Popoff, Ezrin, Gillan - the Tasmanian’s universe is populated by people who all know less about and were not as close as him to DP. Can you spell hubris?
Your repeated argumentative trick to immediately discount any sources I quote to back my opinions runs by now as dry as the Northern Territory. Why don’t you just say out loud that you don’t want to hear or discuss opinions that differ from your own?
Plus the fact that …
OMG, that to me was an elevated bonus track, what the hell has it to do with the creativity of the rest of the album?
In my opinion the overall quality of Abandon is by far the best of the entire Morse Era.
the songs are various (meaning not boring, certainly stylistically Bananas contains more compositional variety for example), dynamic, melodic, technical from the first to the last, while Purplendicular has some splendid songs and others that have never convinced me and I can easily skip.
It’s clearly the hardest album with Steve.
If I have to find a flaw, Don’t Make Me Happy is a nice slow song, but it loses in comparison with Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming before, and with Haunted after.
Even though Non may have already lost enthusiasm in his adventure with Purple, I find that his contribution to the album was fundamental and almost a sort of testament to the band.
Even a little Jon Lord can go a long way.
Most people have forgotten about this (or never even heard it in the first place), criminally so!
Don‘t disappoint me, Flavio. Or you‘ll go without pasta and only Kartoffeln the next month! 
The way I look at it, if there was a trend, it’s best illustrated by examples. The one I posted above was from 1998 with a band on fire. Steve, Jon, all of them.
I would agree that when Don came aboard there were suddenly more notes, especially evident in Hush. At first it seemed like a new injection of energy, and it was exciting up to the point you realised the solo is played the same way every night.
That is why Almost Human is such a good reminder of what Jon really brought to the band, even if he had his mind elsewhere in the years leading up to 2002.
Why do you need to have your opinions backed up by Popoff?
It became more about Don and less about Steve. A matter of personal preference. I don’t know what you mean by “cinematic”? The increasingly compressed mixes?
Surely you can explain it to us.
Have a good day..
I’ll need to go back and check some old interviews/tour books etc, but I’m sure Jon was just as involved in Abandon as he was in Purpendicular. The trouble is, Abandon is probably the heaviest album since Machine Head, and with Steve having a dirtier sound, Jon is a little drowned in the mix. I think it needs a remix to give more guitar/Hammond separation.
But yes - it was during the Abandon Tour then Jon decided he no longer enjoyed travelling between shows (definitely not performing). Speed King was the highlight of the shows, but the absolutel best shows were the ones Jon stepped up - Ulm in '99 springs to mind. I know Nick was there too.
I think it’s fairly well-known that Jon wanted to leave after the Concerto tour in 2000, and didn’t want to do the non-Concerto shows tacked on to the end of the tour. He was persuaded to stay, and they had another writing session, but he decided his future was elsewhere.
Back in 2002, he told me that in the end, he hadn’t needed knee surgery, just rest. Given Don was originally announced for just 2 - 3 dates, I’ve always presumed it was to see if the band could work without him. And if he could be happy without the band. Everyone knew that the UK tour in early 2002 was his last, even if it wasn’t specifically stated.
Because Popoff takes a sincere interest in the band. I don’t have to agree with everything he feels or says, but I find it curious that he has of late fallen from grace with DP fans.
Or call it professional courtesy to another contrarian, we get along well in our occasional email exchanges even when we violently disagree - not an ability shared by everyone here dare I say!
Cinematic, Daniel?
Here:
I geddit. Bob Ezrin’s production values have always been divisive and if you were raised on Martin Birch and Roger Glover productions, they are likely hard to stomach. It is sheer coincidence that my favorite band and my favorite producer (since the 70s) stumbled together late in their careers, but imagine my elation about it!
But Bob’s production style - like many things in life - is definitely a matter of taste, I’m good with that.
I remember the first gig I saw with Don in DP, it was in Bonn. They started with Fireball I believe. A few seconds into the song, I realized that DP would never sound like with Jon again, but that they could make it work with Don, it would be different, but credible. Since then his playing has improved and loosened up in leaps and bounds. He’ll never be Keith Richards on Hammond though like Jon, but I’ve grown to accept that.
Is it a heretic view to voice that Don’s playing in DP has seen more of a development than Jon’s during his decades with the band? I need to be careful here as of late … 
Keith Richards on a Hammond is such a great definition!
Obrigado, I’ve used that for ages here, no one ever gets what it means, you’re the first. It’s like people thinking why is Uwe comparing a Stones rhythm guitarist to the Purple Demi-god of the ivories? 
You know, my appreciation of both Jon and Paicey has radically changed in its focus over the decades. As a teenager I loved them for that flashy stuff they did, Jon’s solos in HS and Burn or Paicey’s tour de force in the latter song. But these days I would point someone asking what sets Jon apart as a Hammond player to what he rhythmically plays in the verses (!) of SOTW, no joke. No Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson or Don Airey can emulate that (but they could learn the flashy stuff no sweat). Likewise with Paicey, if he never played another roll or fill again, I simply love his swing and groove even when he is doing “nothing”.
