After about two months of rehearsals, Shades of Deep Purple was recorded in only three days in May 1968 and contains four original songs and four covers, thoroughly rearranged to include classical interludes and sound more psychedelic. Stylistically the music is close to psychedelic rock and progressive rock, two genres with an ever-growing audience in the late 1960s.
The album was not well received in the UK, where it sold very little and did not chart. In the US, on the other hand, it was a success and the single "Hush", an energetic rock track originally written by Joe South, became very popular at the time, reaching number 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart. The good sales of the album and the intense radio play of the single contributed largely to the attention Deep Purple would get in their early US tours and also during the 1970s. Modern reviews of the album are generally positive and consider Shades of Deep Purple an important piece in the history of Deep Purple.
When Deep Purple's first line-up came together in 1967, there was a moment of transition for the British music scene. Beat was still popular, especially in dance halls and outside the capital, but the tastes of young people buying records and filling up the clubs was rapidly changing in favour of blues rock, progressive rock and psychedelic rock. New bands like The Moody Blues, Procol Harum, and The Nice were pioneers in combining classical music with rock, using complex and daring arrangements. At the same time, psychedelia was making strides in the hedonistic swinging London society, where bands like Pink Floyd, The Pretty Things, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Traffic and Cream experimented with different forms of drug-induced rock music, in line with the hippie subculture coming from the USA. Many well-known acts, including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who, were influenced by the changing feel and added many elements of progressive and psychedelic rock to their albums of that period.
During this time of great creativity for the British musical scene in the summer of 1967, Chris Curtis, former drummer of the beat band The Searchers, contacted London businessman Tony Edwards to find financing for a new group he was putting together, to be called Roundabout. The name meant that the group would contain a revolving cast of non-permanent members getting on and off the stage like a musical roundabout, with only Curtis as mainstay and singer. Impressed with the plan, Edwards agreed to finance and manage the venture with two business partners, Ron Hire and John Coletta, and the three of them founded Hire-Edwards-Coletta (HEC) Enterprises.
In September 1967, the first successful Roundabout recruitment was Curtis' flatmate, the classically trained Hammond organ player Jon Lord; he had most notably played with The Artwoods, a band led by Art Wood, brother of future Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, and featuring Keef Hartley. At that time, Lord was playing in a band backing the successful pop vocalists The Flower Pot Men called The Garden, which also included bassist Nick Simper and drummer Carlo Little. Simper and Little were alerted by Lord of the Roundabout project and remained in standby for an eventual involvement. They recommended to Lord the guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, whose playing Chris Curtis had appreciated when his band The Searchers had played at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany. Blackmore had been a member of The Outlaws and had played as session and live musician with many beat, pop and rock acts, including Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, where he had met Little. Curtis contacted Blackmore to audition for the new group and persuaded him to move from Hamburg, where he was hanging out in local clubs. The guitarist came back to England for good to join the group in December 1967. Meanwhile, Curtis' erratic behaviour and his sudden loss of interest in the project he had started slowed down any development, forcing his financiers, HEC Enterprises, to drop him and entrust Lord and Blackmore with the task of filling out the rest of the band.
Lord signed up as bassist his friend Simper, whose fame at the time came from his membership in the rock and roll group Johnny Kidd & The Pirates and for having survived the car crash in 1966 that killed Kidd. The line-up of Roundabout was completed by drummer Bobby Woodman, recruited by Blackmore. Dave Curtiss, an acquaintance of Woodman, was at first considered as singer, but he left to fulfill previous commitments. According to Simper, Ian Gillan, the singer of the band Episode Six, was also contacted for an audition, but declined the offer.
Roundabout moved into Deeves Hall, a rented old farmhouse near the village of South Mimms, Hertfordshire in late February 1968. There, while waiting for the arrival of new musical instruments and equipment, they continued the search for a singer through an advertisement in the British music paper Melody Maker. Rod Stewart was among the dozens of aspiring vocalists that were considered for the auditions, but was not up to the standards the band required. They chose Rod Evans instead, who was already the singer of the club band The Maze. Evans brought along after the audition his 19-year-old bandmate Ian Paice, a drummer whom Blackmore recognised from his days in Hamburg. They quickly improvised an audition for Paice and he was chosen on the spot to replace Woodman behind the drum kit. Woodman was unhappy with the direction the band was heading and the other members thought that he was not suited for their sound.
The first rehearsals of what would be known as the Mk. I line-up of Deep Purple involved mostly jamming and some work on the instrumentals "And the Address" and "Mandrake Root", which Blackmore and Lord had written earlier that year. Mandrake Root was also the name of an earlier band that Blackmore had been trying to form in Germany, before being contacted by Roundabout's management. After the two instrumentals, the first proper song to be arranged was "Help!", a Beatles cover that Chris Curtis wanted to include in an eventual album. Evans wrote some lyrics for "Mandrake Root" and reduced to one the number of instrumental tracks. Having arranged and rehearsed the first three songs, the musicians focused their attention on "I'm So Glad", a song by Skip James which had earlier been covered by Cream and The Maze. The next addition during rehearsals was "Hey Joe", a song originally, but disputably, written by Billy Roberts and mistakenly credited to Deep Purple on original releases of the album. The main inspiration for the new arrangement of the song was the 1966 hit version by American guitarist Jimi Hendrix, but the track length was stretched with the inclusion of classical-influenced instrumental sections. The band also selected a pop rock song called "Hush", written by Joe South for Billy Joe Royal the previous year, which Blackmore had heard while in Germany.
Deep Purple's members were experienced musicians with different musical backgrounds: Lord had trained in classical music and had played in jazz and blues rock ensembles, Blackmore and Simper came from session work in pop rock, Paice and Evans from beat bands. However, no one was an accomplished songwriter. The only one with experience in musical composition was Lord, who treated the arrangements and wrote the bulk of the music for the first album, with some guitar riffs added by Blackmore. The album shows the potential of the band but does not focus on a distinct sound. Clearly identifiable on the album are the musical styles which were developing in the UK in that period and that influenced the young musicians in Deep Purple, a mix of psychedelic rock, progressive rock, pop rock and hard rock, the latter mostly evident in Blackmore's guitar parts.
Traces of the heavy sound that would mark the production of Deep Purple's "Mk. II" line-up (when Evans and Simper were replaced by Gillan and Roger Glover) can already be heard in the opening instrumental "And the Address" and in "Mandrake Root". The main riff of the latter is very similar to the one in the song "Foxy Lady", a testimony of Blackmore's admiration for Jimi Hendrix. The other original compositions, the ballad "One More Rainy Day" and "Love Help Me", are pop rock songs that enhance the commercial appeal of the album, but are considered by critics less interesting than the cover songs.
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