamps in, and modified the Lesllies, modified the organ - the whole 9 yards, But I realised in the end what I was doing was trying to Gild the Lily. Coz what I actually do is turn the leslies full up and play with my foot down quite hard, you know and that gives me what people call the Jon Lord Sound, but really all it is is just a hammond turned up. OK theres a way of playing a Hammond, there's a different… a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that you can play a hammond with a piano technique. Well, you can, but it sounds like you are playing a Hammond with a piano technique. What really you have to learn how to play an organ - it's a legato technique, it’s a technique to achieve legato on a non legato instrument. There is no legato, there is no sustain.

SS: On and off

JL: Exactly, so you want to achieve a seamless effect. You have to learn how to finger that to get that effect. And a lot people who come from piano are surprised and horrified when they hear themselves on an organ.

SS: Any other gear that you are using?

JL: I use a master control keyboard which fires up a couple of synthesiser type things.

SS: Do you have a techhie guy who kinda takes care of that.

JL: Yeah, he kinda presses buttons in the corner.

SS: Do you have him off the road as well

JL: Yeah he comes into the studio.

I used to use a lot more gear in the 80's

SS: I remember when Burn came out, like A200, you were getting right into the synths and all the knob twiddling and all that stuff.

JL: In the early days of synths I was a convert.

SS: Did you kind of lose that.

JL: When we reformed I still had all that gear, coz I was in Whitesnake for four or five years - I usually refer to it as what I did in my holidays.

SS: That band kicked

JL: They kicked. I thought the early Whitesnake. Was a wonderful band. The big Whitesnake - the big hair - is good stuff, but I prefer the R&B Whitesnake.

SS: Sweet satisfaction

JL: Yeah, ready and Willing Come and get it - I thought those albums were good albums.

So that was very much end of 70's beginning of 80's. I still had that stuff when we reformed Deep Purple, I still had it so I was using it. You can hear it quite heavily not so much on Perfect Strangers but on the House Of Blue Light. It was really when Steve rejoined the band he said "whats that kind of stark screaming distorted hammond" I said well its still in there I just havent used it. And he kind of led me back towards discarding all that stuff. So I sent the organ back to this guy and I said "take everything out of it except what's Hammond" Take all the modifications out. Take the leslies back to ordinary Leslie Speakers and Ordinary Leslie Amplifiers. We just upgraded the horns so they don’t blow up so often. And there we are

SS: So in a way, you're saying technology has come to the point that people are looking back to the old gear and finding that the raw chemistry of people playing together has actually got a chemistry of its own that cant be replaced

Well thank God that's coming back. No it cant never could be never will be. You cant synthesize emotion. The thing about Synthesisers was that you needed a great player to make them live. An Emerson to make a moog synthesiser. One of the great moog players was Stevie Winwood. He had the feel for that style - to make em sing.

SS: So as far as the new people that are utilising this technology. Are you finding any that is inspiring to you?

JL: Oh yeah. I think that the last few years of the 90's have been incredibly productive for music - for popular music. It was a bit sterile out there for a while. But I see a lot of things that make an old man very happy.

SS: Anyone in particular?

JL: Its very difficult to say, you'd have to ask my daughter. She'd tell me what I like. I'd say "what's that one I like, darling?" and she'd say "that's so-and-so, Dad"

SS: Theres a band called machine head that uses live playing and digital domain..

JL: Well you know what happened? Its really easy to point up how it happened. At the same time as the big technological revolution where in a way the keyboard took over the well the revolution was in the keyboard almost to the level of the guitar. So you’ve got this huge technological revolution, and at the same time you got a decline in live music, and the spawning ground for music is live. That’s where you learn how to deal with a good audience, how to deal with a bad audience, being booed, being greeted with complete silence. You know it's going to school. And the whole training ground of bands being able to find a place to go to school was taken away by the technological; revolution, and other factors as well.

SS: Of course, economic………

JL: But that's come back in quite a big way certainly in Europe and I presume so here too

SS: Slowly here, here we've taken up a lot of the… the nightclubs and discos… we've got a lot of cover bands' playing redoing the old stuff.

JL: Even that is a training ground. What were the early british rock an roll musicians doing but covering what the americans were doing…. Had done. But it was a symbiotic relationship. It one fed the other. We in England were listening to American music, playing it our way and sending it back to America. They were hearing it done our way, reinterpreting our version of it… And doing it again..

SS: Yeah well its kind of happening here. There are a lot of people with the baseball caps, but they are turning it into a uniquely australian thing and they are going back there and doing well with it.

