While he had just as much faith in his own ability, the problem for Ian Gillan was how to top what he’d already achieved. He’d forever be recognised as ‘the voice of Deep Purple’, but he could clearly not hope to rival that band’s unity of purpose and sheer power as a solo singer.

That’s why he’d take three years to open his account – and when finally he did, he attacked the problem on two fronts. Firstly, he formed his own outfit called, not unexpectedly, the Ian Gillan Band, and to avoid direct comparisons allowed the music to reflect the individual members’ jazzier leanings rather than follow a similar hard-rock course to his former band. To allay fans’ doubts as he led them further into the musical unknown, his first album ‘Child In Time’ was named after a classic Deep Purple track, while the Ian Gillan Band’s live set also revisited past glories.

The musicians involved had been recruited while Ian had been spending a period of tax exile in Paris. Ray Fenwick, the guitarist, had played with the Spencer Davis Group in their post – Steve Winwood period, while American drummer Mark Nauseef had most notably played with Elf, a hard-rock band Deep Purple had signed to their own label and which would yield another notable singer in Ronnie James Dio. Keyboardist Mike Moran, who’d played on ‘Child In Time’, had, by the time of ‘Clear Air Turbulence’, given way to Colin Towns, who would go on to score tams and TV series and whose experience added new textures and approaches to the band. (Moran, for his part, went on to the 1977 Eurovision Song Contest with Lindsey de Paul!)

Bass player John Gustafson deserves at least a paragraph to himself. A veteran of the Merseybeat era when he starred as one-third of the Big Three, ‘Gus’ was a volatile character whose route to Gillan’s side had been with a band called Hard Stuff and Roxy Music; his was the robust bass line on `Love Is The Drug’. Gus’s off-stage activities were the stuff of legends, but musically he had much more to offer than the standard rock bassist’s root-notes.