If you start adapting to audiences, you're really second-guessing the situation, and it becomes a bit more like cabaret.
An album represents an artist or a band or a group of musicians at any given moment in time. You just produce the music that you feel good about and hope that the audience shows some interest in it.
I used to do interviews - I still do - interviews every day, all day. And you go from maybe doing a couple of professional interviews, where you can hear the sound right, to everyone else sounds like they're at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
I was an avid collector of Elvis' early stuff; for a young singer, he was an absolute inspiration. I soaked up what he did like blotting paper. It's the same as being in school - you learn by copying the maestro.
I have to think that 'Nessa Dorma' is the greatest rock ballad that's never been recorded as such.
I've done a lot of research on science and theology to try and get a better understanding of what happens to the human soul or what potential it has.
When I was in my formative years, I rejected Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, and Dean Martin. I now realise they were all great artists, but at the time, as a young man, you have to clear the decks.
The only advice I can give is to absorb as much as you can from as wide a spectrum as you can. If you're in a rock band and only soak up Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple kind of beginnings, then you're not going to have much leeway.
Glenn Hughes is one of the most naturally talented musicians, but he's still copying Steve Wonder to this day, so I can't call him a bona fide member of Deep Purple.
My grandad was an opera singer, my uncle a jazz musician; I was a boy soprano in the church choir. But the first performance with Deep Purple was something I'll never forget. All elements were working brilliantly.
'Smoke On The Water' was ignored by everybody to begin with. We only did it in the shows because it was a filler track from 'Machine Head.' But then, one radio station picked up on it, and Warner Bros. edited it down to about three and a half minutes. It then started getting played by lots of different radio stations.
If you think of a solo artist, you normally know them by their name; you don't normally describe their kind of music. You just say, 'It's so and so, or it's so and so.' But with bands, everyone feels an obligation to categorize them.
We soaked up everything from Beethoven to Chopin to Jimi Hendrix to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.
There used to be a time when people used to hold up cigarette lighters and candles at concerts, and the place was aglow to celebrate the end of the evening, or during a slow song, there was this congregational euphoria that used to exist. It still does, but now it's a question of iPhones being held up.
'Classic rock' is never a label that we've given ourselves - it's one of the many labels that's been imposed on us.
I sang 'Nessun Dorma' twice with Pavarotti, and he told me he'd heard 'Smoke' about five or six times, and every time was different. He was so jealous because if he deviated one jot from the traditional interpretation of the famous arias, he'd be crucified. We have the freedom.
My first contract was in 1965. There were six of us in this band - my band before Deep Purple - six in the band plus management, and the entire royalty rate was three-fourths of 1 percent.
No matter what I do, I've always recognized that Deep Purple is primarily an instrumental band. That's where all the music comes from in rehearsals - it all stems from the music.
I remember my uncle, who was a jazz pianist, when we did Deep Purple 'In Rock,' he ran from the room screaming, holding his ears: 'I can't hear anything. I can't hear any instruments.' And I was rubbing my hands going, 'Great.'
Deep Purple was sinking with Ritchie. We were playing to quarter houses in Europe, which is one of our strongest territories - in Germany. Smaller venues, and they weren't even full. So had we continued that way, and had Ritchie not walked out, we would have finished; that would have been the end of it.
