Deep Purple do not have plans to make a farewell concert – instead, they have new music almost ready

Roger Glover, bassist for Deep Purple, discussed the band’s current tour, “The Long Goodbye,” which began in May 2017, on August 26 on SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk.” Without ever announcing a final performance, he was asked if the band will “just keep moving forward” with live performances while they are still physically capable. This is his answer, transcribed by blabbermouth.net.

Well, I see a lot of bands doing the farewell tour or the farewell gig — Black Sabbath just did it recently, and other people have done it before — but it doesn’t appeal to me, and I don’t think the rest of the band either. To actually put a date on the final [show], now where’s it gonna be? The pressure is too great. I’d much rather just play and play and play, and suddenly we’re not playing. We don’t need to go out with a fanfare — I don’t think, anyway. It’s possible other people disagree with me, but that’s my feeling.

The other members seem to share this feeling.

Quite a few years ago now, at the start of ‘The Long Goodbye’, Steve Morse, he said, ‘Why don’t we finish on a high and name the last tour and we’d make a lot of money because it’s the last tour and then kiss it goodbye?’ And that didn’t go down well with the band, which is why we called it ‘The Long Goodbye’, because we knew it was gonna happen sometime, but, of course, we didn’t know it was gonna go on and on and on. And thankfully so. This year is a bit of an off year. We’ve been writing and stuff, and there’ll probably be an album next year. And the last — actually, the last two or three years have been so busy. We haven’t stopped touring and working. So it’s good to have a little bit of a breather. We did one gig in Brazil — a festival in June — and there’s a couple of gigs coming up at the end of the year, but it’s not really a touring year. It’s a resting year.

So it will be impossible to foresee when they will stop.

Yeah. I think that would be the way to do it. I mean, who knows? The business side of things, we all disagree. We haven’t talked about it. It’s just we assume we’re just gonna carry on. Bop till you drop.

Deep Purple isn’t certainly the first band to announce a farewell tour.

It’s all about the money. See, it’s all about the money. And then we’re more about the music. Yeah, money’s important, but music is more important. And having a big finale like that … of course it may happen, but it wouldn’t be my decision.

They seem also okay with their health.

Well, I don’t think anyone, when they’re around 80, feels like they did when they were 20. We all have aches and pains and stuff like that. But so far, certainly playing live and playing in the studio, we’re still on top of the game. So, I don’t see any problem coming up. Ian turned 80 this year. I’ll be 80 later this year. It’s a horrible number. I still haven’t quite got used to it. I’m hanging on to 79 as much as I can.

The group is focused on new music.

That’s what we do, isn’t it? We write music. Even if there was no band, I’d still be writing music, certainly for my own pleasure. It’s one of the things you do. The idea is not to try and repeat yourself, to find new ways of being a hard rock band. And we seem to do that. I don’t know how we do it. We just do it. It’s kind of a natural thing.

Creativity is essential!

I’m working on my book right now, writing about my life, and the more I write, the more I realize what an amazing journey that we’ve been on, and certainly I’ve been on. And you kind of owe it to yourself to sort of not squash it, just to continue as much as possible. [Working on my book] keeps reinforcing what an amazing — almost against the odds of joining a band and having been going for 60 years, or 50-whatever it is, years, I mean, just it doesn’t make sense. We were just very lucky or just in the right place at the right time, or just the right mix of people. I don’t know what it is, but we kind of owe it to our legacy to not give up.