In April 1984, eight years after the demise of Deep Purple, a full-scale reunion took place with the “classic” Mark II line-up from the early 1970s: Ian Gillan, Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore, Roger Glover and Ian Paice.The reformed band signed a worldwide deal with PolyGram, with Mercury Records releasing their new material in the US, and Polydor Records in the UK and other countries.The album Perfect Strangers was recorded in Vermont and released in October ‘84.Their reunion tour followed, starting in Australia and winding its way across the world to North America, then into Europe by the following summer.Financially, the tour was also a huge success.In the US, it out-grossed every other artist except Bruce Springsteen.The UK homecoming saw the band perform a concert at Knebworth on 22 June 1985, where the weather was bad – torrential rain and 6 inches of mud – in front of 80,000 fans.The gig was dubbed the “Return of the Knebworth Fayre”.The Mark II line-up continued, releasing The House of Blue Light in 1987, which was followed by another world tour (interrupted when Blackmore broke a finger on stage while trying to catch his guitar, after throwing it into the air) and another live album Nobody’s Perfect (1988) which was culled from several shows on this tour, but still largely based on the by-now-familiar Made in Japan set-list.In the UK a new version of ‘Hush’ (with Gillan on lead vocals) was released to mark 20 years of the band.Gillan was fired in 1989; after auditioning several high-profile candidates – former Rainbow vocalist Joe Lynn Turner was recruited into the new line-up.This Mark V line-up recorded just one album, Slaves and Masters (1990), and toured in support of it.It achieved modest success, reaching number 45 in the UK and number 87 in the US Billboard chart.
