Bananas  by Deep Purple

In 2003, Deep Purple released the seventeenth album of their career, titled Bananas. The album is a typical hard rock album, containing many remarkable songs that are worthy of the talent of the members of this great band. In some cases, Deep Purple even flirt with the progressive rock sound, as in Walk On.

Bananas was the band's first album in which Jon Lord did not participate on keyboards, having been replaced by Don Airey. However, Jon Lord receives writing credits for two songs. Another occurrence in the album was that Ian Gillan, who does not usually do this, had the help of Beth Hart on backing vocals for the song Haunted, which was the first and only single from the album. The instrumental Contact Lost, which is a composition by guitarist Steve Morse, is dedicated to the memory of the astronauts who were lost on February 1, 2003, in the accident that happened to their spacecraft, Columbia.

The album was not a huge commercial success. Bananas managed to reach the Top-10 in Germany and Finland, while in the United Kingdom it climbed to No. 85.