The Rest Is History

After the tour and a deserved Christmas skiing holiday, Jon and Tony had agreed to split the band, although there had been talk of trying to lure David Coverdale into the band, this never happened and David formed Whitesnake and eventfully Jon and Ian followed Bernie into Whitesnake.

It was not until the May of 1978 that the official announcement was made about the demise of PAL. Ian Paice later said (“We broke up in March after 16 months together because the project was not living up to our expectations. PAL was a brave experiment; it was built around Tony Ashton and his ability to make an audience to love him. Tony still had that ability but the audience had better not be bigger than three hundred quid. It was an experiment that cost me and Jon a fortune, but I’m glad we did it”).

Tony returned to his role as a producer, but continued to pursue a low key musical career, the Paice Ashton Lord film was finally completed by the end of 1977, but it was far too late, hastily named “Lifespan” a documentary about the band which included some live work.

Although rumours were abound about the band reforming it never happened, which

Was a huge pity as although the live set was very ambitious, the studio album was something  very special. A big band sound with a completely new style, which is what they always wanted to achieve, but maybe it was too different for the huge numbers of Purple fans, awaiting a reincarnation of Deep Purple.

Many years later a re-issue album of "Malice in Wonderland" was made which included added bonus tracks taken from recordings of the proposed second album. But no tapes could be found at first, all the masters had vanished, possibly recorded over. Only to find that Tony Ashton thankfully had taken a monitor mix of tapes in the studio so he could get some of the lyrics finished. Tony worked hard with the poor quality tapes to get as many tracks as he could. Although many of the tracks were unfinished, that special sound was still there and listening to those tracks with all the studio hiss, is a real treat and you can only wonder what would have happened if the second album would of been completed.