Customer Reviews

Nobody's Perfect

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Deep Purple's Nobody's Perfect captures some of the highlights of the House of Blue Light tour 1987. The recordings are superb and the performances are outstanding. Hats off to Ian Gillan for maintaining his patented screams,shreiks, and wails. Not bad for a guy in his early 40s. I myself saw the first reunion tour Perfect Strangers 1984-85. The newer tracks including Bad Attitude, Hard Lovin' Woman, and Dead or Alive sound great. The vintage material is always a pleasure to hear. This newly remastered 2CD set also includes tracks not featured on the original CD release. Lazy is one of those tracks. If you are into Deep Purple than I highly recommend this album. Cheers!

This album, somewhat of a sequel to "Made In Japan", features a 'matured' Deep Purple. The vocals do not quite match the raw power of early Deep Purple, but the guitar work is excellent as usual. The rest of the band does as well a job as they did in the 70s. This is recommended for serious Deep Purple fans, but not for casual listeners.

I agree and disagree with the other reviews presented here. I disagree that this is a bad album. I do agree that the editing was a little sloppy, but the cool thing about this is that you get to hear the interplay between Ian and the crowd. I am not one for overkill on improvisation ala Jon Lord's five minute keyboard tinkling prior to beginning Knocking At Your Back Door, I would have preferred him go right into the song or the producers of this CD could have made it into a seperate track entitled Jon Lord Solo. For me the song Bad Attitude is the hightlight on this CD. The mix and sound of all the instruments, including Ian's voice, is incredible and sounds as if it was recorded in a studio. I have a feeling this song was recorded at a venue that the other ones on the CD were not. It is a shame because this would have probably improved the sound of the other songs. I am a big fan of the Perfect Strangers CD and bought this for Perfect Strangers and Knocking. Originally I only had the single CD version, but if you are debating whether or not to buy this version, do because Bad Attitude is worth it alone.

Deep Purple always made a magic performances, this second reunion tour was great, my humble opinion. The set were recorded in Calif irvine meadows, Arizona, Oslo and Verona Italy. The opening set Highway star is incredible, the second song Strange kind of woman with the Jesus christ superstar as a hard rock improvisation. I enjoy it so much! The new version of Hush is also cool, I enjoyed the old version too, but the new one is still the best and much much more powerfull. Ian Gillan tried to sing Child in time one more time, the song he did not perform, since his departure in 1973. But the result is brain melting. I don't understand any reviews below, some fans said that the album is bad. If you like Made in japan & live at the olympia albums, certainly you will love this one too, because the songs are similar, though some songs have changed through Blackmore co improvisations. You got it folks?

I have heard people say bad things about this. I even saw that singer Ian Gillan called "shameful".
For the life of me I can't say why.This was cassette that I absolutely wore out (literally!). My casstte had all the same songs except Bad attitude on it (I wish that was on it, its a good song). Of all the records I purchased the past ten years This one got the most play. I really came to love this version of "Smoke On the Water". At first I wasn't sure because of how different it was, but now its my favorite version. I love Blackmore's solo on it. It was my first exposure to "Dead or Alive" and "Hard Lovin'Woman" as well and I came to really like those two-so much that when I now hear them on the studio album
they don't sound right.
I think the reason Gillan called it shameful was because he,as well as other fans, didn't like the fact that the songs were taken from 3 or 4 different shows, rather than have the whole thing be from one venue like Made In Japan was- but even M.I.J. was culminated from the best of a weekend of performances (2 in Osaka, 1 in Tokyo).
I couldn't care less either way, as long as the music is good, and the music on Nobody's Perfect is great!
If the only Deep Purple you know stops after '73, than this may take a bit time to adjust to, but give it time like I did and you will be very grateful.

This is a good live album, but it doesn't have enough energy. Buy 'Made in Japan' instead which I think is their best album.

There is a certain irony about the fact that when there was friction within the ranks of Deep Purple, the studio albums seemed (with one exception) to come out strong, but live albums turned out to be turkeys. Take into account that this album was a contract filler with Polygramand was also released AFTER Ian Gillan left the band due to the aforementioned friction, and then listen to the album with that in mind.

"Made In Japan" this certainly ain't! Musically the raw power is still there, but the editing makes it something of a joke as the flow of a Deep Purple show is lost with the breaks between tracks (mainly note Gillan's introduction to "Perfect Strangers" aka Perfect Stranglers - and the intro to the next track on which he refers to the fictitious Perfect St. Rangers soccer team.)

It strikes me that there is someone out there who is deliberately trying to destroy the live reputation of Deep Purple by compiling relatively substandard live albums as they did in the 70s with the long list of bad compilations.

