• AllMyVinyl #131
• Band: Deep Purple
• Album Title: The House of Blue Light
• Release Date: 12 Jan 1987
• Date purchased: 18 Jan 2025
• Location purchased: Josey Records
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 1
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

This was the first Deep Purple album I was fully onboard for.  If you go back two albums (Come Taste the Band), I wasn’t even aware of them.  The one before this – their big comeback album in 1984 I wanted to hate out of the gate because it broke up the Born Again lineup of Black Sabbath.  So while I did buy it new, it was a “I want to hate this”, but then couldn’t – it was too good.  However, the next one (this one) I was fully onboard for as shockingly, it was the first Deep Purple studio album to have the same lineup as the album before it in quite a number of years.   So in 1987 I was like “OK, bring it boys, I’m ready for this one”.  And we got an album that wasn’t as good as Perfect Strangers, but still had some great songs on it.  Nobody will ever claim that Blue Light is the band’s best album at all, but the general reputation of it being a bad album is an assertion I don’t believe.  The album has quite a few songs I like a lot.

I was there right away and bought House of Blue Light very early on.  Not on vinyl when it was new, but I did buy it in cassette tape.  At this point on time I hadn’t yet got a CD player (that came Christmas 1987), and as such cassettes were still my main music at this point since I was all about my walkman in this era.  I thought I still had that cassette in 2025, but I don’t – I had a look at which ones I still had now and it’s not there.  I also have a vague memory of buying it on CD in 1988 as well, as it was still the then new album, so I would have bought a bunch of stuff then, so that’s probably where my CD came from.  Vinyl didn’t hit the equation until 2025.  The town I live in got a new Josey Records store late in 2024, so one day in early 2025 I just popped in, and one of their albums they had being featured was this one, so I picked it up with that internal “yoink – mine” sound you experience when you see something you hadn’t planned on getting, and knew it was there.  That’s what the picture of the cover is – I put it on the car seat driving home, and snapped a pic to a show a friend what I found that day.  Very pleasant surprise randomly finding this vinyl.  Was a fair price and in good shape, so I was happy with that.

A word about versions.  The original 1987 CD is the version I’d consider to be “the” version as it’s got longer versions of nearly every song.  I won’t list them all here, but a few examples are Bad Attitude at 5:04 on 87 CD and 4:32 on other versions. Dead or Alive is 5:00 on 87 CD, but 4:42 elsewhere.  The worst change is “Strangeways” which is 7:35 on the 87 CD, but is anywhere from 5:55 to 5:59 on the other versions – about a minute and a half difference.  I’ve never quite found out why this OG version is like this.  I still have my original print CD in 2025, and I’ve never let Apple Music overwrite that rip with their version because of this.  To make it more confusing, the version on Apple Music has different times than what’s listed on Wikipedia for any of the versions there.  *AND* to top it off, the vinyl I have in my hand doesn’t match the track lengths for ANY version, so what the fuck, guys?   It’s why my 1987 CD remains the preferred version.   If this album ever gets a deluxe box set, I wonder if they’ll use that version as the base – it is 40 years old in less than two years, so we could get that.  I’d like that, but then if they use the short version (or worse come up with another length), I’ll get annoyed.  Go look all the way at the bottom, I have a short spreadsheet showing the various times of the songs.  It’s fairly annoying, actually.  :)

Anyway, to some music.

Bad Attitude – The album leads off with my favorite track.  Bad Attitude I thought was a perfect lead single, a great song, and what I thought was a PERFECT followup to the Perfect Strangers album.  This would have fit well on that album.  It’s perhaps not their most musically diverse song – it doesn’t stray far from the traditional Deep Purple sound, but that’s fine with me.  Ritchie’s solo is one that more matches the song vs trying to dominate everything and do his own thing.  It’s all put together quite well.   The underlying beat is simple, but works well, drives the song along.  It remains my favorite song on the album after all this time, it’s not lost any attraction for me. I loved seeing this on MTV back in the day – the video was mostly them in the studio, but someone who was into 80’s video effects created these video effects where half the screen would be black and white and the rest would be colour, or be split into different sections on the screen.  I always loved that.

The Unwritten Law – This song has an odd beat that runs through the verse parts of the song.  I can’t quite put my finger on it.  I do like it, I just don’t know how to describe it.  It also has this “clap” sound which sounds very much of its era.  Actually, as I listen I notice the beat keeps going through the rest, they just lost the “clap” sound.  In fact as I listen now, I’m spending all my time listening to see if that carries on, I just blew through most of the song listening to just that.  Must really stick out as the rest of the song got overlooked.   I remember thinking in the past that the chorus sounded like more traditional Deep Purple, yet the verses part has a different sound to it.   It’s interesting in that they have different sounds that they put on top of that underlying beat, makes for a song with a few different sounds to it, despite the one running through all of it.   These words flew out of my brain kind of oddly, feels like I didn’t actually say anything about the song itself, just focused on one part.  There’s where my brain was at 9:13AM on Sunday morning the 4th of May 2025 (the exact moment I finished this song).  It ends with a drum solo outro, which was definitely something that could be lopped off to make the song shorter.  Given the fiasco that song lengths are on this album, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was done on some of the shorter versions.

