according to Ian Gillan in the early days of Deep Purple he was so poor that he had to share one set of clothes with Roger Glover he didn't even own a pair of shoes he and Roger were starving sometimes they didn't even have money for food so Gillan had to steal dog biscuits to get through the day and when he went to the band's manager John Keta who managed Deep Purple from 1968 until 1976 to ask for some money to buy clothes Keta brutally said I knew you were troubl the moment I set eyes on
you if you asked me for money one more time I'll throw you back in the gutter where I found you Gillan was shocked he felt like he was being dipped in crap those words remained etched into the back of his skull for decades I had never heard anything so horrible in my life Gillan says if you can ride through crap like that and come out the other side you can cope with most things Ian Gillan actually had a poor childhood his father was a storekeeper at a factory in West London Ian grew up moving from
one Council flat to another and they ended up in a three-bedroom semi detached on a council estate in Cranford in those days there was rationing and his family had to be Thrifty his dad put 5 lbs on on the mantle piece for the weekly shop and on Saturday mornings they took that to the butcher they would hand over their coupons and get a lump of meat that had to last the rest of the week life was harder back then Gillan says in the very early days of his career you'd get 5 lbs for a gig
and that had to be split five ways with something put aside for petrol so there was never very much left Gillan recalls so according to Ian Gillan he was very poor in Deep Purple however that was the case only in the early days of Deep Purple after the Breakthrough of deep purple and rock and then the massive success of the 1972 album Machine Head the band started making lots of money we had a lot of money back in 1972 but it didn't keep us happy Roger Glover recalls however Ian Gillan says he did not see
a penny until he filed the lawsuit it took a lot of lawsuits to see a penny Gillan says and eventually the band's accountant went to jail but it was common in those days I tend to have just enough for next week I call the office each morning and say can I afford this generally the answer is no when finally Gillan started getting money the first big thing he bought was a rollsroyce silvercloud secondhand for 2,750 lb about $6,800 in 1973 about $55,000 today he explained I was young and I thought I was Immortal and everything
I wanted I must have my manager said at the time that a Rolls-Royce probably cost a quarter of a house he was right my first house cost me about 122,000 $30,000 and those days in 1973 Ian Gillan quit d purple and the music industry to become a businessman he invested his Deep Purple money in three diverse Ventures a London recording studio Kingsway recorders formerly delaye Lee Studios where many purple classes have been recorded a hotel and North Stoke Oxfordshire and a motorcycle engine manufacturing firm Gillan says after I left Deep Purple I didn't get paid
in 10 years in the early '70s I bought a dilapitated hotel in North Stoke for about 100,000 and spent the same amount again renovating it putting in a guitar-shaped swimming pool painting the bathrooms purple and installing gold dolphin Taps but I had also spent 150,000 starting starting up a motorcycle team as well which failed as a business venture because it didn't get enough sponsorship I had a cash flow crisis and had to close the hotel and sell it at a loss I never have done well from business I should have kept to music but more
about that later in Spring 1974 Ian Gillan began to work on a diverse set of songs with session musician at his record ing Studio but purple's old management team wasn't interested eventually gillan's guest appearance at Roger Glover's butterfly ball live show at the Royal Albert Hall London on the 16th of October 1975 prompted him to resume a singing career and form a new band initially Ronnie James deal was supposed to sing it but Richie Blackmore banned him to take part in it so Ian formed a new ban initially called scan grenade but the management insisted
to change the band's name to the Ian Gillan band for obvious name recognition the musicians in the band played a jazzy funky stuff which didn't appeal to either the audience or Gillan himself and when the keyboardist Colin towns came up with a song called fighting man Ian loved it in 1978 he left his own ban and formed a new ban with Colin towns called simply Gillan the Ian Gillan band basist John gustofson commented Gillan decided he didn't like the band's Direction and wanted to do more rock stuff in reality he should have put his foot
