HALLELUJAH (I AM THE PREACHER) / APRIL (PART ONE)

This Hallelujah single is one of those records which you should necessarily take when you see them at a flea market for one or two euros, unless you already have the song on one of the several Deep Purple collections.

The A-side Hallelujah is a great song by the early Mk2 of Deep Purple, recorded in the summer of 1969 with Ian Gillan (voc) and Roger Glover (bass), though the Mk1 members Nick Simper (bass) and Rod Evans (voc) were still in the band at that time. The other band members Jon Lord (org), Richie Blackmore (git) and Ian Paice (dr) weren't entirely comfortable about Simper's retroverted bass playing style and Evans' voice which, as they thought, fit perfectly into balladesque music, but not into the hard rock that Deep Purple wanted to do.

So the three remaining musicians kept looking for new musicians, who they found in the pop group Episode 6 - and with whom they recorded this song; Evans and Simper were fired a few weeks later (!). Of course the band did their most influential stuff in the early 70s, but I think that Gillan had totally wrecked his voice after one year of playing with the band. I'm just thinking about his vocal part in the Concerto for Group and Orchestra and the recordings for In Rock, compared with how he pushed himself to the limits on Made in Japan. Hallelujah is the first recording session with Gillan, and he absolutely rules in this song. Originally the song was a slow pop number by the popular songwriter duo Greenaway/Cook which has now turned to a great late 60s rock tune with a very nice guitar solo bei Ritchie Blackmore. I actually prefer this song to most of the numbers on Machine Head; anyway it can well be regarded as an interesting halfway between Mk1 and Mk2, and as a predecessor to the innovative and outstanding In Rock album of Deep Purple, whose best songs were already recorded in the autumn of 1969.

A b-side was now hard to find for the band because it would have been irritating to take a number sung by Rod Evans on the other side of the single. So Deep Purple cut out the entirely instrumental symphonic first part of their 1969 epic April and put it on the B-side. Of course, the whole track is better than a part of it, but for the means of a single it is a great solution.

If you own a LP player and this small adapter for to play singles this is an unusually rewarding single to get, because of the historic value and the great music on it. The single isn't essential, but really good. A fine listen and highly recommendable, given that none of the reissued Deep Purple studio albums features this recording as a bonus track.