The band, initially called Roundabout, was the idea of former Searchers drummer Chris Curtis, who recruited Jon Lord and Ritchie Blackmore before leaving the project.

After about two months of rehearsals, Shades of Deep Purple was recorded in only three days in May 1968 and contains four original songs and four covers, thoroughly rearranged to include classical interludes and sound more psychedelic.

[1] The good sales of the album and the intense radio play of the single contributed largely to the attention Deep Purple would get in their early US tours and also during the 1970s.

[2] New bands like The Moody Blues, Procol Harum, and The Nice were pioneers in combining classical music with rock, using complex and daring arrangements.

[4] Many well-known acts, including The Beatles,[5] The Rolling Stones[6] and The Who,[7] were influenced by the changing feel and added many elements of progressive and psychedelic rock to their albums of that period.

During this time of great creativity for the British musical scene in the summer of 1967, Chris Curtis, former drummer of the beat band The Searchers, contacted London businessman Tony Edwards to find financing for a new group he was putting together, to be called Roundabout.

[8] Impressed with the plan, Edwards agreed to finance and manage the venture with two business partners, Ron Hire and John Coletta, and the three of them founded Hire-Edwards-Coletta (HEC) Enterprises.

[11] At that time, Lord was playing in a band backing the successful pop vocalists The Flower Pot Men called The Garden, which also included bassist Nick Simper and drummer Carlo Little.

[15] Blackmore had been a member of The Outlaws and had played as session and live musician with many beat, pop and rock acts,[16] including Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages,[17] where he had met Little.

[13] Meanwhile, Curtis' erratic behaviour and his sudden loss of interest in the project he had started slowed down any development,[13] forcing his financiers, HEC Enterprises, to drop him and entrust Lord and Blackmore with the task of filling out the rest of the band.

I line-up of Deep Purple involved mostly jamming and some work on the instrumentals "And the Address" and "Mandrake Root",[26] which Blackmore and Lord had written earlier that year.

[31] The main inspiration for the new arrangement of the song was the 1966 hit version by American guitarist Jimi Hendrix, but the track length was stretched with the inclusion of classical-influenced instrumental sections.

They had met years before, when both worked for producer Joe Meek[34][35] and Lawrence ran an independent production company that recorded singles for release in the United States.

[36] HEC arranged for the band to cut some demos for the American label in late March and early April at Trident Studios in London.

[26] The band name was changed at this time, after Blackmore suggested the title of his grandmother's favourite song, "Deep Purple" by Peter DeRose.

[44] There, with Lawrence producing and Barry Ainsworth acting as engineer, they recorded the recently gigged material using a four-track tape machine.

[50] The single "Hush" was released overseas in June 1968 and it turned out to be a huge success, garnering the band considerable attention and peaking at No.

[48] In August, an appearance on British TV at the David Frost Show to lip-sync the song was shot with the roadie Mick Angus standing in for an unavailable Blackmore.

[48][55] Jon Lord, in an interview with the magazine Beat Instrumental, reflected on the scarce receptivity of England to his group and on how lucky the band was to be signed to an American label that gave Deep Purple "far greater freedom both financially and artistically" than they "could ever have got with a British company", which "as a rule won't spend any time or effort with you until you're an established name".

[57] Besides the original issues, the most significant version of the album is the Remastered CD edition released in 2000 by EMI, which contains as bonus tracks previously unreleased recordings from the first demos in April 1968 and from TV show appearances.

II" line-up (when Evans and Simper were replaced by Gillan and Roger Glover) can already be heard in the opening instrumental "And the Address" and in "Mandrake Root".

[45] The songs covered in the album were all treated with new arrangements to be considerably longer and sound more grandiose than the originals,[32][69] in an attempt to emulate the American rock band Vanilla Fudge, which many Deep Purple members admired.

[73] The dualism between Blackmore's flamboyant guitar playing, which he had honed in many years of daily practice and experimented on tour with Sutch,[17][74] and Lord's rocking Hammond solos[75] was still in an embryonic stage, but it would soon become an integral part of the band's dynamics.

[48][78] In an interview with Melody Maker, Ian Paice explained that their lack of touring and promotion in England was due to the low wages they were offered and to the fact that they had very few danceable numbers to attract audience.

"[79] Waiting to start their first US tour and in need of new material to be offered on the American market and to beef up their live show, the band returned to the studio with producer Derek Lawrence to record their second album, The Book of Taliesyn, in August 1968.

Despite being presented as a "polished commercial group" in their radio appearances,[86] Deep Purple's stage excesses and success in the US did not make a good impression on British audiences.

The Deviants frontman and later journalist Mick Farren described Deep Purple's music as "a slow and pompous din, somewhere between bad Tchaikovsky and a B-52 taking off on a bombing run".

"[87] By contrast, in the US the band was often introduced as "the English Vanilla Fudge"[70] and massive radio coverage of their songs granted success for both the album and tour.

Bruce Eder of AllMusic considers Shades of Deep Purple, despite some flaws, "a hell of an album" and praises the "infectious ... spirit of fun" of the disc, which has "much more of a '60s feel than we're accustomed to hearing from this band".

[66] Canadian journalist Martin Popoff described this early incarnation of Deep Purple as a "hard psych band", more committed to the music than other contemporaries and already capable of creating "a noise that definitetly foretold of things to come.