Glenn Hughes: Liverpool is the place for me

Apr 25 2008 by Mike Chapple, Liverpool Daily Post

Mike Chapple talks to Glenn Hughes about life with Deep Purple and his love for this city

GLENN HUGHES really shouldn’t be here and he’s the first to admit it. He traversed the golden age of heavy rock through the 1970s and 80s as frontman and bass player with the likes of Trapeze and Deep Purple in a head-on blizzard of birds, booze and Colombian marching powder.

But there’s a heavy rental price to pay for a room inside the gilded palace of sin, as some of his best mates in the music world discovered. Keith Moon, John Bonham, Phil Lynott and Purple guitarist Tommy Bolin all passed prematurely through the exit door.

The boy from Cannock also teetered on the edge of oblivion before a pivotal moment changed – and saved – his life.

Today, in his 55th year, he’s 25 miles outside Beverly Hills.

It’s 8.30 in the morning on the veranda of his luxury villa, the sun is beaming down on the deep azure blue of the Pacific Ocean, and he’s talking to the Daily Post 5,000 miles away about how understandably happy he is about his current situation.

“I worked my ass off for this place, so why shouldn’t I be?” he laughs, the Black Country twang still prevailing over Californian drawl.

“When I was back in Cannock recently, this guy came up and said why would you want to live over there when you could live here.

“I’m British and proud of it, right – but there’s the weather for a start!”

He’s glad, though, to be coming back to Liverpool for a Carling Academy gig on Saturday, June 7, one of only three dates on a UK tour.

“Liverpool is the place for me musically,” says Hughes, who regards The Beatles as a seminaI inspirational influence.

“It’s a great city, one of the few that are really significant, and I’ve always loved the music coming out of there.”

Liverpool is also the setting for an anecdote summing up the turbulent times of chemical excess in Deep Purple Mark IV, when he and David Coverdale replaced original singer Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover to join the remainders Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Lord, and Ian Paice.

It was March, 1976, and after three years of life on the edge the band finally toppled over on the final date at the Liverpool Empire.

“It imploded on that night through an accumulation of literally too much sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” he recalls before exclaiming: “The things we did on that tour!

“We played five gigs in six days, and I never slept once because of the stuff that I was taking. I knew things were not right on stage in Glasgow when I started to see things that weren’t there!

“And, to be honest, by the time we got to Liverpool, there’s very little I can remember about what happened.”

To fill in the memory gap, legend has it that Coverdale departed the Empire stage in tears and asked to leave, only to be told by remaining original members Lord and Paice that there was no band left to quit – they’d already made the decision to split beforehand without telling anyone else.