Not having a Jon Lord and an Ian Paice were Rainbow’s greatest predicaments. And I am vain enough to talk myself into the hubris that Jon would have been chuffed to be called “the Keith Richards of the Hammond” and would have known exactly what I meant.
It’s somehow funny that this overlooked album gets so much attention right now. The album is currently out of print (in this way a real collectors item) and furthermore the great digital platforms (Amazon, Apple or Spotify) don’t have it neither as download nor as streaming content, funny enough in case of Apple music it’s the only Purple studio effort missing. But back to the music on Abandon. I never considered the album as being one of Purple’s greatest works (nor is it around the worst) - it has always been one of these records with a few highlights and lot mediocracy. My personal gems one this album: Any full kno that, Watching the Sky, Seventh Heaven and Almost Human. The re-recorded Bloodsucker (Bludsucker) is a pale and tame rendition of this classic and pales completely if compared with the original and the live version from Total Abandon at least justifies its revival with a lot of energy. Apart from the songs mentioned nothing really sticks out. Maybe a remaster like in the case Rapture would help to improve the overall impression and also to make the album available again.
Is Bananas present in Apple Music?
Mea culpa! Overlooked, Bananas is missing too - there is gap between the 99 concerto and Rapture. That‘s if I recall it properly earMusic took over, so propably a rights, licensing issue with those albums sitting in between. But just to come back to Abandon which I would definitely rate higher than Bananas.
Whatsername is back in town
or, the more I said I’d write about Abandon.
Any Fule Kno That - there’s a certain magic being really enthustiastic about a band, and then they release new music, and you learn about it hearing the new song on the local rock radio station. Of course, that would have to be happening in the late 90’s - the latest - since nowadays it is a lost form of experience. If you’re at the right city at the right time, indeed. Any Fule Kno That is, in 1990’s terms, a modern exploration that does not stray too far, but much like House of Pain on Bananas, sets the tone for the rest of the album. An acquintance actually asked for an mp3 copy of this song after hearing it on the radio. I duly complied.
Almost Human is how I felt back then, too, as an outcast teenager. The lyric, of course, is not about outcast teenagers with still somewhat limited English vocabulary, but I still loved and connected with it.
Don’t Make Me Happy was a more traditional track, and not really the song I think of when I think about the album. It’s there, it belongs there and it sounds nice, but in comparison, it’s an “album track”, so to say.
Seventh Heaven, then again, Christ, what a song. Like someone said, it’s heavy metal, while at the same time, perfectly Deep Purple. By the time we get to the chorus, I’m in Seventh Heaven…
…seguing into Watching The Sky which is, if I had to pick just one, my favourite off the album. The resignation of the lyric has spoken to me several times. I’ve never left my luggage at the station (though I did once forget a bag full of unwashed clothes on a long distance train), but there’s something magical going on here.
Fingers to the Bone is at the same time a great song and “album track”, really depending on the mood I am in. There’s a sense of resignation here as well, but it is of a different kind. It’s not half as heavy as the songs around it, and that may be one reason why it is both subdued and stands out.
I intend not to do just like Jack Ruby did - I’ve always low-key wondered what is the sentiment here. I mean it was fairly obvious it was not about wanting to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, but obscuring enough for me never to get quite there.
She Was and Whatsername have always been sister tracks to me. There’s a groove there, and even if it’s somewhat repetitive, it also works really well. Lyric-wise I didn’t really connect with these, though.
'69, as I already mentioned above, was the song that sort of immediately redeemed the album - it was the Dead or Alive, A Twist In The Tale moment of the record, where the boys go really fast. It took me several years to learn that Hallelujah was referring to a Deep Purple song, since that song was nowhere to be found on CD’s my local record store had. Anyway, nowadays '69 plays somewhat like a remake of Hungry Daze.
Evil Louie says the entire population of the world could live in Texas, and now as I listen to it again, there are 1.5 billion more of us than in the song, and somehow that fact makes me feel very old. In the olden days of the last millennium, though, it was just a prelude to…
Bludsucker. For the old fan, this was probably just a needless rehash and a sign of running out of new ideas. To me, it was proof what Deep Purple were still capable of being a powerhouse, and early on, I’ve probably listened to this version more than the one on In Rock. The way Gillan screams the final verse at the end, as if to say “I might not be able to do this for an album’s worth of material any more, but I can still deliver”, still gives me goosebumps.
Both Abandon and Bananas were done by EMI, who I think were split up between several companies including Universal. I think the original albums were also licensed in different territories. The result is a bit of a legal quagmire over who has the rights to what, where.
This is exactly why I still believe in owning the physical product. I am on my second Abandon compact disc, because after a bit over 25 years of service, the first one gave up on me. Luckily enough someone else had sold theirs to a used records shop after considerably less listens (and ok, wear and tear…)
