In a new interview with Paul Brannigan for Classic Rock, Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, The Dead Daisies) looks back upon a lifetime of fabulous, and sometimes terrifying, rock 'n' roll adventures. An excerpt from the feature follows...
Dressed in black, and sporting tinted sunglasses, a pashmina scarf and two fistfuls of chunky rings, we join Hughes today in an upscale boutique hotel in Cambridge. The Voice Of Rock, arguably the greatest British rock singer of his generation, is in fine fettle today as he reflects upon five remarkable decades in the music business, a journey which has included stints in Trapeze, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Black Country Communion and some wild adventures with drug dealers, gangsters, movie stars and beauty queens en route. Hughes freely admits that he has “lived the lives of 10 men” and “done everything that you can imagine, good and bad, wonderful and silly.”
“I’m so fortunate not to have died,” he confesses. “I’ve overdosed, been pistol-whipped, shot at, stabbed, run over in a car… and I’m still here to tell the tale. Where shall we start?”
Classic Rock: Who was the first musical artist to capture your imagination?
Glenn Hughes: "The Beatles. I remember coming home from school and saw them on a TV show with Muriel Young in 1963 and that was it for me. I asked my mum, who’d named me after Glenn Miller, Is there any chance I could get one of those instruments?, meaning a guitar. I’d originally wanted to be a footballer, but I wasn’t good enough, but I found that I was adequate on the guitar, so I stuck with that. When I left school I was set to get a real job in September, but in August I got offered the chance to be in a professional rock’n’roll group [Finders Keepers] so I accepted that offer. I was the youngest guy in the band by ten years."
Classic Rock: Your first step into the big time came alongside Mel Galley and Dave Holland in Trapeze. In America, at least, you were a proper rock star before you’d turned 20.
Hughes: "Yeah, Trapeze did really well in America. We toured there initially with The Moody Blues, before we’d even made an album, and played unknown songs for 45 minutes every night to their audience and the reaction was incredible. I was 17 then. By the time I accepted the offer to join Deep Purple in 1973, Trapeze were doing 10,000 tickets a night in America as a headline act."
Read the full feature at Classic Rock.
