1144. Deep Purple / Turning to Crime. 2021. 3/5

Back in the very early days of Deep Purple, and I’m talking about those first albums back in the late 1960’s, the band often delved into performing cover songs in their sets, and also recorded several that appeared on those albums. Their first successful song and single was “Hush”, a song written and performed originally by Joe South, and one the band still performs on occasions today. The also did a cover of The Beatles “Help” and Billy Roberts “Hey Joe” on that first album, Shades of Deep Purple. On their second album The Book of Taliesyn they released two singles, both cover songs – “Kentucky Woman” which was a cover of a Neil Diamond song, and “River Deep, Mountain High” a cover of the Ike & Tina Turner song. It also contained yet another Beatles cover, “We Can Work It Out”. Finally, on the self titled third album, a cover of the Donovan song “Lalena” was recorded. As with most cover songs recorded by bands, some of them sound good and do a great job of transferring Deep Purple’s sound to the original song without compromising the original, and others are basically an abomination. Seriously. Steer clear of “Help”, it could easily turn you off Deep Purple forever. Thankfully, once the Mark II line up came together, they stuck to writing their own songs, and also to taking a much heavier approach to their song writing.
All of that leads us to this new album, Turning to Crime, because all of the songs here are cover versions of other songs, and all the original songs are mainly from that period of when Deep Purple first came to formation and fruition. Covid presented challenges to the band in regards to no performing being able to be done, the members were all holed up in their far flung residences, and they needed to find something to keep them occupied. The band didn’t like the idea that many bands came up with, which was to record live streams of songs and release them to the internet. Bob Ezrin, who has been the band’s producer since 2013, came up with the idea to do this project, with each of the members able to rehearse and record their parts in their own home studios, and he then wove them all together to form the songs. The only member without his own home studio was lead vocalist Ian Gillan, so Ezrin hired a studio in Europe for several days where he and Gillan met and put down the vocals. The end result was this album, Turning to Crime.
I was at a disadvantage when it came to the majority of the songs of this album, as I didn’t know many of the bands the songs here were originally played by, and knew barely more of the actual songs themselves. So when it came to listening to the album and deciding whether I liked it or not, it pretty much came down to how much I enjoyed the band’s performance. And I’m sure to the surprise of no one, it was the rock tracks that grabbed me more here than the blues based tracks.
“Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” as you would expect is a real blues song with honky tonk piano and horns to match, which sounds great but is a long way from where Deep Purple as a band is musically. Or is it? “Jenny Take a Ride” also has the piano involved but is more on the rock side than the blues side of the genre, with plenty of energy and Don Airey switching between piano and keys which gives it a nice Purps touch. I’m not a Bob Dylan, and the version here of “Watching the River Flow” also does little for me. “Let the Good Times Roll”, from the big band era of the 30’s and 40’s sounds great here but just doesn’t interest me, and “Dixie Chicken” is the same deal. More interesting is the version of “The Battle of New Orleans” by honky tonk country artist Johnny Horton, but again I think they missed a trick in not just trying to put a real Deep Purple spin on the song rather than staying so close to the original song.
On the good side, “7 and 7 Is” is a great rock song, and perfectly suits how Purps perform it. Ian Paice’s drumming is a highlight while Gillan’s voice is a great fit and the solo by Steve Morse is very Blackmore-ish from that time. “Oh Well” is the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s early hit when the band still had their Peter Green blues influence, and is another song that suits the Deep Purple treatment. Steve Morse again sounds brilliant when given the chance to shine. I’ve always loved The Yardbirds song “Shapes of Things”, but while this version of the song is good, it pales in comparison to Gary Moore’s version from 35 years ago. It’s a song that lends itself to being rocked up, and Purps here sit closer to the original version. So too with the Bob Seger song “Lucifer”, in that while this version is good it could have really been given a harder treatment in order to get a modern take on the song. Of course, then there is Cream’s “White Room”, which must have been covered a thousand times over the years, but this song is really in Deep Purple’s wheelhouse, and their version here is stellar. The album then finishes with a motley crew of a medley, called “Caught in the Act” but covering five different songs of different genres to compete the album.

Cover albums are things that I have reviewed before and spoken about before, and my opinion on them rarely changes. So here is the spiel I usually give to start off with. Most cover albums are fun to listen to, to here different versions of songs you may or may not know, performed by a band you admire or love, and to see how they go about performing their own versions of those songs. But in the long run, the novelty will wear off, and that album will go back onto the shelves and rarely be thought of again in regards to putting it back in the cd tray or on the turntable to listen to again. And essentially for the same reason every time, in that either the original versions of those songs are better, or the songs covered just aren’t that interesting.
And when talking about Turning to Crime I don’t really have to add that much more. As I said here earlier, I knew very few of these songs in the first place, so in order for me to really enjoy this album I had to really enjoy the treatment the band gave to them. And in a few cases that was true, but overall the style of song selection wasn’t right for me to get the maximum enjoyment out of it. For those fans out there who are ten or fifteen years older than me and would know these songs better, then your enjoyment of this album may be completely the reverse.
Overall though, my main problem with the album is that I would like to have heard a real Deep Purple-izing of the tracks they covered, and that just isn’t the case here. And without a doubt the main reason behind that is because it was all recorded separately, and not together as a band. In the long run, this project gave the band something to do as they whiled away the months of isolation created by the Covid-19 pandemic, and taking that into account, you can only say that while some like me may not be jumping out of their skin over the song choice, it is a worthy and worthwhile project to have undertaken.