1976 saw the split of one of the greatest rock bands in history with the collapse of Deep Purple. For over eight years Deep Purple were entertaining huge concert arena’s around the world as well as selling more albums than anyone else between 1973 and 1974. But with bands long history of personnel changes culminating in the departure of first Ritchie Blackmore and then his successor, with the tragic death soon after of Tommy Bolin.
To that point the band had little more to prove and with various members of the band having wanting to pursue other avenues a split was inevitable.
It was at that point that two major contributors of Deep Purple realised that they actually liked playing in a band together and decided to form a new band and obvious choice was with their old friend Tony Ashton who they had worked with on various other project previously, the last one being ‘Last of the Big Bands’ by Ashton and Lord. This album was to set the style of music that would form their new band ’Paice, Ashton and Lord’.
(“Ian and Jon approached me with idea of forming a band, in fact Jon had approached me before and I had,nt liked the idea much because I could,nt see myself as a front man. I also thought that with Jon and me both being on keyboard players we’d get in each others way. I’d be dropped out of playing with bands. There were plenty of sessions to do. I was also into doing commercials and jingles for TV which is interesting work. Its also quite lucrative as well, I was comfortable and I suppose I was in a bit of a rut”)
Tony was nevertheless persuaded to give it a go and the project began to take shape.
Now with split out the way and the three members putting together a band without strings they now had the chance to branch out.
Paice, Ashton and Lord emerged in August 1976 amidst much fanfare in the music press, in those days rock still had enough support to attract a number of weekly music papers and magazine. The story both of Purples’s split and of the new band was big news, with speculation of who would be in the band and what would the sound like.
Nothing was announced but mysterious adverts appeared in the music papers during July 1976 were enough to give a hint, especially if you recognised the telephone number of Purples’s office in London
John Lord described the auditions afterwards:
(“If you want to know what hell on earth is like, try conducting audtions! It,s not that the musicians were bad or anything, its just that there were so many of them. We had about sixty bass players to listen to and this came down to short list of four. Paul Martinez fitted right in within four bars, it sounded as if he and Ian had been playing together for years and as Ian is the main driving force behind the band a rapport between these two was going to very important”). Martinez was at the time playing in a band called’Stretch’ and was the funky bass player they were looking for.
On the lead side of the things were proving more difficult until they ‘Bernie Marsden’
Bernie was with ‘Babe Ruth’ and had done numerous sessions with UFO and Cozy Powells Hammer. Bernie had,nt seen the add, it was Cozy Powell who told about the vacancy.
Bernie recalls “ (I thought I was too late and I was a bit embarrassed phoning up and asking if they still needed a guitarist. But I was in luck and they seemed to like me.Mind you it was probably only because they were so knackered , my contribution just battered them into submission, they did,nt have any choice)”.
“Not so says Jon Lord, Bernie like Martinez was exactly what the band needed”, Thus Paice Ashton and Lord – alias PAL – was born.
On August 7th the papers announced that Lord and Paice were forming a new band and line up was made official on August 21st.