down a lot earlier I personally was expecting deep purple stuff but he let us do whatever we wanted originally Steve bird was on guitar Liam jinaki on drums and John McCoy on bass the band pursued a progressive rock director ction releasing their debut album in September 1978 although they could get a record deal only in Japan Australia and New Zealand the album was released in Japan in Autumn 1978 before a new album was recorded bird was replaced by Bernie tet and Pete Barnacle by drummer Mick Underwood Ian gillan's former colleague in episode 6 Mr Universe
did well for week says Gillan we went through a list of record companies from A to Z but we couldn't get a record deal stiff records told us to get off and about six or seven other labels said the same thing we had 28 shows in Britain sold out and no one wanted to know we couldn't get a deal in the end we went back to a again and signed with a tiny company called acrobat released in October 1979 Mr un Universe reached number 11 in the UK albums charts and then acrobat went bankrupt so
Mr Universe disappeared from the chart says Gillan but after that the phone wouldn't stop ringing we decided to sign with Virgin because they'd been back on us straight away they were hot I likeed their attitude and it worked out great we had some super years with Virgin Glory Road 1980 reached number three in the UK albums charts Future Shock 1981 went number two in the UK album chart and we had double trouble also 1981 which was a combination of a live album recorded at the reading festival and a studio album and then we had magic
1982 the album magic actually failed to achieve the chart success of Glory Road or Future Shock peing at number 17 on the UK album chart in 1980 Gillan reached the peak of their success releasing the album Glory Road however the ban remained unknown in the US and were unable to raise any interests there despite a long and difficult 1980 US tour by 1981 the band members became disgruntled that their European and Japanese success was not translating into increased Financial rewards and after the Future Shock album whilst on tour in Germany guitarist Bernie toret left the
band just before they had to fly back to the UK to appear on top of the pops meanwhile Richie Blackmore's band Rainbow wasn't commercially successful either rainbow had a solid fan base Richie Blackmore's fans who knew him from Deep Purple but that wasn't enough for Blackmore he wanted the band to become really popular he asked Ronnie to write some commercial songs but Ronnie did nothing so Blackmore fired Ronnie and he asked in Gillan to join the ban at the end of 1978 but Gillan turned him down Richie tried to get Gillan again in the ban
in 1980 but Gillan turned him down again he was too happy with his own ban in 1982 their success came to an end gillan's band collapsed financially he couldn't pay the wages there was no money I was on the verge of bankruptcy his recording studio had gone the hotel had gone he had lost the Motorcycle Company his car his house everything gillan's musicians were very angry basis John McCoy hit the band's manager Phil Banfield according to Ian Gillan he and his mates were on an equal share of income but they weren't on an equal share
of any cost so he told him that he was going to rejoin Deep Purple he went to meet with Richie Blackmore in Connecticut and when he went back his ban was over in 1983 Ian Gillan replaced Ronnie James Deo in Black Sabbath and when Richie Blackmore made up his mind Ian left Black Sabbath to join a reunited d purple in April 1984 it's actually rumored that each member of d purple Mark I was paid a million dollar to reunite Roger Glover dispelled the rumors saying that they had been offered $2 million long before the reunion
between the five of them just to do one concert and for the reunion he said no they weren't paid a million doll each to do it it was a legitimate ordinary record deal which was worth up in the million somewhere but that was between the five of them not each the reformed ban signed a worldwide deal with polygram with Mercury records releasing their albums in the US and poor records in the UK and other countries the album Perfect Strangers was recorded in Vermont and released in October 1984 the album was commercially successful reaching number five
in the UK album charts and number 12 on the billboard 200 in the US perfect strangers became the second Deep Purple album to go platinum in the US following Machine Head and the live album made Japan would also finally hit Platinum Status in the US in 1986 the same year Machine Head increased a double Platinum financially the reunion tour was also a tremendous success they played 49 concerts in the United States and 44 concerts in other countries including one concert in the United Kingdom in the US the 1985 tour outgross every other artist except Bruce
