Description
Label Review.
1982 solo album remastered with 2 bonus tracks. Fts Bernie Marsden, Mick Ralphs, Ian Paice, SImon Phillips and Neil Murray.
Our Overview.
Jon Lords' (founding member of Deep Purple) missing solo album Before I Forget finally returns to the CD racks.
Jon Lord began playing piano aged 6, studying classical music until leaving school at 17 to become a Solicitor’s clerk. In December 1967, Jon met guitarist Richie Blackmore and by early 1968 the pair had formed Deep Purple. The band would pioneer hard rock and go on to sell more than 100 million albums, play live to more than 10 million people, and were recognised in 1972 by The Guinness Book of World Records as “the loudest group in the world”. During Deep Purple’s early years, Jon also wrote several large scale works for orchestra.
This album was first issued on CD by RPM in the early nineties, and then transferred to Purple Records, but was deleted when the license expired. This new edition appears on EMI itself, and is remastered. Some of the bonus tracks from the old edition have been left off, as has the interview, but the album out-take Ravel’s Pavane remains, and they’ve added the single edit of Bach Onto This as well.
The album, issued in 1982 (EMI seemed to have missed the 30th anniversary tie-in) was quite a mixture, rounding up ideas and themes Jon had been working on across a variety of musical genres. Busy as he was with Whitesnake, Jon just decided to put them all together in the time he had (sessions were begun in September 1981 and concluded in spring 1982), with loads of special guests including members of Whitesnake, Bad Company and more (as well as Jon Lord himself, Tony Ashton, Sam Brown, Vicki Brown, Elmer Gantry, Bernie Marsden, Neil Murray, Boz Burrel, Ian Paice, Simon Phillips, Cozy Powell, Simon Kirke and Mick Ralphs all pop up).
As such it’s an album which is best viewed as a snapshot of the moment, but has some stunning individual tracks, mostly those which lean towards the classical side. Where Are You and the title track can clearly be seen as leading towards his more recent solo albums in style, very moving performances. Bach Onto This is a terrific classical romp, Burntwood by contrast a very melancholic piece, while Chance On A feeling rightly leads off the original album, a lovely number.