Ian Gillan, the Deep Purple singer who left, was fired, came back and won’t say goodbye

Ian Gillan

Photo: Stefan Brending (2eight) / CC BY-SA 3.0 de, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 19, 1945 Chiswick
Occupation	Singer
Awards	Order of the Badge of Honour

Deep Purple once named a tour The Long Goodbye and then simply kept going. Their singer has spent the past year explaining why there will be no formal ending: Ian Gillan says he will stop when he no longer has the strength, and that the band would rather carry on until it stops than announce a last night. On the last weekend of October that position ran into something he could not argue with: the band postponed its concerts in Leipzig and Hamburg because of what its statement called “a medical emergency involving Ian Gillan, which has resulted in his current hospitalisation”. No diagnosis or return date was given.

The voice most people hear when they think of Deep Purple is his: the scream that climbs out of “Child in Time”, the deadpan storytelling of “Smoke on the Water”. He is also the member who walked out at the band’s commercial peak, was fired after the reunion, and was asked back each time because nobody else sounded right. He likes to describe himself as a man without ambition. His record shows someone who has always known exactly where his limits were, and left when he reached them.

The training started in church. Gillan sang as a boy soprano in Hounslow, the west London suburb where he grew up after his birth at Chiswick Maternity Hospital on 19 August 1945, and his mother’s father had been an opera singer. Elvis Presley records pulled him away from his O-level studies. In 1965 he joined Episode Six and began writing songs with its bassist, Roger Glover.

In June 1969 Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Lord and Ian Paice saw Episode Six in a pub, offered Gillan the job and took Glover too. One of Gillan’s first contributions in rehearsals was the melody and lyric of “Child in Time”, the centrepiece of Deep Purple in Rock (1970), and its scream reached Tim Rice. Gillan sang Jesus on the original 1970 recording of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, recording his whole part in three hours. For the film he asked £250,000 plus pay for the band whose tour it would disrupt; the producers cast Ted Neeley instead.

Machine Head (1972) gave the band “Highway Star” and “Smoke on the Water”, but the pace was wearing him down. He had collapsed with hepatitis in Chicago in November 1971, he was drinking heavily, and he wrote “Smooth Dancer” about Blackmore. For Who Do We Think We Are (1973) he recorded his vocals after the others had finished and left. On tour in Dayton, Ohio, he wrote to the managers resigning from the band, effective 30 June 1973.

The years outside were uneven. A hotel near Oxford and a motorcycle company failed, while Kingsway Studios in London worked out. The jazz-rock Ian Gillan Band ran into punk and sold poorly; the harder-edged Gillan did better, returning him to the British charts with Mr. Universe (1979) and to Top of the Pops with Glory Road (1980), a record he rated as his best since Machine Head. In 1983 he replaced Ronnie James Dio in Black Sabbath for Born Again and a world tour, reading the old lyrics off a perspex folder that the stage dry ice kept hiding. He called it “the longest party I’d ever been to”.

A year later the classic line-up reformed for Perfect Strangers (1984). By 1989 the old friction was back: Blackmore called a rehearsal without him, and after a row Glover told him, “Ian you’ve gone too far this time.” He was out. That year he also sang on the Rock Aid Armenia remake of “Smoke on the Water”, the start of a lasting bond with Armenia that later produced a music school in Gyumri and the charity project WhoCares with Tony Iommi. Glover, Lord and Paice brought him back in 1992 for The Battle Rages On, writing over material begun with Joe Lynn Turner. Blackmore quit the following year, Steve Morse arrived, and Purpendicular (1996) opened the band’s longest stable period. In 2016 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Deep Purple.

Gillan’s account of himself does not always match the paper trail. “I haven’t ever had any ambition in my life,” he has said, yet he spent the late 1970s trying to rebuild under his own name the success he had walked away from. He disliked Made in Japan, and live albums in general; it is now one of the most celebrated live albums of its era. And since the mid-1990s the band has done better on stage than in the shops. The retirement question shows the same gap. In a November 2025 interview with Uncut he said: “I’ve only got 30 percent vision. That won’t get better,” and added, “I think if I lose my energy I’m going to stop. I don’t want to be an embarrassment to anyone. We’re not far off that.” In July 2026 he told The Independent: “I didn’t say that at all, and I never did say that,” and, of his eyesight, “Well, I don’t sing through my eyes.” Both statements are on the record.

He treats the words as his main job in the band: “Words have to sound good. They have to sound like an instrument.” His wife, Bron, to whom he dedicated “Keep It Warm” on Born Again, died of heart failure in Exeter on 19 November 2022, after almost forty years together; they married in 1984. Their daughter, Grace, is also a singer. He lives near Lyme Regis in Dorset.

Bob Ezrin has produced every Deep Purple album since Now What?! (2013), Simon McBride replaced Morse on guitar in 2022, and =1 (2024) was followed on 3 July 2026 by Splat!, built on a concept of Gillan’s: the end of humanity, “not in any crude apocalyptic sense but as a metamorphosis beyond physical existence”, as he wrote in the liner notes. “Guilt Trippin'” brought back the screaming delivery he had not used on record for years, and the album reached number three in Germany and number two in Austria. Ten days later the band played the Montreux Jazz Festival, in the town where “Smoke on the Water” began, on an 86-date world tour across 28 countries.

That tour is where his future will be settled. In early November 2026 the band was looking for new dates for Leipzig and Hamburg while the schedule ran on towards the Royal Albert Hall on 25 November and Latin America in December. Beyond it, Gillan has booked something he has never done before: Talking Gib’rish, a spoken-word tour of British stages from Bournemouth to London in April and May 2027. For now, the next date on his own calendar is one where he does not have to sing.

Selected Recordings

Accidentally on Purpose (1988)
Naked Thunder (1990)
Toolbox (1991)
Dreamcatcher (1997)
Gillan's Inn (2006)
One Eye to Morocco (2009)
Greatest (2012)
Ian Gillan & The Javelins (2018)

Tags: singers, hard rock, Deep Purple, Ian Gillan, Jesus Christ Superstar, Ritchie Blackmore, Smoke on the Water

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