JL: The problem is whats happened since MTV is that rock and roll has become a visual art as well as an audio art, which is fine except that in a way what you are getting now is attitute as much as music, and again that’s cool, providing that somebody realises why he wants to be a musician, because in the end what you’ve got to communicate is music not attitude.

SS: You guys in the early days you had attitude - …

JL: Yeah but it was attitude based on our knowledge of our ability to communicate our music. It was not the knowledge that we looked good in baggy pants or that I was an incredibly handsome man

SS: Which of course you were.. hehe

JL: I think it was about the music more, and the great thing about what's happening now is its becoming about the music again, and that's terribly important to me

SS: Yeah like the front cover of Made In Japan. You’ve got this live shot which is basically just five guys on a flat stage playing their instruments, but the power of that affected everybody, it was like a huge album, because it was pure chemistry, energy, if that can still be around that’s a good thing..

JL: I'd like to think so

SS: On that album, made In Japan, you guys were doing stuff that at the time would have been seen as being a part of the technical revolution coz you were pulling out sounds that had never been heard before, Lazy, the intro

JL: That was a ring modulator.. a little box about the size of a small palm top. And it was actually a company called gibson, and I just plugged the organ through it and it made some amazing noises. And really as a trained musician, I had been trained to listen to as much music as possible, so I listened to all kinds of music, like Music Concrete, Avante garde, Classical music, some of it I thought was crap. And others I stuff which I thought gfreat sound just noises, So I was just really using the stage as an experimental ground. Trying to express myself in ways beyond just pure music. And I began to love that sound more than the synthesisers

SS: Its funny that now with all the technology and all the limitless potential that some of the stuff that you were doing back then is still in a way cutting edge, because you are actually doing pure expression, because they are all copy paste sample, they are not actually going what am I trying to do here, and they are not doing what they really want to say, maybe they havent got anything to say.

JL: Probably, but even if they have, perhaps they have lost the ability to say it. To me I believe in music, Ive never been a great one for dressing it up.

SS: So as far as the visual side of it, you haven't really explored computer graphics and video and effects and all that sort of stuff.

JL: No not really we never did. There doesn’t seem any real reason to start now. And if you look back at old photographs of us, we were never into fashion, ever. The only one who made any concession at all to any kind of something extra-musical was Ritchie, who used to wear those silly hats.

SS: If you were the same age you were when you started right now, confronted with all this stuff at that age., what do you think you would be doing with your music now.

JL: Interesting question, if I were a keyboard player now I would be I think confused by the amount of things available to do as a keyboard player. I am really thankful that when I started the only two options were the piano and the organ. But music is… the music business iby definition is kind of incestuous. It grows, it feeds on itself. It comes out of whats around you. And what takes it forward each time is a band that has the courage to take what they hear and then to reinvent themselves based on what they’ve heard.

SS: Which is what you did back then, so I guess you would do the same sort of thing now.

JL: I'd like to think I'd have the courage to do the same thing now.

SS: But do you think it would be harder now?

JL: I think it would because as a cynic said, and I forget who said it said it's all been done. The trick now if it is down to being a trick, that's what's so sad. The trick now is to make it sound like it's not been done before And that really is hard.
Uh we , I think we had the best of it, I don’t mean we deep purple, I mean we my generation. I think we had the best of it because we had a clean canvas on which to paint and uh, pretty clean anyway. A few smudges there but it.
And the ability to be able to say "can we do this?" yes we can that was wonderful

SS: You can't have someone saying such and such already did that, or that sounds like so and so you cant do that

JL: That’s right, and don’t forget we also came out of the 60's where we had record companies that would give you a five year contract, I mean that would be like gold

SS: A five week contract

JL: What they get now is a one album contract with an option. And that’s a big deal to get the option. But record companies had the courage then to allow you to grow.

SS: In the old days you'd buy a record, you'd listen to it and go wow. Now you buy a record and you listen to it while you are playing your computer game. So music in a way has kind of shifted not in its importance but in the effect it can have on you, because there is so much else trying to have an effect on you at the same time.

JL: Absolutely, it become almost like audio wallpaper. It’s a background thing very often. But its become the soundtrack of modern living, whereas it used to be the alternative it was what young people turned to to revolt against what they saw as dull old fashioned middle class values and middle class music.

SS: Which brings me to my next question about your new solo album. Pictured within

JL: It came out some time last year.

