Deep Purple have shared their new single ‘Lazy Sod’ – listen below.
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The release of the Bob Ezrin-produced track marks the third single the band have shared from the upcoming album ‘=1’, following ‘Portable Door’ and ‘Pictures of You’.
The album arrives on July 19 via earMUSIC, and will be the band’s first full-length release since 2021, when they dropped the covers album ‘Turning To Crime’, and the first LP of original material since 2020’s ‘Whoosh!’.
On their official website, they shared the unlikely inspiration behind the song’s name. Frontman Ian Gillan explained: “Recently, a young journalist asked me how many songs I had written in my life. I replied that the last time my assistant counted, twenty years ago, it was over 500.
“I felt quite accomplished until she pointed out Dolly Parton‘s 5,000 songs, calling me a lazy sod. I couldn’t help but agree and wrote down the exchange in my notebook.”
In a nod to that exchange, and seemingly as a modern follow-up to 1972’s ‘Lazy’, the light-hearted lyrics include: “The world’s on fire / And I can’t get my arse out of bed / The world is on fire / There’s smoke all around my head“.
Earlier this year, the band announced details of a new arena tour set to take place across the UK. Entitled the ‘One More Time’ tour, they’ll will cycle through hits like ‘Smoke On The Water’ and ‘Highway Star’ across five dates. Visit here to buy tickets and check out a list of tour dates below.
Deep Purple’s 2024 UK tour dates are:
NOVEMBER
04 –Birmingham. Resorts World Arena
06 – London, The O2
07 – Leeds, First Direct Arena
09 – Manchester, AO Arena
10 – Glasgow, OVO Hydro
Last year, several members of the band opened up an incident with the Swiss police while they were recording ‘Smoke on the Water’.
Founding guitarist and former member Ritchie Blackmore recalled: “We went outside to the mobile unit and were listening back to one of the takes, and there was some hammering on the door.
“It was the local police, and they were trying to stop the whole thing because it was so loud. We knew that they were coming to close everything down. We said to Martin Birch, our engineer: ‘Let’s see if we have a take.’ So they were outside hammering and taking out their guns… It was getting pretty hostile.”