Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan states that The Long Goodbye tour “Was a joke, actually”

Though Ian Gillan dubbed the band’s 2017 tour “The Long Goodbye,” he acknowledged that Deep Purple never meant to retire. In an interview with Eddie Trunk of SiriusXM, the singer gave an explanation of the meaning behind the tour’s moniker.

That was a joke, actually, because it was the promoters, and someone said, ‘We’ve gotta sell some more tickets.’ And it’s the good old standby, the farewell tour. So I said, ‘OK, we’ll call it ‘goodbye’ tour, but let’s call it ‘the long goodbye’, and let’s make the emphasis on the word ‘long’,’ so it’s kind of an enigmatic phrase.

The singer’s justification differs from his statement from six years prior, when he asserted that Deep Purple named their tour “The Long Goodbye” because they were thinking about calling it quits. At the time, guitarist Steve Morse declared that it was a farewell tour for him, which fueled the flames even more. In 2022, Morse left the band. Gillan made it apparent to Trunk throughout their talk that Deep Purple has no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

There’s no intention to stop. We’re already booked to the end of ’26, in the planning stage, in the diary, with all the projects we’ve got for Deep Purple. So, yeah, years to come, hopefully.

Gillan hinted at a potential retirement date in a recent interview with Matt Wardlaw of UCR.

As soon as you start feeling unable to deliver at that level – of course, you adjust, of course, you adapt and make do the best you can. But when the energy level goes, that’s time to stop because then it gets embarrassing and nobody wants that. But so far, so good.