Ian Gillan – Deep Purple

The phrase Talking Gibberish, tell me about that.

Well, I think it all started with a c- with my songwriting, and it's a technique.

Because I work with a band that writes the music first and I have to write the songs afterwards, it's kinda tricky to, um, keep up with what's going on.

So I had so many times when I was trying to write a song and then they decided to completely scrap the song or change it, and I thought, "Well, why don't I just do the basics first and do the tune and just put some gibberish words to it so that I can get the phrasing right and the time and the meter and all that sort of thing so it scans properly, and then I'll finish it off later?" And that's pretty much how I did.

So I s- I started writing gibberish, and then, uh, on stage, I remember a long time ago at the Lyceum when we'd barely started, Ritchie broke a string and he came across and he said, "I'll, I'll be a few minutes.

Tell 'em a joke." And [laughs] I'd never had to do that before, so, um, I started talking gibberish on that occasion, too, and I, I still do today between songs.

It's, uh, kind of a trademark.

Most of the stories I'm gonna be talking about are events that have taken place that I think people will find interesting over the years since I started and up, right up to date.

And is Splat a phrase that you had for a long time, or was it something that came to you after the songs for the new album came together?

I've had Splat hanging around for two or three years, but the problem with that and the word itself, because it's onomatopoeic, of course, it's, sounds pretty terminal.

So, and, uh, through my mind was the, uh, the old joke about an insect hitting the windscreen.

What's the last thing that goes through his mind? And so I related that to myself as I was thinking, as I have done about, uh, sort of surreal ideas connected with the future of mankind, and I had this idea of a metamorphosis in the way of the life of butterflies and that sort of thing because i- there was a sort of Armageddon existential scenario floating around because of the pop statistic.

So I thought of this metamorphosis in relation to the insect hitting the windscreen.

I thought, well, if the sudden end comes when I am hitting the windscreen, the first thing that would go through my mind would be King Arthur followed by Motorhead followed by the Roman Empire followed by God knows what, only, um, little tin cans to float around and explore space, but we would be an intelligent energy, albeit a very primitive one compared to all the other alien forces out there.

So it's, uh, a fun concept.

It's just, it gave me an opportunity to write about serious issues with hope for a future because I didn't like the doomsday scenario connected to Splat without that thought.

So it served me very well and, um, I think we had a lot of fun with the graphics and the artwork connected with it, and I certainly had a, a really good time with the very loose concept of metamorphosis.

Seems to be an undercurrent of humor with the album as well.

An undercurrent of humor.

Well, I hope so.

I think probably some things if you talk about them literally, it becomes ...

You, you get bogged down in semantics and taken off into side issues to qualify this and qualify that.

But if you take the broader picture and deal with it perhaps euphemistically, then you can bring a lot of humor into it, yes.

And I think if you see the funny side of things and don't take it too seriously, you can probably enjoy it a little more.

I've often found that.