SS: Now that sounds like in today climate of music, what you are doing there seems to be at the same level of not so much rebellion, but in your expression within it, you are actually doing something that’s saying "hey stop all this.. have a look at this and move more inward..

JL: "Thank you for bringing it up by the way. I think quite early on I realised that in my own way I didn’t ever want to be pigeon holed.

SS: Which is hard to do when you are the keyboard player and everyone knows smoke on the water.

JL: Yeah but even before I was the keyboard player of deep purple, I was experimenting with a way to play the Hammond organ, which was one way of going, plus I had been classically trained, I had piano lessons from the age of 5 till the age of 17. I had a whole world of music which Id been brought up on parallel to rock and roll I was lucky that my family - I discovered rock and roll later of course. I was lucky that my family didn’t try and suppress one against the other so I grew up with a love of music with a capital M. As wide a spectrum as possible. I've always had that, I'm really really lucky not clever, just lucky to have that. I've never figured that any or hardly ever figured that any influence should stop me from trying to express myself as a musician in any way that seemed appropriate, and in some ways didn’t seem appropriate.
We did the concerto for group and orchestra, which was an idea I had based on something Id seen. There was an album called Brubek plays bernstein plays brubek, which was the dave brubek quartet with the new york philharmonic. And I thought that’s cool, one day Id like to do that with a rock band.. and then I found myself in deep purple, a band that I figured was capable of doing it, so we did it.

So in a way.. and then being in a band that got famous, I was allowed to indulge myself two or three times over the years, so when it gets to this time of my life when I realise, I have realised for some time that I cant be a rock and roll musician forever, I just can't. There's a physical limitation that’s going to start happening eventually. Touch wood it doe…Im a fit healthy middle age man but at some point theres going to be a physical limitation but there may even be a mental thing where I say I just don’t want to do this anymore. Again touch wood that hasn’t arrived yet. But theres a whole side of me that needs to be expressed which I cant express in Deep Purple thus this solo album - which is the first one I've done since 1981, its not like Ive littered the world with them

SS: So have you been doing some other projects?

JL: I've done some TV music Ive done some film music. Every now and then a) when the right project comes along coz again deep purple has always paid the bills, so Ive been able to pick and choose so I've been very lucky.

SS: Do you find that because you are in deep purple you cant take some things that you might want to do but some pe/…. You might want to do some music for a circus or a kids show, but they go hang on that’s not Jon Lord that’s not cool

JL: No, Ive only been restricted by two things one my own sense of adequacy for some things and inadequacy for others, so what I'm trying to say there is that I've self censored myself
On a couple of occasions. And the other limitation has only ever been time because since 1983 purple has taken up a huge amount of my time, so I've had to turn things down that I would have like to have done.

SS: So your life has been quite involved with the band.

JL: Yeah but over the last 15 years I've been writing an enormous amount of what people continue to call classical music its not, its orchestral music - I write an enormous amount - I've got reams of the stuff, and I'm trying to move myself into the position where I can be considered, where I can consider that I can make my living as a composer when I finally stop spinning around

SS: Well if you send me a few scores I'll try and get an orchestra together and we'll put on a gig in sydney.

JL: It's a deal

SS: Well you'd better not say that

JL: I just did.

SS: Are you using computers to compose

JL: No I used a computer to record pictured within. I recorded it with digidesign

SS: With a technical guy saying hit play and off you go.

JL: Yeah I had the benefit of a stunning engineer who understood the computer world and we were able to when needed we were able to cut and paste.. we did all that. But I used it really for the benefit for being able to make em… coz there are several long pieces of music on the album. What I did was I did a map if you like of a piano track. So I just recorded me alone at the piano - a really beautiful Steinway on my own in a big studio with wooden walls wooden floor and a great woody piano sound. and I recorded that into the machine.

SS: The entire album

JL: Pretty much track by track

SS: From written out scores dots and lines

JL: Yes I've always used manuscript paper always. I find it almost as much of a compositional aid as anything else Ive ever used because it becomes and audio visual thing with the paper and the pencil. I can see it on the stave and I can see a line I can see a shape to it which pleases me or not. And it’s a very personal thing but it seems to make sense to me. And also it doesn’t pin me down. Sometimes when you write a piece of music when it comes out of your head, you know and it comes straight onto the paper Its got a form in your head but the form is not necessarily 1,2,3,4 or crotchet =140 or whatever, you might feel like it's somewhere in that so you put moderato on it and you know roughly what ..
And you put it to one side and a year later you come to it and you start to play it, and some memory of what you meant when you wrote it down comes back, but then other feelings come too like the way it feels then at that moment you play it. So I actually like to write it down.
I am putting a home studio in and in that home studio I will have the ability to do my scores on computer

SS: But are you putting someone in to do that so you don’t have to worry about it

JL: I think I’ll have to do that because I'm not.. I'm in my 50's I don’t think got time to learn it all..

