STEVE MAC has been rehearsing for this night since he was 12 years old, and now at 58 he is good to go.
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This month he will be joined on stage by fellow musos – Justin Ngariki, Jarrod Daunt, Rob Banks and Dave Tavender– to perform Deep Purple’s Machine Head at Lizotte’s.
“We are just Deep Purple nuts and Lizotte’s is a great place to celebrate Machine Head,” Mac said.
“We will play Machine Head in its entirety, from start to finish.”
The album plays for 38 minutes. The rest of the performance will cover other Deep Purple “mark two” material.
“Among Deep Purple nerds this version [of the band] is referred to as mark two. That’s Ian Gillan, Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Lord, Roger Glover and Ian Paice,” Mac said.
“This is the version that had monster hits and monster success and really took rock music somewhere it hadn’t been before … they changed everything.”
Machine Head was the sixth studio album by the English rockers and contains the song Smoke of the Water. The seven track recording was their most commercially successful album and is often cited as an early influence on the heavy metal genre.
“As kids, they were the guys who inspired us to want to play,” Mac said.
It was 1972 at Wallsend High when Mac, 12 at the time, first heard the album. A fellow student was listening to the album, on tape cassette, in the school’s listening console.
She let him put on a spare set of headphones to listen along.
“It was mind blowing,” he said. “I had to buy it.”
He dropped into Tyrell’s Record Land and picked up a copy. But not just any copy, it was quadraphonic!
“It was a dollar more, it was “$6.95 instead of $5.95,” Mac said.
“My best mate at school, Rocker, his dad was a technophile and he had a new quadraphonic listening system.”
Quadrophonic record players had four channels!
“The vista of sound that it opened up, I could hear everything,” he said.
Tickets: lizottes.com.au