Springsteen after that their success began to decline ever since the 1984 reunion Richie Blackmore established himself as more equal than the others getting a bigger slice of the pay and making decisions to hire and fire people as it was his own ban in 1988 Blackmore decided that Gillan should be fired from the ban for bad behavior too much drinking affected his performance in gillan's words it became so difficult to work with Blackmore there was antagonism he wanted to do more touring and Richie wanted to do less touring and then they had immed and Gillan said
why don't we go to South America why don't we go to Russia why don't we go all over the world we're a live band and the next day Richie went to the management and said well it's him or me and they chose Richie and that was fine and then they made a record with another singer I can't remember his name and the record label said either you get in back in the band or we're tearing up the contract so I went back in deep purple and Richie went crazy he didn't like it so eventually he
walked out so in normal terms in a family or something like that because we are a family you think it was like a divorce he walked out he's gone but he wanted to keep control of the ban after having walked out and he's been a pain in the butt ever since so Gillan rejoined d purple in 1992 to record the album the battle rages on the album had already been partially completed with Joe ly Turner Gillan recorded his own vocal Melodies and lyrics which unsurprisingly Drew criticism from Blackmore although Blackmore wanted Turner to remain the
singer of the band he grudgingly relented after requesting and eventually receiving $250,000 in his bank account Blackmore still disagreed with the decision creating more tension between himself and the rest of the band especially Gillan Blackmore left d purple for the second and final time in November 1993 so after that Joe Satriani joined d purple to complete the tour and then Steve Morris became the guitarist of the band Deep Purple toured a lot with Morris they didn't sell a lot of their new records however they made a lot of money from touring so so Ian Gillan
and the rest of the band finally became multi-millionaires gillan's estimated Nest worth is about 40 to 50 million according to the website Market realist.com his salary is $300,000 plus and the annual income is $4 million plus and looks like Richie Blackmore's income was very modest over the past 25 to 30 years in 2015 he demanded 750,00 000 pounds in unpaid royalty and cost from the two management companies over the music he made with deep purple according to the mail on Sunday Blackmore initiated a claim against d purple overseas for 67,000 saying the firm charged too
much failed to report income received and used an incorrect exchange rate he was also suing HEC Enterprises set up in 1967 by Deep purple's original investors for 102,000 saying it made incorrect adjustments failed to report some publishing income and apply charges in excess of agreed limits in addition he claimed 43,500 for the cost of an audit covering accounting by the two firms between 2007 and 2013 actually those companies had paid out to his former bandmates in Deep Purple Mark I 12 years ago so Richie was a little slow on the uptake in 2003 Ian Gillan
John Lord a pace and Roger Glover sued the two companies without Blackmore's involvement reaching a settlement and in 2015 Blackmore argued that settlement should have involved him demanding 1 of up to 85% of the income from 14 albums in 2018 Richie Blackmore said that he would like to do maybe one more show with the rest of Deep Purple he said just do that and go hey everybody it's just one show for all the Deep Purple fans that like the mark 2 lineup that was my idea in the beginning but when you're talking to managements of
purple it gets complicated they want their money for this and that so it's not like you call up your old friends and say hey let's just have a good time in play there's lots of fans that want to hear it once you have managements and agents and promoters getting involved it gets so complicated that everybody just calls back and says it's too complicated in 2022 Ian Gillan put an end to rumors about a possible reunion with Richie Blackmore this is what he said I think the idea of a call for a grand reunion or something
like that it would be utterly disrespectful to the living breathing Deep Purple it would be awful the atmosphere would be terrible it would be artificial it would be only for money nothing else because there's no love there there's no Affinity 25% of the essence of Deep Purple is improvisation and we've got a musician now that is absolutely unbelievable and I don't don't know how much Richie has been practicing or anything like that it's the ex-wife and we don't want to get back together again