SS: So Jon Lord at home is basically a piano and a pencil and paper.

JL: That’s me, I've got a beautiful piano at home in 1982 I treated myself to a 7ft6 Steinbeck and its my pride and joy - I adore the thing cant pass it, in fact my wife gets pissed off with it, in fact my wife gets pissed off with it. If she wants me to do something she says "don’t go past the piano" So you know Manuscript books tons of pencils, and the piano and Im a happy pussy

SS: And you are getting on the internet occasionally?

JL: I get on there and put a few people right. Theres a newsgroup alt……… and I read it and sometimes I look at it and I go now these people have got it wrong Ive got to tell them how it was

SS: So you actually go on and make postings yourself

JL: Yeah occasionally or I just cruise around and have a look but the people in the newsgroup know that I post so sometimes they tend to send me email which is a little intrusive.

Well sometimes its difficult to find private moments - being a travelling musician, you get a lot of people want a lot of you, and the older I get the more I travel the more I tend to value my privacy.

SS: So you log on with a nick name

JL: Yeah I've got a handle that everybody knows and I've got another one that I can just go round and make my postings

SS: Are you using the net for research and creative personal reasons

JL: I have done Ive looked things up

Im quite a tactile person I actually like looking things up in the encyclopaedia britannica and I find that a more rewarding search for knowledge than the net somehow, but that’s a generational thing and I don’t expect that I will ever plug into it the same way that my daughter does.

SS: Well, they have reduced the whole thing down to one button, it's like there is a barrier between the user and what is out there

JL: I think that anything when its young and new and still cutting edge is going to produce almost a kind of a mania about it as everything does. I think that as the Internet comes so much more part of our lives it will stabilise Im sure. People will treat it less as a kind of a wow factor and more of a kind of a ho hum factor. It's going to be there like the refrigerators there

SS: If you project forward and think that fortunately for you got there with mass media and big record companies, but up and comers today might only expect a tiny slice of a totally fragmented pie.

JL: You may get less than the famous andy warhol 15 minutes of fame. I don’t know it could go either way. I was speaking a few months ago to the head of international of EMI in Germany. He was an old friend of mine he started as a tea boy, hes now head of international. I like to see that happen.

And he said that they are completely and utterly geared up for dispersing music through the net so the only problem at the moment is safeguarding copyright of the musicians and the record companies. The record cos are in a bit of a spin at the moment. They don’t knoww quite which way to turn, and some people are saying too bad they’ve had it too good too long but record companies, as we discussed about 15 minutes ago, played a huge part in the success of popular music.
There are countless bands who wouldn’t have been able to have achieved anything were it not for record companies. So I think that to try and snip them out of the equation just because theres a revolution in dispensing of information would be a mistake.

SS: They should be able to hang on though

JL: I think they will. I think everything will find its level. At the moment everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off coz they don’t quite know whats going to happen. You made the point earlier - we got there before all that happenned and I really rather glad we did.

SS: I started playing live music in 1979. And things changed almost straight away. By the time I got good enough to make it, discos took off, and the live music scene died. Now it has all changed. Now you don’t get anywhere unless you got a business plan. You need a marketing plan to market your product

JL: Its kinda weird isn't it. It really is the music business.

SS: I started off thinking if you just go out there with enthusiasm and energy, someone would see that and pick it up.

JL: Its like when I went to do that solo album, the last one, I almost had the same thing. I had the head of classical. I am signed to the classical division at EMI, which is really nice because it gives me a separate existence to being the guy from deep purple.

SS: Same name though

JL: Im not schizophrenic to that degree although I am a gemini - but at least it gives me a feeling of being succoured by a different level of the record industry. It’s a quiet place to be - but even they were saying - german accent - So what kind of record will it be?
I can show you the dots and I can play you the little bits on the piano, but that doesn’t tell you anything

SS: So they wanted to know which demographic it was going to appeal to

JL: Exactly, and what are we going to file it under

SS: From the excerpts I heard on the net - it sounds very nice.

JL: It's very quiet, very introvert. Its like nothing I've done before and like nothing Ill probably do again.

