Throughout Jon Lord's long and varied musical career, his love of orchestral music has never been far from the surface. While he worked hard to integrate his organ playing into a rock context, from time to time the desire to work with an orchestra manifested itself.

When Lord mentioned to Purple's management an idea of staging a show with a rock group and orchestra they promptly booked the Royal Philharmonic and the Albert Hall, along with conductor Malcolm Arnold. The result was the writing and performance of Concerto For Group & Orchestra in September 1969, an evening which brought the band a lot of publicity, though in the end it caused more problems than it solved, as Lord later remembered: "It drew attention to us at a time when we needed it, but we weren't expecting to be labelled as a group that plays with an orchestra." Jon Lord had been commissioned to write a second orchestral / rock piece, but it was agreed that it would be the last venture of this sort to be performed as Deep Purple.

He decided to write a piece which took as its theme the five members of Deep Purple. There would be five solo movements, each written to reflect the style of the particular member and named after their star-sign. By the time it was finished in the autumn of 1970, "Deep Purple In Rock" and the single, "Black Night", had charted. Against this background, Purple took the stage of the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank on the evening of September 17th 1970 with the Orchestra of the Light Music Society, to perform Jon Lord's "Gemini Suite", conducted once more by Malcolm Arnold.

Ritchie Blackmore's segment came first. He turned his volume down, bowed his head and put together guitar passages of stunning beauty, echoed by quiet and sympathetic orchestral backing. Ian Gillan too turned in a breathtaking performance. Ian Paice's movement became a drum battle with the orchestra's percussion players, and proved popular with the crowd. Lord was in fine form while Roger Glover adopted a casual approach, to inject a little humour into proceedings. The work showed promise and was a lot more forward looking than the "Concerto", relying more heavily on individual performances.

The live recording of the show was shelved. Almost exactly a year later a studio recording of "Gemini Suite" did appear as a Jon Lord solo project, with Albert Lee, Tony Ashton and Yvonne Elliman replacing Blackmore and Gillan. The live recording disappeared until the DPAS made contact with a fan who had taped it on an old reel to reel at the time. In 1992 the tape was located and cleaned up, and then fully restored. Pictures taken on the day of the show were discovered, and the whole package was put together for a release on RPM Records the following year.

This edition was deleted during 1998 and the material has now been repackaged for the Purple Records label. The original inlay has been replaced by a 12 page booklet, which includes a new section discussing the music, as well as the original notes. A fascinating sideline to the history of Deep Purple, this release forms one of a number of Jon Lord related titles on the label.

Deep Purple 'The Gemini Suite - Live' can be ordered from the dpas online store.