You can't play bass in a vacuum.

I don't listen to hard rock or heavy metal. I suppose I've always been influenced by folk music, I'm a big Bob Dylan fan.

It's really an orchestral piece featuring a group and it was quite revolutionary at the time and it in fact, it kicked Deep Purple off as a name in Great Britain because it made all the newspapers. Everyone was writing about us. And there was some confusion as to what kind of band we were after that, which is why Deep Purple in Rock is such a hard unbending album of really furious hard heavy rock. Heavy metal hadn't been invented at that point.

If you listen to what's on the pop charts, everything is machine oriented.

Obviously you take any creative people and put them in a room and you're going to get clashes, you're going to get friction.

I'm old enough to know what music was like before rock & roll.

You can't play bass in a vacuum.