Roger Glover and Guests - The Butterfly Ball And The Grasshopper's Feast (1995)

Line-Up :

Roger Glover - synthesiser, piano, guitar, bass, percussion, backing vocals
Eddie Hardin - piano, organ, synthesiser, backing vocals
Les Binks - drums
Ray Fenwick - guitar
Mo Foster - bass
Mike Moran - piano
Ann Odell - piano
Mike Giles - drums
Nigel Watson - saw
Eddie Jobson - violin
Jack Embrow - accordion
Chris Karan - tabla
Robin Thompson - bassoon
Liza Strike - backing vocals
Helen Chapelle - backing vocals
Barry St. John - backing vocals
Judi Kuhl - backing vocals
Kay Gardner - backing vocals
Joanne Williams - backing vocals

This album was inspired by the picture book of the same name. The project to put music to this book was offered to Roger Glover (of Deep Purple fame) after Jon Lord (also of Deep Purple fame) turned it down. Roger Glover asked some of his musical friends as well as his girlfriend to participate. He even asked his replacement in Deep Purple, bass player Glen Hughes as well as the new Deep Purple vocalist David Coverdale to contribute. Ronnie James Dio and his piano playing partner Mickey Lee Soule from Elf (Deep Purple's opening act for many years) made contributions to six of the twenty songs. They helped cowrite Harlequin Hare and Together Again. Mickey Lee Soule sang on No Solution and Ronnie sang on Sitting in a Dream, Love is All (an intended Beatles rip off) and Homeward. Ronnie's singing on Sitting in a Dream is nothing short of breathtaking. His vocals on Homeward are almost Karen Carpenter like, they are astonishing. What's really funny about this album is that so many of the guys that participated on it became famous metalheads. Ronnie of course formed his own band Dio in the 80's, David Coverdale went on to form Whitesnake, Les Binks went on to become the drummer for Judas Priest in the late 70's, and Glen Hughes sang for Tony Iommi's solo project. The enhanced version of the CD has a video for Love is All. The video features Dio as a singing frog with a three string guitar! It is hysterical. There are other standouts on this album as well. Old Blind Mole, Aranea, Waiting, and Little Chalk Blue. This is a CD you and your family can treasure for years. You can also find the book that inspired the music on Amazon as well. And for the fanatic, there is a video of the actual concert (which includes everybody from the album except for Dio) that Roger Glover did to promote the album.
When the original version of this album came out (remember vinyl?), it had 19 tracks.

This CD version is NOT the one with the video of "Love Is All", but features 10 tracks not on the vinyl: track 17 "Little Chalk Blue", which features the great voice of John Lawton, who unfortunately does not appear anywhere in the credits, as well as a demo of "Love Is All" featuring many singers on the album each taking turns at singing a few lines, plus 8 alternate mixes of some tracks, some quite similar to the "original".

The music is festive, and bears no resemblance to Deep Purple's rock style. The melodies are simple, but the arrangements are quite original. The cast of singers and musicians is quite extensive (too long to mention here), making this album a pleasant diversion from the usual path involving Glover.

It's not really a solo album: it's an album written by Glover, with contributions from a lot of known people, and constitues my favorite one: completely different from his other albums outside of Deep Purple.

The music was intended as a project for an animated movie, which, to this date, was never made.