Deep Purple return to the Royal Albert Hall, where Jon Lord’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra first brought the band to wide British attention in 1969.
Deep Purple, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016, play a one-off night at the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington on Wednesday 25 November 2026.
The band formed in London in 1968. In September 1969 they played Jon Lord’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra at the Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Arnold. It was one of the first full collaborations between a rock band and an orchestra, and it gave them their first wide public attention at home.
The singer Ian Gillan and the bassist Roger Glover had joined that year. That line-up made Deep Purple in Rock, Fireball and Machine Head, the 1972 album that carries “Smoke on the Water”.
Lord’s concerto, its score long lost, was reconstructed and performed here again in 1999 with the London Symphony Orchestra. This night returns the band to the auditorium where that orchestral experiment began.
Ian Paice, the one musician to have played in every line-up, still anchors the band with Gillan, Glover, the keyboard player Don Airey and the guitarist Simon McBride. McBride’s first album with them, =1, arrived in 2024.
The British rock band Jayler open.