Don Airey - Rock & Roll’s Best Kept Secret
Deep Purple's unassuming keyboardist, and possibly the most prolific rock star that most people have never heard of.
Don Airey tickling the ivories live for Deep Purple at Tons of Rock 2022
In 1929, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short-story called Chains (Láncszemek) in which a group of people play a game where they attempt to link themselves to any other random selected person in the world through a series of no more than five social connections. If you limited it to the world of Rock & Roll, Deep Purple’s ivory-tickler Don Airey, who while well known amongst aficionados isn’t necessarily a household name, would rarely need more than a single intermediary to link himself to just about anyone in the business.
Even if you’ve never heard his name, you’ve definitely heard his music. If you were to type his name into Google an just skim the surface of the first few links, these are just a few of the artists you’d find that he has played with or for: Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep, Judas Priest, Gary Moore, Bruce Dickinson, Paul Di’Anno, Randy Rhoads, and…uhm…Andre Lloyd Webber (yeah I had to double check that one too). And there are so many more. The list is seemingly endless.
In 2017, he was even inducted into the Hall of Heavy Metal History.
A less pleasant trivia fact about Airey is the he was the only witness (or only witness in the band, reports differ) to the fatal plane crash that killed his friend and bandmate Randy Rhoads when the pilot was trying to buzz Ozzy Osbourne’s tour bus.