Flying away from the site of the California Jam, Glenn Hughes only twigged that he wasn’t actually under arrest when the 'policewoman' sharing his helicopter took off her hat, shook her hair loose and knelt down to unzip his white satin trousers.
Perhaps if he hadn’t been up all night partying with Ozzy Osbourne, or wasn’t still buzzing after performing in front of 400,000 festival goers, Deep Purple’s 21-year-old vocalist/bassist might have realised that his German tour manager Ossy Hoppe was taking the piss when he solemnly informed him that the local police had been handed film footage of Hughes snorting coke behind the amps during the quintet’s co-headlining show on the evening of April 6, 1974 and wanted to have a word with the young Englishman. As it was, the prank “scared the crap” out of Hughes, so much so, in fact, that he politely declined the offer of fellatio from his mischievous airborne travelling companion.
“I was too freaked out to do anything,” he recalls, ruefully. “Looking back, I wish I could have helped her out.”
