Classic Rock
Ian Gillan will do twenty-four spoken-word shows across the United Kingdom between 28 April and 29 May 2027. The tour is called “Talking Gib’rish”, runs from Bournemouth to London’s Cadogan Hall and takes in Glasgow, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield and Liverpool, among other cities. There are no dates outside the country.
The Deep Purple singer has never toured like this before. “I’ve done a few talks and things like that,” he tells The Strange Brew podcast. “I’d speak for the ICD occasionally, the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. I did some talks in Berlin, and last year in Edinburgh. I think that must have triggered it. I had an offer from the promoter to do 25. I thought, ‘Yes. Why not?’”
The title comes from how he writes. Gillan works with a band that writes the music first, and he says he took to putting invented words over the melodies to fix the metre and the phrasing before finishing the real lyric. The second half of the story happened at the Lyceum, early in the band’s life: Ritchie Blackmore broke a string, came over and said, “I’ll be a few minutes. Tell ‘em a joke.” “I’d never had to do that before,” Gillan says, “so I started talking gibberish on that occasion, too, and I still do today between songs.”
Gillan has sixty-four years behind him: he joined his first band, The Javelins, in 1962, met Roger Glover in Episode Six in 1965 and joined Deep Purple in 1969. The tour was first announced last June.
Text by Enric Vilaplana