I believe the Deep Purple Appreciation Society seated in Sheffield is behind this - an act of cleansing. But rebuilding the Iron Curtain just to prevent Joe getting back together with Ritchie is slightly overdoing it.
JLT has a loyal fan base in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, that might have something to do with it. He regularly does concerts there in all kinds of set-ups.
And tell me one other country where a middle-aged man with a bad wig and a worse tan plus the nervous-edgy demeanor of a 16-year-old New Joisian with Italian-American roots picking up his first date gets interviewed by
her:
It's easy to joke about Joe, he's the Dolly Parton of the DP family. But it is also fair to say that his voice has held up better (as the Moscow clip evidences) than either Gillan's or Coverdale's though it is not as one of a kind as either of them.
As for the young lass, I see a career for her in Russia Today as an anchor woman!
And as regards Vladimir, I'm squarely in the middle of how the West villifies him and Joe's adulation. Anybody wishing Putin - neither a shining democrat nor the new Stalin - away should give a long deep thought on who might follow him. I remember people wishing the Russians in Afghanistan away - seemed like a good idea at the time to some people - and look what it left us with. In a ying and yang roundabout way, I prefer a bi- or multipolar world to a unipolar one.