SS: Well in a way that is kind of like another revolution..

JL: It may well be as a writer and composer I tend to be very autobiographical I tend t o write better about things that have affected me reasonably recently as well. I lost both my parents just before I started making this album and that coloured it very strongly. Its quite a melancholy album, although I like to think its also uplifting because I tried to write my way out of my sadness.

SS: There are some very sweet sounds in there, not too dark

JL: No no no it's not too dark I don’t think, I think its slightly nostalgic, slightly melancholy. But I love the sound of a string quartet. That kind of woody sort of stringy sound and mixed with the piano and I found a lovely mix too of the string quartet and I found a lovely JV2080 stunning machine - theres an orchestral card you can buy for it and they had some marvellous sounds but particularly it had a very nice string sound and there's also a general GSM sound a warm pad and I mixed this warm pad with the string sound and the string quartet and I found this lovely sound it lives in a lovely place it’s the kind of sound that you go oh yeah it feels good.

SS: You’ve got a sound check to go to.

JL: My tecchie guy handles that.

Its not coz Im a luddite, its just that I don’t understand it. I started with one of the greatest mechanical instruments known to man, and thats the piano and Ive always remained a mechanical instrument player. And that what I love about the Hammond. You cant just pull out a few drawbars and expect it to make a good sound. You have to get over the thing and talk to it. It’s a mans instruments. Actually theres a stunning german jazz hammond player. Ever heard of Barbara Denelein? Shes a very beautiful woman This is not a sexist remark but . Shes an incredibly sexy good looking woman, and she gets on the Hammond and she sounds like Jimmy Smit. And she plays great bass pedals too.

SS: Do you use bass pedals much

JL: I used to but I got out of the habit As with most things with music if you get out of the habit. My piano technique - for this last solo album that I did coz its all piano I really had to practice four or five hours a day for a few weeks to get my piano technique back, coz the hammond organ is a totally different thing.

By Stefan Sojka

I ROCK, THEREFORE I AM

Fresh from the recording of their latest album, Abandon, Deep Purple came to our great southern land to show off the new songs and to prove that they can still rock as hard as ever after all these years. Fans old and new were treated to a classic Purple rock-fest with the old crowd pleasers thrown in amongst the new songs, and plenty of trademark musical tom-foolery and virtuosic hi-jinks. I was sent to interview Jon Lord on the afternoon of their Sydney gig.

Meeting your childhood keyboard-playing hero can be an awesome enough experience, but getting the opportunity to sit and talk with the dude for an hour - well, that takes the cake. And take the cake we did, as we ate our way through the Ritz Carlton Club Lounge dessert rack, sipped on coffees and talked about all things musical. Giggling nervously at his every quip in the first few minutes, I soon realised that Mr Lord was one helluva friendly English chap, so I ought to cut the childish adoration and get serious with the interview.

Deep Purple has been hard at it for over thirty years now. Naturally, founding member Jon Lord is looking much more like a distinguished middle aged gent than a hard rockin' keyboard pounding maniac these days. Later that evening though, at the Entertainment Centre, he was transformed from the stocky grey-haired fellow I met at the hotel, into an archetypal demonic wild man of rock. Channelling raw rock power, he pumped the Hammond, convulsing and contorting under the spotlights, while the note-perfect riffs and blinding solos poured out to an audience that knew they were in the presence of rock royalty. This is "A-Band-On" alright. They kicked ass!

Back at the hotel that afternoon, we discuss the secrets behind the chemistry and the magic of being a rock icon that has outlived almost everyone. And surprisingly or not, some basic truths surfaced. Regardless of your style, to survive beyond a flavour-of-the-week act, you have to love MUSIC. Call him a rock God, a legend, a master, a star, a genius, (hey and if you don't like Deep Purple, call him anything you like) - Jon Lord is one thing above all of that - he is a musician.

Cyrius: The new Album, Abandon, - it's a very classic Deep Purple sound.

J.L.: Yeah, well, we've done two since Steve's been in the band. The first one was made over quite a long period of time. We wrote an enormous amount of material, coz we were trying to work out what we could do with Steve in the band. With something as fundamental as the change in guitar, and not just a change in guitar - but a change of Ritchie Blackmore, a founder member along with me, and a man who has arguably invented a style of guitar - it was a huge change. We did some gigs with Steve and it was great - and we loved it. And so when we went into the studio, we tried to do the same thing, which was to explore, whereas with "Abandon", we did it very quickly. For two reasons: 1) We wanted to see quite how a very straight ahead rock and roll album sounded - just jammed songs, very quickly done, quickly written, quickly recorded. And 2) because we didn't really have much time anyway coz the management had us out on the road again.

