Louder AAA
Sunderland-born Don Airey has served as Deep Purple’s keyboard player since returning from semi-retirement to replace Jon Lord in 2002. The classically-trained keyboardist has also worked with an expansive and diverse selection of names including Ozzy Osbourne, Colosseum II, Whitesnake, Jethro Tull, Gary Moore, Queen’s Brian May and Black Sabbath. In 2011 he told Prog he only regretted one of the 250-plus albums he’d helped make.
Many Prog readers will recall you were a member of Colosseum II. Do you have good memories of those times?
Yes – they were amazing days! I’m in Dusseldorf at the moment, and Colosseum II used to play in this area a lot. One of our early German tours lasted for six weeks, I think, which was quite hard work.
You’ve been a full-time member of Deep Purple since Jon Lord’s retirement in 2002. How long did it take to feel comfortable and established?
I don’t think you ever feel like that in Purple!
That’s a serious answer?
Yeah! Purple are just not that kind of band.
Nevertheless, you have made your influence felt on albums such as Bananas and Rapture Of The Deep.
I think I’ve made a decent contribution. I’ve tried to recreate the old sound that Jon used to have. I use different Hammonds and Leslies to Jon’s, but it really makes for a ferocious barrage.
Paicey and I had this discussion about the set-up on the Made In Japan sleeve and getting back on the ground, so we got rid of our risers and suddenly the full sound of the band has returned.
In 1987, you played live keyboards with Jethro Tull on European and US jaunts for the Crest Of A Knave album. Not as a full band member, but as a guest?
Yeah, I was with them for a year. It was an arrangement that happened to fit in with my plans to do a solo album for which MCA had offered me a contract.
Musically, Tull weren’t quite my thing – I like heavier music – but the time I spent with them was marvellous. I bumped into Ian Anderson at Heathrow recently and we had a good old chat about our grandchildren!
You’ve appeared on more than 250 albums between 1976 and 2011. Which are the ones of which you are most proud?
Funnily enough, Roger Glover and I were talking about what an incredible time it was making Down To Earth [by Rainbow, 1979] in a French château in winter.
There was no material except Since You’ve Been Gone, which Ritchie Blackmore and Cozy Powell didn’t want to do. At other points we didn’t even have a singer or a bass player –but it’s a fantastic piece of work.
Are there any that you now regret?
I did work with a Canadian band called Helix who were very defensive about having keyboards on their album [Wild In The Streets, 1987]. Everything I played, they had to have a band meeting about. Then they’d listen back to what had been recorded and suddenly they wanted wall-to-wall keyboards over the whole thing. That was quite silly.
