8 Perfect Strangers

Can you recapture the past? Will the flames burn again so fiercely? These were the questions we asked ourselves as we stood, together again for the first time in over ten years, somewhat shakily in the mid-eighties. Deep Purple. We were a family, albeit a troubled one, and the spirit of what had gone before was drawing us together again; unlikely as that may have seemed just a year earlier. We had each of us been on great Odysseys and that meant that we were not the raw individuals that had made things work in '69.

The song refers to uncertainties about ourselves and about the reaction from the public, about our music and our integrity. A recognition that the days of gay abandon had passed and that a new phase was being entered. And so, from my point of view, the loneliness and singularity of all these vulnerabilities being put under a spotlight, a strand of silver, for the first time.