Call of the Wild – This was the second single from the album and given it was 1987, it had a video.  The video however was very un-Deep Purple as while the song was them, they’re barely in it. In fact the “plot” of the video was that Deep Purple refused to do the video, and they had to drag in randos off the street to be in the video.  They show the band at various places saying “No” and they all appear together at the end saying “See, you didn’t need us”.  The rest of it is just random people doing well, random stupid stuff.  I never much cared for that, because at the time I just wanted to SEE Deep Purple, so the video turned me off to the song, and to some extent that remains to this day.  I always viewed the song as a lesser song, definitely not one that should have been a single choice.  It remains in this spot in 2025, I think the video clearly clouded my “enjoyment” (or lack thereof) of the song, as as such this still doesn’t do much for me now.  The video STARTS before the song with Ian Gillan on the phone saying “no” to being in the video.  I thought the laugh he had there reminded me of a laugh I heard him use in Black Sabbath (opening to Disturbing the Priest or the live version of the song “Black Sabbath”).  But could just be me – I’ve included just his “laugh” from the video below as an embedded mp3 file.  The song is a more upbeat, lighter song than Deep Purple usually does – even Ritchie’s “solo” was more upbeat than usual.

Mad Dog – This song starts off with a little more raw of a guitar sound from Ritchie.  This is IMO one of the weaker songs on the album.  It doesn’t do a lot for me.  The Deep Purple Podcast guys both ranked it 3.5 out of 5, but I’d go a bit lower than that.  It’s not actively bad, but it just strikes me as a bit of a filler song.  There’s a keyboard solo in the middle which even by Lord standards was one of his weaker ones.  Love a good keyboard solo, but this one..  Jon could have done better.  It just felt stuck in the same gear, never went anywhere interesting for me.

Black & White – Ritchie’s guitar riff that runs through the background of this song has a bit of a different vibe to it that I quite liked – I’d call it “choppy”?  Kind of hard to put a word to that underlying guitar sound here.  In fact I quite liked Ritchie in this one.  Good solo.  Not my favorite vocals by Ian, though.  Drums sound a bit flat, though.  Overall, I did enjoy the song, despite those two negatives.  This is one that’s a full minute longer on my 1987 CD version than the others.  That’s borne out by the outro which is a VERY long fade.  To be honest, it does go on a bit at the end so for this one I think the shorter version works better.

Hard Lovin’ Woman – The counterpart to the 1970 track “Hard Lovin’ Man”.  It’s not really a sequel as such, but you can’t help but think of the 1970 original when this is on.  A definitely classic Deep Purple sound, from the overall construction of the track to Ritchie’s solo.  this song is definitely constructed from their usual toolbox of tricks.  Which is a tasty toolbox of course, so this song is quite enjoyable, just not much in the way of experimentation here.  While I’m not raving about this one, I do really love the track.  Only thing I don’t care for is Ian sings in a higher than normal register in the verses, but as music goes it’s darned good – has a high energy level that doesn’t give up.

The Spanish Archer – The title of this one made me think we’d be having some flamenco guitar, and that’s not what this song is, although I really wanted some of that after the title.  Having said that, I did really enjoy this track.  I do particularly love the delivery of the vocals for the chorus , which is “I’m getting out, I’m losing ground… The Spanish Archer’s going to bring you down” (they vary a little depending on which chorus is is).  A foot tapper for me for sure.  Towards the end there’s a nice bass part I would have loved to have heard more of.  Not a lot of Roger standout moments on this album.  This also has a hard ending, which is unusual.

Strangeways – This one is strange.  It’s also the longest song on the album by far (7:35 on my version, but about 5:55 on average on the others). It’s well named.  There’s a lot of stereo effects on this song which will mess with you if you’re wearing headphones.  For some reason the line of lyric that included “academy of fear” always stuck out to me.  don’t know why.  This song is one I find hard to describe, since it’s got a whole lot of different sounds that aren’t the norm for Purple.  I do love it, definitely one of those “embrace the weirdness” moments.  The Deep Purple Podcast guys both gave this a 2.5 out of 5, but I don’t agree with that, I’d give it a 4 for the sheer absurdity speaking to me.  Having said that I can easily see why people wouldn’t like this song, but I was into the bizarre here.

Mitzi Dupree – An Ian Gillan “story” song.  It’s basically him telling the story of meeting a woman named Mitzi Dupree, who was an exotic dancer who, well,  did things with ping pong balls and was known as “The Queen of the Ping Pongs”.  I won’t get into it here, but you can read about her here a bit if you’d like.  A healthy percentage of the singing is less singing and more “speaking” – not true speech but singing of such slow nature it is almost speaking – Roger Waters does a lot of that.  It starts with a positively dirty guitar riff that I really love, great stuff before the rest of the band kicks in.  No clue if Ian’s story is real or not, but it doesn’t matter.  Killer track that tends to get overlooked by most.  Love the part when Ian sings “Oooooh – have another drink”.  haha.  This entire song is SO Ian.

Dead or Alive – One of my favorite things, the couple of minute long fast paced track.  It’s probably the fastest song on the album, actually.  Definitely a song I’d say Pacey might have issues playing live in 2025.  This one has both a keyboard and a guitar solo, that’s so Purple.  It’s not one of the most varied songs, but I do love the fast pace of the thing.  Not a ton to say here except it’s a five minutes of fast paced Deep Purple, so that’s not a bad thing.

As I sad above, this album isn’t as killer as its predecessor (Perfect Strangers), but on its own it’s not a bad album.  The opening track for me is still the best track on the album – nothing I listened to today made me change my mind there.  That’s not to say this is a bad album – far from it.  There’s some great tracks here. I *ADORE* Bad Attitude, and I really wish more people would pay attention to Mitzi Dupree – great forgotten Purple track.

Shortly after this the revolving door of personnel started again (Hello Roundabout?) when Ian departed.  It took several more albums for two studio albums in a row to have the same lineup (four more to be more precise).   But no matter who is in Deep Purple and when, they always seem to produce some killer tunes.  Give this one a listen, I’m sure you’ll find something you like in the house of blue light.

Long live Deep Purple!