“I had a meltdown. Cocaine psychosis took over – it’s a form of paranoid schizophrenia”: How Deep Purple split from Ritchie Blackmore and made a funky masterpiece in Come Taste The Band

Deep Purple posing for a photograph in 1975.

Released in November 1975, Deep Purple’s Come Taste The Band album was their only album to feature American guitarist Tommy Bolin, who replaced Ritchie Blackmore to create the Mk IV line-up. For years, its funkier style meant it remained an outlier in the Purple catalogue, but today it’s held up as a classic. In 2010, singer David Coverdale, bassist Glenn Hughes and late keyboard player Jon Lord looked back on the making of a Deep Purple record like no other – and the tragedy of the man who was part of it.