C: So you are still being whipped along by the record companies?

JL: Well, it's coz we allowed it to happen - because we like it. The best thing about rock and roll is playing the live gigs.

C: So you're still doing the Hammond / Leslie thing?

JL: Yeah - Yeah I got a C3 which I've had for 24 years, two Leslies..

C: What about effects - distortion that kind of thing?

JL: Well I've gotten out of that. I did it in the 80's. I put pre-amps in, and modified the Leslies, modified the organ - the whole 9 yards, but I realised in the end what I was doing was trying to gild the lily. Coz what I actually do is turn the Leslies full up and play with my foot down quite hard, you know and that gives me what people call the "Jon Lord sound", but really all it is is just a Hammond turned up. OK, there's a way of playing a Hammond. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that you can play a Hammond with a piano technique. Well, you can, but it sounds like you are playing a Hammond with a piano technique. You really have to learn how to play an organ - it's a technique to achieve legato on a non legato instrument. There is no legato, there is no sustain.

C: On and off...

J.L.: Exactly, so you want to achieve a seamless effect. You have to learn how to finger that to get that effect. And a lot people who come from piano are surprised and horrified when they hear themselves on an organ.

C: I remember when "Burn" came out you were getting pretty heavily into the knob-twiddling, like on the instrumental track "A-200".

J.L.: I used to use a lot more gear in the 70's and 80's. In the early days of synths I was a convert.

C: Did you kind of lose that enthusiasm with the technology?

J.L: I still had that stuff when we reformed Deep Purple. I still had it so I was using it. You can hear it quite heavily not so much on "Perfect Strangers" but on "The House Of Blue Light". It was really when Steve rejoined the band, he said "what's that kind of stark screaming distorted Hammond you used to do?" I said "well it's still in there I just haven't used it". And he kind of led me back towards discarding all that stuff. So I sent the organ back to this guy and I said "take everything out of it except what's Hammond - take all the modifications out. Take the Leslies back to ordinary Leslie Speakers and ordinary Leslie amplifiers. We just upgraded the horns so they don't blow up so often - and here we are.

C: Do you think that all the technological advances are inadvertently steering us back to realise that there is something vital about the chemistry of humans playing together that can't be replaced?

J.L.: Well thank God that's happening. No it can't - never could be, never will be. You can't synthesise emotion. The thing about synthesisers was that you needed a great player to make them live. An Emerson. One of the great moog players was Stevie Winwood. He had the feel for that style - to make 'em sing.

C: As far as the new generation of players that are utilising technology. Are you finding any that are inspiring to you?

J.L.: Oh yeah. I think that the last few years of the 90's have been incredibly productive for music - for popular music. It was a bit sterile out there for a while. But I see a lot of things that make an old man very happy.

C: Anyone in particular?

J.L: Its very difficult to say, you'd have to ask my daughter. (laughs)

C: So music is evolving nicely, you would say..

J.L: Well you know what happened? It's really easy to point out how it happened. At the same time as the big technological revolution, at the same time you got a decline in live music, and the spawning ground for music is live. That's where you learn how to deal with a good audience, how to deal with a bad audience, being booed, being greeted with complete silence. It's going to school. And the whole training ground of bands being able to find a place to go to school was taken away by the technological revolution, and other factors as well. But that's come back in quite a big way certainly in Europe and I presume so here too.

C: Well we have a lot of live festivals and stuff, but the smaller venues are predominantly cover gigs.

J.L.: Even that is a training ground. What were the early British rock an roll musicians doing but covering what the Americans had done? But it was a symbiotic relationship. One fed the other. We in England were listening to American music, playing it our way and sending it back to America. They were hearing it done our way, reinterpreting our version of it, and so on.

C: Yeah well its kind of happening here. Local artists are imitating the techno heads in Europe or the rappers and R&B artists in the states, but they are turning it into a uniquely Australian thing and sending it back overseas and succeeding with it, even though they still might have to wear the baseball caps and baggy pants..

J.L: The problem is what's happened since MTV, is that rock and roll has become a visual art as well as an audio art. That is fine except that in a way what you are getting now is attitude as much as music, and again that's cool, providing that somebody realises why he wants to be a musician, because in the end what you've got to communicate is music not attitude.

