Deep Purple’s biggest British hit was never meant to exist. “Black Night”, the single that climbed to No. 2 in the UK in the summer of 1970 and still stands as the highest-charting single of the band’s entire career, was written in a single alcohol-soaked night by five musicians who had spent the whole day failing to write anything at all. They borrowed the riff from a Ricky Nelson record, scribbled the most deliberately banal lyrics they could think of, and went home convinced they had produced, at best, an obscure B-side. Then their management insisted on releasing it, the band protested that they had been drunk, and the record-buying public made it a hit anyway. Few classics have been willed into existence so reluctantly by the people who made them.
An Albums Band Under Orders
By the spring of 1970, Deep Purple’s Mk II line-up — Ian Gillan on vocals, Ritchie Blackmore on guitar, Roger Glover on bass, Jon Lord on keyboards and Ian Paice on drums — had just completed the album that would define them. Deep Purple in Rock, recorded in sessions spread across the previous autumn and winter, was a deliberate manifesto: as Blackmore put it, if it was not dramatic or exciting, it did not belong on the album. Gillan and Glover, poached from the pop group Episode Six the year before, had transformed a progressive-rock outfit into a hard rock band of genuine violence and virtuosity.
The strategy worked commercially as well as artistically. Deep Purple in Rock reached No. 4 in Britain and made the band, almost overnight, into one of the country’s leading album acts, the kind whose records were bought by devotees rather than casual listeners. But album success in 1970 still left a gap in the machinery of promotion: without a single, there was nothing for radio to play in three-minute bursts and nothing to put the band’s name in the singles chart, where casual listeners lived.
There was one problem. The band’s label, EMI, wanted a single to help promote the album, and Deep Purple did not consider themselves a singles band. Like Led Zeppelin, whose example they consciously admired, they believed their dignity lay in albums, in music that grew organically rather than being slung together by a producer and a publisher to fit a format. “I don’t think we were anti-commercial,” Gillan later reflected. “But we were anti-contrivance.” Management, alive to the realities of the record business, smoothed over the dispute with a euphemism — the song would be called a “lead track” rather than a single — and booked a session at De Lane Lea Studios in London in May 1970.
One Night at De Lane Lea
The session began disastrously. The band arrived with no ideas, and from morning into the evening they still had nothing that sounded remotely like a single. The setting, at least, was familiar: De Lane Lea was one of three London studios where Deep Purple in Rock had been recorded, and behind the desk on those sessions had been a young engineer named Martin Birch, whose long association with the band — and later with Rainbow, Whitesnake and Iron Maiden — began in rooms like this one. Familiarity, however, was producing nothing. Five of the most formidable musicians in Britain sat in a state-of-the-art studio, under instructions to be commercial, and the commercial song simply would not come. To clear their heads, they decamped around the corner to a pub in Holborn called the Newton Arms. “We drank far more than was good for us,” Paice later recalled to Uncut. “Not paralytic, but certainly losing touch with reality. Then we went back to the studio.”
Properly drunk, the band stumbled back into De Lane Lea with only the glimmer of a plan. Blackmore and Glover went in first, and Blackmore began playing a stomping riff that he had, by his own cheerful admission, simply taken from somebody else’s record. Glover’s response, as he remembered it, was cheerfully pragmatic: “Well, I’ve never heard it — let’s do it anyway.” The rest of the band piled in around the riff, and by about one in the morning the music was complete.
The words were an afterthought, and the band treated them as one. “We were having a laugh, because we thought the whole thing was a waste of time now,” Glover explained, “so we wrote the most banal lyrics we could. We just banged it out. I went to bed that night thinking, ‘That’ll be some obscure B-side or something.'” What they produced — a half-lost wanderer insisting that “black night is not right,” hoping he might find on the way down the line that he is free to be himself — is vague, repetitive and, in performance, completely irresistible. Even the title was borrowed: Gillan has said it came from a song of the same name recorded by the American singer Arthur Alexander.
Nicked from Ricky Nelson
The riff at the heart of “Black Night” has one of the more improbable pedigrees in rock. According to Glover, its basis was Ricky Nelson’s 1962 recording of “Summertime”, George Gershwin’s lullaby from Porgy and Bess, in a hard-rocking arrangement built around a pounding bass line. Jon Lord confirmed the theft with undisguised delight in the BBC documentary Heavy Metal Britannia: “Black Night was nicked from the bass line in Ricky Nelson’s ‘Summertime’,” he said, before demonstrating the line on a grand piano. Critics have also noted the song’s close resemblance to “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet”, the 1966 psychedelic hit by the Blues Magoos, which had itself drawn on the same Nelson record — a small genealogy of borrowing that only underlines how freely musicians of the era recycled one another’s best ideas.
Blackmore never bothered to hide any of it. Looking back in a 1995 interview, he retold the story with obvious fondness: “We went down the pub in Holborn. The management came in — ‘Lads! You need a hit!’ We were drinking, so we went back. I knocked out the Ricky Nelson ‘Summertime’ bass riff, which we did as a shuffle. We just added a couple of bits that worked very well. And all of a sudden it was number two.”
The Hit They Tried to Stop
When the band played the finished recording to their management, the reaction was the opposite of their own. Management loved it and wanted it released immediately. The band objected — “You can’t release that, we were pissed,” Glover reportedly protested — but the label’s instincts won. “Black Night” was released on Harvest Records on 5 June 1970, the same month Deep Purple in Rock reached the shops, with the album’s ferocious opener “Speed King” on the UK B-side and “Into the Fire” on the American edition.
The throwaway proceeded to outperform almost everything the band had laboured over. It reached No. 1 on both the NME and Melody Maker charts and peaked at No. 2 on the official UK singles chart, where it remains Deep Purple’s highest-charting UK single to this day. It topped the chart in Switzerland, reached No. 2 in Norway and West Germany, No. 4 in Ireland — the group’s only Irish Top 10 hit — and No. 4 in Austria, even scraping into the American charts at No. 66 on the Billboard Hot 100. Because it had never been intended for an album, it appeared on no studio record at the time; it was only added to Deep Purple in Rock a quarter of a century later, on the album’s 25th anniversary edition.
Life After the Pub
Success bred a sequel problem: the label immediately wanted another single, and the follow-up, “Strange Kind of Woman”, duly delivered another British Top 10 hit in early 1971. But it is “Black Night” that has carried the further distance. When EMI reissued Deep Purple in Rock for its 25th anniversary in 1995, the single finally took its place on the album it had been written to promote, a quarter of a century late.
On stage, “Black Night” quickly became indispensable. It settled into the first-encore slot in the Mk II set list, a guaranteed eruption of recognition after the epics. When Gillan and Glover left the band in 1973, the song was dropped in its full form — though Blackmore continued to tease audiences with fragments of the riff inside his improvisations — and when the classic line-up re-formed in 1984, it returned to the main set, where it has remained a fixture on the band’s many live albums ever since.
The irony at the centre of the story has never quite faded. Deep Purple built their reputation on long, ambitious album tracks — “Child in Time”, “Highway Star”, the concerto experiments — and guarded that reputation jealously against the machinery of the pop single. Yet the record that carried their name highest up the British charts was a three-and-a-half-minute shuffle assembled in a few drunken hours from a borrowed riff and joke lyrics, by a band actively trying not to write a hit. As Glover discovered when he woke up the next morning, sometimes the songs a band throws away are the ones the world refuses to give back.