#8 Colour Countdown — Purple

So next up in our Colour Countdown is purple. A solid fixture in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

The first to jump to many people’s minds might be Prince’s Purple Rain. Strictly speaking, the cover is pretty multi-coloured. But, Prince made quite a good quote about the colour purple: “When there’s blood in the sky… red and blue = purple. Purple Rain pertains to the end of the world.” Spooky ey!?

Staying dark, where I’d actually like to begin is the bold use of purple in Black Sabbath’s ‘Master of Reality’. The first of their albums not to use any photography on the front cover, designer Keith Macmillan (legend commonly credited as Keef on album sleeves) worked with typographers at the Bloomsbury Group to create a bold graphic cover (whose type warping must have been trickier to do in the years before designers had Adobe Illustrator and fancy Mac laptops). In a modern context, it feels quite familiar, but at the time, it must have been a bold visual statement. I also feel that any other colour but purple would have made the tone seem more playful and childish. Purple adds gravitas and an air of spookiness.

Keef’s creative roots were as a photographer, and he experimented a lot with infrared film to create distinctive gloomy images that were known to create a ‘false-colour effect’. At that time in the 1970s, this divergence from the flower power primary and pastel shades would have been quite a departure for many people. Combining black and purple must have felt mysterious and curious for music fans.

Historically, the colour was associated with wealth and luxury due to the scarcity of the materials that made it: a mixture of sea snail shells and ripe urine (how they settled on those ingredients, no one knows!). Basically, only rich folk could afford it. Apparently, Julius Caesar banned anyone in the Roman Empire from wearing a purple toga apart from his love child with, Cleopatra. Poor kid, I just hope he got the smell off it! Further afield, in Japan, deep purple (murasaki) was a forbidden colour if you were an ordinary person. All these facts must associate a sense of power in the colour; subliminally our inner cave dweller must feel there is something magical afoot.

Early Impressionist painters in France were often mocked for overusing the purple shade of violet in their work. There are many logical explanations for this, from hastily mixing blue and red wet paint on their palettes or the fact that violet is the colour you see when you close your eyes after staring at yellow sunlight for too long. However, my favourite explanation by far is that these artists saw an invisible, hidden world on the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum.

If you believe the colour psychologists, purple is a glorious union of red’s energy and blue’s calming influence, coming together in an alchemical reaction to trigger emotions of calmness and creativity. I wouldn’t associate Black Sabbath with calmness, but they do say kids who grow up as heavy metal fans often end up as the most well-adjusted adults. I guess they just tackle their demons when they are young!

An honourable mention in the purple category is Run DMC’s Raising Hell. Designed by Janet Parr, it actually had three different colour versions (one green, one red and one purple), but the purple one is the one I have and seems to have become the most established. If asked if there were colours I associated with Run DMC, I, like most people, would probably say Red, White and Black, as in their now iconic logo. However, writing this did make me think about their use of the colour purple on Raising Hell. As a band, their mix of Rap and Rock style seems like a classic parallel to the idea of mixing the colours red and blue to make a new magical colour, purple. Alternatively, the films Purple Rain (1984) and The Color Purple (1985) and their championing of black culture in the US could have influenced the choice of this colour for Run DMC in 1986, in what was one of the formative albums for a new genre called Hip-Hop.

For me, however, purple will always be the colour of Dinosaur Jr. Used a lot on their early records, including the Just Like Heaven 12-inch and their album Green Mind. I had the Green Mind poster up on my wall, and my mum would always despair at why I would want a poster of a girl smoking on my wall (is it a girl? …it doesn’t really matter).

Next week’s colour will mostly be about Joni Mitchell.