FLOWER POWER

The Dead Daisies is a supergroup with a stellar line-up, in which the great Glenn Hughes brings a career’s worth of songwriting, singing and playing bass to the table. “I’ve fallen in love with bass again,” says our hero, looking back at his days with Deep Purple, Trapeze, Black Country Communion, and more...

- Joel McIver

The British-born, California resident singer, songwriter and bassist Glenn Hughes must have a streak of immortality somewhere within him. Now 69 years old, he appears on Holy Ground, the new album from the Dead Daisies—an American, Australian and British supergroup—and sounds all of 25 years old. Hughes has been nicknamed the ‘Voice Of Rock’ for decades with good reason, although that phrase undermines the soulful, funky nature of his vocals, and also takes the focus off his amazingly adept bass playing, the reason why we’re interviewing him today.

For those not in the know, Hughes was born in Cannock in the British Midlands in 1951, honed his chops in the underrated funk-rock band Trapeze as a teenager and then sprang into the limelight in 1973 when he was recruited into Deep Purple, then one of the biggest bands ever formed. Recording and touring with Purple for the next three years, Hughes was enveloped by a blizzard of drugs and alcohol from which he only fully emerged in 1997, by which time he was a solo artist, having worked with a range of musicians and bands such as Gary Moore, Pat Thrall and Black Sabbath.

You can read about all this crazy stuff in Hughes’s 2011 autobiography—full disclosure; I was his co-writer—but today we’re here to look back at his last decade or so, when he’s recorded as a solo musician, alongside guitarist Joe Bonamassa in Black Country Communion, and now with the Dead Daisies.