Deep Purple's Jon Lord recording a tribute to John Mortimer with the RLPO

By Catherine Jones on Oct 2, 09 08:00 AM

Deep Purple co-founder Jon Lord is in town this week recording some new music he's written.
But it's not hard rock or heavy metal the 68-year-old keyboard player is laying down in the studio - it's classical works in collaboration with our own RLPO.

Lord has forged a career with rock and classical music running in parallel, from the 1969 Concerto for Group and Orchestra (which he still performs all over the world) to the Durham Concerto which he recorded with the Phil two years ago.
I had a chat with him in a break between recording sessions at the Friary in Everton yesterday, and he explained to me how he'd never seen a distinction between the musical forms.
"I felt I was travelling pretty much the same highway whichever music you played," he told me.
"I like in my own mind to think of it all as music. The grey area which splits the two is getting less and less grey."
Even more interestingly, he told me that inspiration for this latest classical work had come from his close friend John "Rumpole of the Bailey" Mortimer who died earlier this year.
The pair first met 15 years ago when they were both protesting "vigorously" (and successfully as it turned out) about the demolition of a 1930s cinema in Henley on Thames.
Jon said: "We became really good friends - the rock organist and the QC.
"He was doing shows called Mortimer's Miscellany, a mix of scurrilous legal anecdotes and reading pieces of poetry and literature, and he was always accompanied by a piano and flute player.
"He asked me if I'd play the piano, and I loved every minute of it."
The new CD includes a track called To Notice Such Things, taken from the last line of Thomas Hardy's poem Afterwards which was a Mortimer favourite, and three autumnal-feeling works.
It's the latest in a line of interesting collaborations for the Phil which continues tonight when the orchestra joins Dame Edna Everage at the Echo Arena.