Buy this for completeness only, especially as this is now a double CD rather than the hacked down single CD which came out first. But my recommendation is that you invest in the double CD from the Knebworth show in '85 as a reminder of the strength of the Mark II reunion.

Many years ago, Jefferson Airplane put out a compilation album which they entitled THE WORST OF JEFFERSON AIRPLANE. They were being ironic--that album contained all the BEST songs. However, the title of this CD could be changed to THE WORST OF DEEP PURPLE, or DEEP PURPLE: AT THEIR WORST--without a shred of irony.

I'll be brief here, but if you are interested in hearing a horribly truncated (and unfinished) of the classic "Woman From Tokyo," Ian Gillian singing off-key as he does on several songs here (especially on "Highway Star" and the beloved "Smoke On The Water"), the band tripping into a Buddy Holly song (!) in the middle of another song, and in general, long rambling, ruined versions of some of their most classic tunes--then, buy all means buy this CD. But if you're like me, and like to hear a great rock 'n' roll band performing at their best, then you should avoid this CD like the plague.

Who ever thought that this was a good idea, anyway? I mean, anyone who has their mega-classic live album "Made In Japan" knows that Deep Purple can be incredible in concert. Why did they do this to their fans? I guess I'll never know.

The only good thing about this CD is their rollicking version of their all-time classic "Hush" (recorded live in a studio on Long Island, NY). I made sure to transfer this to tape before selling my copy of this CD.

This originally came out as a single CD. It now is a double CD with a few extra tracks. I only have the single CD, so I don't know about the quality of some of the tracks.

In 1984, Deep Purple "MKII" reformed. This was the most popular line up of Blackmore, Lord, Gillan, Paice and Glover. They recorded two studio albums (Perfect Strangers and House Of Blue Light) and went on a number of tours. Then they broke up. But then they reformed with and without Blackmore.

This CD is from the 1988 tour following the release of House Of Blue Light. The sound quality is good and clear, but the recording was sloppy and the mixing was poor. The vocals fade in and out. The editing is really bad. There fade in while someone is talking. One track is just a choppy mess of the band fooling around. Gillan sounds horrible. I don't know if it the recording or if his voice is shot.

The setlist is about an equal mixture of new tracks and the old classics from the seventies. Some are good and some are boring. I wasn't looking forward to yet another version of Child In Time. This song is on just about every Deep Purple live album ever made and got stale long ago. But this was surprisingly fresh, energetic, raunchy and noisy. Strange Kind of Woman is also fairly good, with Gillan trowing in some bits from Jesus Christ Superstar, as he does on some other songs.

But other songs just aren't good. Highway Star and Smoke on the Water are just boring, although Blackmore does get in a few good licks. Knocking At Your Back Door starts out really bad with Lord dorking around on his organ. It sounds like it could be a Yes concert, only worse. It then goes into some of most juvenile lyrics ever written: Miss Lucy was a dancer/but nobody would chance her/because she was a sumarai. These guys were in their late forties when they wrote that!

Missing from this CD is one of the long jams that highlighted a Deep Purple show. Blackmore and Lord would go crazy to a driving beat. I know they were jamming quite a bit when they were playing in the eighties, but it doesn't show up here.

A much better choice would be to get one of the live albums from the seventies. There are two that are even better than Made In Japan. One is called a double CD called Live and Rare (not to be confused with the 12 CD Live and Rare) and one is a double CD called In Concert (not to be confused with the three other CD's called In Concert but from a later periods).

Note that Deep Purple is huge in Asia. While wondering through the small CD shops in Malacca, I would find Deep Purple CD's mixed in with the Chinese and Malay CD's. There were almost no other English artists in these shops.

Nobody's Perfect is a live album from Deep Purple, released in 1988 and featuring the much celebrated MKII line up, in the middle of their successful 1980s reunion.

The album contains a selection of material from their then two most recent albums, The House Of Blue Light and Perfect Strangers in addition to all the old favourites from the 70s like 'Space Truckin,' 'Smoke On The Water,' and 'Black Night.'

In terms of performance, the band were really on to something here, Blackmore and Lord add furious extra solos and alternative sections in, Glover and Paice hammer the rhythm home, and give the whole proceedings a different mood than on the 70s live stuff, different but still good and therefor worth an investigative listen at the very least. In addition to the band playing superbly, Ian Gillian's vocals are on top form indeed, in addition to his sense of humour(between and sometimes during songs, like during 'Woman From Tokyo,' for example)

The sound is really clear, fairly punchy and its mixed fairly well. The combination of a good track listing, good sound and good performance is what makes a good live album in my book so I'd definitely recommend this.

There are a hell of a lot of Deep Purple live albums available, but if you liked the band's work in the 80s, then this live album is a definite must buy... and still very worth a listen even if you don't.