C: You guys have always had your fair share of attitude, though.

J.L: Yeah but it was attitude based on our knowledge of our ability to communicate our music. It was not the knowledge that we looked good in baggy pants or that I was an incredibly handsome man. I think it was about the music more, and the great thing about what's happening now is its becoming about the music again, and that's terribly important to me.

C: So as far as the visual side of it, you haven't really explored computer graphics and video and effects and all that sort of stuff.

J.L: No not really - we never did. There doesn't seem any real reason to start now. And if you look back at old photographs of us, we were never into fashion, ever. The only one who made any concession at all to something extra-musical was Ritchie, who used to wear those silly hats.

C: If you were the same age you were when you started right now, confronted with all this stuff at that age, what do you think you would be doing with your music now.

J.L.: Interesting question. If I were a young keyboard player now I would be I think confused by the amount of things available to me. I am really thankful that when I started the only two options were the piano and the organ. But music is... the music business by definition is kind of incestuous. It grows, it feeds on itself. It comes out of what's around you. And what takes it forward each time is a band that has the courage to take what they hear and then to reinvent themselves based on what they've heard.

C: Which is what you did back then, so I guess you would do the same sort of thing now.

J.L: I'd like to think I'd have the courage to do the same thing now.

C: You think it would be harder now?

J.L.: I think it would, because as a cynic said, "it's all been done". The trick now - if it is down to being a trick, which is sad - is to make it sound like it's not been done before, and that really is hard. I think we had the best of it, I don't mean we Deep Purple, I mean we my generation. We had a clean canvas on which to paint - pretty clean anyway, a few smudges here and there - and the ability to be able to say "can we do this?.. yes we can." that was wonderful. And don't forget we also came out of the 60's where we had record companies that would give you a five year contract, I mean that would be like gold now. What you get now is a one album contract with an option. And that's a big deal to get the option. But record companies had the courage then to allow you to grow.

C: Well, in the old days you'd buy a record, you'd sit down and listen to it. Now you buy a record and put it on while you are playing your computer game.

J.L.: Absolutely, it has become almost like audio wallpaper. It's become the soundtrack of modern living, whereas it used to be the alternative. It was what young people turned to, to revolt against what they saw as dull old-fashioned middle class values and middle class music.

C: Your new solo album, "Pictured Within", seems to be a little in that spirit of "alternative" direction in today's climate. A kind of "hey stop for a minute and ignore the bombardment of external stimuli". It seems more of an inward journey.

J.L: As a writer and composer I tend to be very autobiographical. I tend to write better about things that have affected me reasonably recently as well. I lost both my parents just before I started making this album and that coloured it very strongly. It's quite a melancholy album, although I like to think its also uplifting because I tried to write my way out of my sadness. There's a whole side of me that needs to be expressed which I cant express in Deep Purple thus this solo album - which is the first one I've done since 1981, its not like I've littered the world with them. I was lucky that my family didn't try and suppress any one style against the other so I grew up with a love of music with a capital M.

C: But your time is mostly taken up with the band…

J.L: Yeah, but over the last 15 years I've been writing an enormous amount of what people continue to call classical music. It's not, its orchestral music - I write an enormous amount - I've got reams of the stuff, and I'm trying to move myself into the position where I can consider that I can make my living as a composer when I finally stop spinning around with the band.

C: Well if you send me a few scores I'll get an orchestra together and we'll put on a gig in Sydney.

J.L.: It's a deal!

C: Are you using computers to compose?

J.L: No, although I used a computer to record "Pictured Within". I recorded it with Digidesign. I had the benefit of a stunning engineer who understood the computer world and when needed we were able to cut and paste. But I used it really for convenience. There are several long pieces of music on the album. What I did was a map, if you like, of a piano track. So I just recorded me alone at the piano - a really beautiful Steinway, on my own in a big studio with wooden walls wooden floor and a great woody piano sound, and I recorded that into the machine.

C: The entire album?

J.L.: Pretty much - track by track

C: From your own hand-written scores?

J.L.: Yes I've always used manuscript paper. I find it as much of a compositional aid as anything else I've ever used because it becomes and audio-visual thing with the paper and the pencil. I can see it on the stave and I can see a line I can see a shape to it - which pleases me or not. It's a very personal thing but it seems to make sense to me. Also, it doesn't pin me down. Sometimes when you write a piece of music when it comes out of your head, and it comes straight onto the paper, its got a form in your head, but the form is not necessarily "1,2,3,4", or "crotchet =140" or whatever. You might feel like it's somewhere in that so you put "moderato" on it and you put it to one side. A year later you come to it and you start to play it, and some memory of what you meant when you wrote it down comes back, but then other feelings come too, like the way it feels then at that moment you play it. So I like to write it down.
I am putting a home studio in and I will have the ability to do my scores on computer.

