GLENN HUGHES

With Trapeze, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Black Country Communion, solo projects and more, the bassist/vocalist has spent more than 50 years in rock. Addiction nearly derailed his roller- coaster career, but he pulled himself back from the brink and is still going strong. A life? Not half.

- Interview: Dave Everley

Thirty seconds into our conversation, Glenn Hughes starts fiddling with his earbuds. “Give me a second,” he says, with a California smile, a healthy tan offsetting his immaculate white teeth. “I’m still deaf from working with Jon Lord.”

If battered eardrums is the only residual damage that Cannock, Staffordshire-born Hughes has to show from more than 55 years in rock'n'roll, he’s got off lightly. The bassist and singer was one of hard rock’s thrusting young bucks through the 70s, making a trio of great, if underrated albums with his original band, Trapeze, then another three as part of Deep Purple’s Mk III and IV lineups.

The latter trilogy - 1974’s Burn and Stormbringer and 1975's Come Taste The Band - rejuvenated Purple after the departure of vocalist Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover. Inspired by soul and R&B, Hughes brought a funk edge to a band not previously renowned for their funkiness, not to mention powerhouse vocals that dovetailed perfectly with fellow newbie, singer David Coverdale. Not everyone was happy - not least Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who quit in disgust at the direction the band were taking (hotshot American guitarist Tommy Bolin replaced him for Come Taste The Band).

After Purple fell apart in 1976, Hughes embarked on a solo career. His debut album, 1977’s Play Me Out, was his answer to Bowie’s Young Americans - a white English rock guy channelling the black American music he loved. But any promise he had was holed below the waterline by a heavy-duty drug addiction. From the late 70s to the early 90s, Hughes wasn’t so much a musician with a drug problem as a drug addict with a music problem.

“I didn’t plan on becoming a drug addict when I was five years old,” he says now. He’s been studying Buddhism for the past 15 years, and says everything he went through back then was preordained: “I believed it was meant to happen in my story line, in this particular lifetime.”