Made in Japan features powerful versions of seven songs – Highway Star, Child in Time, Smoke on the Water, The Mule, Strange Kind of Woman, Lazy, and Space Truckin’ (later versions came with a second CD with encores from the Japan concerts – Black Night, Speed King, and Lucille). The album’s peak UK chart position of number 16 doesn’t really tell the full story; it sold really well for a long period of time and, even now, regularly wins accolades.

Not for nothing did Rolling Stone magazine rank Made in Japan at number 32 in its list of the fifty greatest live albums of all time, back in 2015 (a readers’ poll in the same magazine, in 2012, put it at number six). Not for nothing did a rock journalist once declare: “There are moments on this record that have never been beaten in the history of rock music”. To listen to Made in Japan now is to be reminded not just of the band’s musical prowess but also of their prominence as a pioneering heavy rock act alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

Over their career Deep Purple have sold some 100 million albums and played live to more than 10 million people. And of course no profile of them is complete without a reference to the fact that, in the year they played in Japan, the Guinness Book of World Records labelled them “the loudest group in the world”.

Deep Purple have had numerous line-up changes over the decades – indeed, Gillan himself walked out in 1973, returned in 1984, was fired in 1989 and rejoined again a few years later – but, unlike Zeppelin and Sabbath, are still recording and touring. They’re “not just phoning in sub-par new albums and playing clubs but writing genuinely good stuff and selling out arenas”, as Record Collector magazine put it a couple of months ago.

The band today consists of Gillan, Glover, Paice, Don Airey on keyboards and guitarist Simon McBride. Jon Lord died in July 2012; Blackmore, after quitting Purple, founded the rock act Rainbow and, later, the “renaissance folk rock project”, Blackmore’s Night.

Things have not always gone smoothly for Deep Purple, perhaps not surprisingly in a band that has been in operation for decades. There were well-documented tensions between Blackmore and Gillan. The band itself went on an eight-year-long hiatus between 1976 and 1984. And in Gillan’s absences his place as lead singer has been taken by, first, David Coverdale and then Joe Lynn Turner. (Glover, for his part, has in the past produced such acts as Status Quo and Nazareth, the latter for their Seventies albums Razamanaz, Loud ‘n’ Proud and Rampant).

Deep Purple founder Jon Lord dies

Purple release a new album, ‘+1’, on July 19 and are currently on tour with a string of dates that includes concerts in North America with Yes. Purple play Glasgow’s OVO Hydro on Sunday, November 10 – all of 53 years since the earliest version of the band played Glasgow for the very first time, at Green’s Playhouse in March 1971.