Thirty seconds into our conversation, Glenn Hughes starts fiddling with his earbuds. “Give me a second,” he says, with a California smile, a healthy tan offsetting his immaculate white teeth. “I’m still deaf from working with Jon Lord.”
If battered eardrums is the only residual damage that Cannock, Staffordshire-born Hughes has to show from more than 55 years in rock’n’roll, he’s got off lightly. The bassist and singer was one of hard rock’s thrusting young bucks through the 70s, making a trio of great, if underrated albums with his original band, Trapeze, then another three as part of Deep Purple’s Mk III and IV line-ups.