C: But you'll get someone in to do that…

J.L: I think I'll have to do that. I'm in my 50's I don't think got time to learn it all!

C: So Jon Lord at home is basically a piano, a pencil and paper.

J.L: That's me, I've got a beautiful piano at home in 1982 I treated myself to a 7ft6 Bechstein, and it's my pride and joy - I adore the thing. In fact my wife gets pissed off with it. If she wants me to do something she says "don't go past the piano".

C: And you are getting into the Internet?

J.L.: I get on there and put a few people right. There's a newsgroup alt.music.deep-purple. Sometimes I look at it and I go "these people have got it wrong, I've got to tell them how it was"

C: So you log on with a nick name?

J.L: Yeah I've got a handle that everybody knows and I've got another one that I can just go round and make my postings.

C: Are you using the net for research and creative personal reasons?

J.L.: I'm quite a tactile person. I actually like looking things up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I find that a more rewarding search for knowledge than the net somehow, but that's a generational thing and I don't expect that I will ever plug into it the same way that my daughter does. I think that anything when its young and new and still cutting edge is going to produce almost a kind of a mania about. I think that as the Internet becomes so much more part of our lives it will stabilise. People will treat it less as a kind of a "wow" factor and more of a kind of a "ho-hum" factor. It's going to be there like the refrigerator's there.

C: Do you think the net could affect the chances of bands getting that mass media type of fame that you had, with whole music scene becoming a massive selection of niche markets?

J.L: I don't know, it could go either way. I was speaking a few months ago to the head of international of EMI in Germany. He said that they are completely and utterly geared up for dispersing music through the net so the only problem at the moment is safeguarding copyright of the musicians and the record companies. They are in a bit of a spin at the moment - excuse the pun. They don't know quite which way to turn, and some people are saying "too bad they've had it too good too long" but record companies, as we discussed earlier, played a huge part in the success of popular music.
There are countless bands who wouldn't have been able to have achieved anything were it not for record companies. So I think that to try and snip them out of the equation just because there's a revolution in dispensing of information would be a mistake.

C: They should be able to hang on though.

J.L: I think they will. I think everything will find its level. At the moment everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off coz they don't quite know what's going to happen. We got there before all that happened and I really rather glad we did.

C: Now it seems you don't get anywhere in music unless you got a business plan. You need a marketing plan to market your product

J.L: Its kinda weird isn't it. It really is the music business. Its like when I went to do that solo album, the last one, I almost had the same thing. I had the head of classical saying (german accent) - "So what kind of record will it be?"
I can show you the dots and I can play you the little bits on the piano, but that doesn't tell you anything.

C: So they wanted to know which demographic it was going to appeal to..

J.L: Exactly, and what are we going to file it under?

C: What is your favourite sound at the moment?

J.L: I love the sound of a string quartet. That kind of woody sort of stringy sound - and mixed with the piano. I found a lovely mix too, of the string quartet and a JV2080 - a stunning machine. There's an orchestral card you can buy for it and they had some marvellous sounds but particularly it had a very nice string sound. There's also a general GSM sound a warm pad and I mixed this warm pad with the string sound and the string quartet and I found a lovely sound - it lives in a lovely place it's the kind of sound that you go "oh yeah" - it feels good.

C: Speaking of sound - you've got a sound check to attend.

J.L: My tecchie guy handles that.

C: Well all the same you'd better start psyching yourself up for the big rock gig. See you there.

J.L: Thanks, I hope you enjoy it.

And so, as I walked away from the interview, some thoughts struck me. This guy has done it all, yet he has returned to what he loves - rocking hard, and indulging his creative urges. He uses technology, but only for what he needs, he doesn't let the technology use him. He gets other people to do the stuff he can't handle himself, which frees him up to be more expressive (something we all need to learn, as we struggle with dozens of software packages, gizmos, effects, wiring diagrams, tapes, discs, drives, not to mention all the scraps of paper). Even without the money, I think I'll at least try and get a friend to help me out now. Above all else, this man believes in the power of music and the ability of those with the talent and dedication to keep it alive and keep making people happy. And at the Entertainment Centre that night - there sure were a lot of very happy people!