a night working in Britain". Composition and recording The band's management organized the spare time from the UK tour to record new songs for a third album over the course of February and March 1969 at De Lane Lea Studios, with Lawrence as producer and Barry Ainsworth as sound engineer. The pressure of the multiple engagements left the band very little time for composition and most of the tracks were written and rehearsed in the studio. Deep Purple was the band's third album to be recorded, even though they had been together for less than one year. According to Nick Simper: "Recording was always a problem. We were always short of material, purely because of our schedule. The fact that we were always being chased by Tetragrammaton for material, we never had the luxury like most bands do now of saying, 'hang on fellas, we need a little bit of down time to just think about stuff and try and be creative.'" Added Blackmore: "That really bugs me...going to the studio, 'right, you gotta turn out an LP, boys.' You know, 'here we go, you gotta write a song...today.' It’s just ridiculous." The musicians were now starting to fully endeavour to write original material and found ideas for seven songs, more than on either of their first two albums. Musical and lyrical inspiration came from very disparate sources. The opener "Chasing Shadows" was based on African rhythms created by drummer Ian Paice with lyrics inspired by one of Jon Lord's nightmares. The baroque "Blind" was written by Lord and largely performed on harpsichord. The short instrumental "Fault Line" was inspired by an earthquake that the band had experienced while in Los Angeles and featured Paice's drum patterns reversed and double tracked. Roman Polanski's movie Rosemary's Baby, which the band members had watched together at a cinema, was the main inspiration for the blues rocker "Why Didn't Rosemary?" "April" was a tune written by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore about his birthday month before the recording sessions had begun; it was later augmented with a long middle section of classical music written by Lord, becoming the album's 12-minute-plus final track and Deep Purple's longest ever studio recording. The only cover song on the album is the Donovan-penned ballad "Lalena", which had been a Top 40 single for its author in the US in the autumn of 1968. The first new song to be