Pink Floyd and Moody Blues Inspired Deep Purple in This Indirect Way, and Thank Goodness They Did

No matter who’s participating in a brainstorming session, not every idea that comes out of it will be a zinger. That’s why it’s a brain-storm and not brain-raindrop. Juggling multiple ideas at once helps sharpen the better candidates into a full-fledged plan—or, in more musical cases, a band name. Some of the most iconic bands of all time went through two, three, or even more name changes before settling on the moniker that would make them famous. British rockers Deep Purple are no exception to the rule.

Videos by American Songwriter

When the band’s founding members were coming up with a stage name, they kept their ideas straight by pinning them to the wall at Deeves Hall, the Hertfordshire house where the four musicians lived, wrote, and rehearsed. The bandmates would wake up and find someone had tacked up a new name, some of which included Sugarlump, Orpheus, Concrete God, and Roundabout—the last of which they briefly toured under.

But of course, none of these would stick. As guitarist Ritchie Blackmore would later explain, the world had Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues, and his grandma to thank.

What Do You Get When You Combine Pink Floyd and Moody Blues? Deep Purple

In the earliest days of Deep Purple, the band held loosely to any one name. Their logic was that if they went on the road and didn’t perform well, they could adopt another moniker and get out from the memory of a bad show. The five-piece toured Denmark in the spring of 1968 as Roundabout. However, keyboardist Jon Lord would later say that Ritchie Blackmore was already telling reporters who asked that their name was Deep Purple. Unsurprisingly, Blackmore was the one who pinned that particular idea to the wall.

“I was thinking of Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues,” Blackmore explained in a 2025 interview with Shane McEachern (via MusicRadar). “There were all these colors. So, I thought, ‘Well, we should have a color.’ There was a piece of music that my grandmother used to play. ‘When the deep purple falls,’ blah, blah, blah, whatever it’s called.”

The song in question was “Deep Purple” by Nino Tempo and April Stevens, with the full line being, “When a deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls, and the stars begin to twinkle in the night / in the mist of memory, you wander back to me, breathing my name with a sigh.”

Thus, Deep Purple they came to be, adding to the colorful palette of late 1960s rock ‘n’ roll that included pinks, blues, and Cream. Thank goodness, too. “Concrete God” doesn’t roll off the tongue in quite the same way. “A bit radical,” Lord said of that one.

Photo by Jorgen Angel/Redferns