An album called Bananas, with a cover photo shot by the band's own manager, opens with a hard rock riff and closes with a wordless requiem for seven fallen astronauts. That's the paradox at the heart of Deep Purple's seventeenth studio record, released 23 years ago on EMI Records. The British hard rock institution had just lost co-founder and keyboard architect Jon Lord. His replacement, Don Airey, had already been tested on the road during a summer 2001 tour when illness sidelined Lord. Now Airey had to prove himself in the studio. The result arrived on August 25, 2003 — an album that baffled critics with its title and artwork before winning most of them over.
A two-month sprint with an unexpected duet
Recording took place in Los Angeles across January and February of 2003, a brisk two-month sprint under producer Michael Bradford. Bradford was also working with blues vocalist Beth Hart at the time, a connection that pulled her directly into Deep Purple's orbit. Hart contributed backing vocals to the track 'Haunted,' transforming it into a duet with the band's frontman. The song landed as a standalone single, one of the album's most textured moments — a far cry from the straightforward hard rock stomp that defined much of the record. Bradford's dual role bridged two very different musical worlds and gave Bananas a vocal dimension the band hadn't explored on previous outings.
Don Airey stepped into a role no keyboardist could treat casually. Jon Lord had shaped Deep Purple's sound since the band's formation, his Hammond organ and classical sensibilities woven into the DNA of tracks like 'Child in Time.' Airey's live stint in 2001 proved he could handle the back catalogue, but a studio album meant creating new material alongside guitarist Steve Morse, bassist Roger Glover, and drummer Ian Paice. The Allmusic critic David Jeffries noted Lord's absence in his review, then conceded Airey had pulled it off. Four stars out of five, despite what Jeffries called every outward sign of a disappointment — the name, the cover, the eccentricity.
The manager's photograph and the absurd title
That cover. Manager Bruce Payne picked up a camera and shot the photograph himself, a decision that reinforced the album's refusal to take itself too seriously. The visual matched the title: absurd, memorable, and completely disconnected from any hard rock cliché. Jeffries singled out both elements as warning signs in his review, yet the music inside dismantled those assumptions. Deep Purple were operating without a net — no Lord, a new keyboardist, a producer with pop and blues credentials — and the album's chart performance told a different story than the skeptical headlines suggested.
Germany pushed Bananas into the top ten. Argentina did the same. Across Europe and South America, the record connected in ways it never did in the United States, where Sanctuary Records released it on October 7, 2003, over a month after the European launch. The American market largely shrugged, but the southern hemisphere and continental Europe embraced a band that had been written off more times than anyone could count. Commercial success outside the US confirmed something the lineup already knew: the material was stronger than the narrative about Lord's departure implied.
A requiem for the Columbia astronauts
The album's final track carries a weight no title could telegraph. 'Contact Lost' is a short, slow instrumental — no vocals, no rhythm section heroics, just Steve Morse's guitar working through grief in real time. Morse wrote the piece immediately after learning about the disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which killed all seven crew members upon re-entry. He dedicated the composition to the astronauts, and the band placed it as the album's closer. A requiem for a shuttle disaster, following a song called 'Haunted' featuring a blues singer, on a record called Bananas. The sequence shouldn't work. It does.
Two tracks with tangled histories hover just outside the album's tracklist. 'Long Time Gone' had been performed live as early as summer 2000 but never made the cut for Bananas. 'Up The Wall,' road-tested during a British tour in 2002, morphed into 'I Got Your Number' somewhere between the stage and the studio. Another instrumental, 'Well Dressed Guitar,' sat on the shelf entirely, waiting for the follow-up album Rapture in 2005. These songs trace a creative period that stretched years before and after the actual recording sessions, a band constantly reshaping material rather than writing to a deadline.
Jeffries' four-star review captures the critical whiplash. He listed the reasons to worry — no Jon Lord, a ridiculous title, cover art by the manager — and then called the album delightful against all odds. The word 'delightful' doesn't often attach to hard rock bands on their seventeenth album, especially ones navigating a founding member's exit. But Bananas earned it through sheer refusal to posture. The songs are direct, the playing is live and unvarnished, and Airey's integration feels less like a replacement and more like a band rediscovering its own chemistry in real time.
Twenty-three years later, the instrumental coda still lands without warning. A slow guitar line, no words, written in the hours after a spacecraft broke apart in the Texas sky. Morse didn't turn the tragedy into a metaphor or a lyrical narrative — he just played what he felt and left it at that. Deep Purple put it at the end of an album with a joke title and a manager's photograph on the front. That's the band in full: irreverent on the surface, dead serious where it counts.
That's the band in full: irreverent on the surface, dead serious where it counts.