Deep Purple Named Their Farewell Tour Ten Years Ago. They Just Refused to Finish It.

Deep Purple have a new album out — Splat!, released July 3 — and an 86-show run across 28 countries and three continents booked behind it. That’s not the schedule of a band winding down. Which is funny, because Deep Purple officially started saying goodbye a decade ago.

Asked about the end, bassist Roger Glover didn’t blink. “We’re not gonna have a final tour, a final gig and make a hoopla about it,” he told Paul Cashmere in a video interview with Noise11 (2026).

Here’s the connection that makes this more than a nice soundbite. Back in 2016, Deep Purple announced a tour called The Long Goodbye — a name suggested by then-guitarist Steve Morse — and everyone read it the obvious way: the hard-rock giants were beginning their exit. Ten years later, the goodbye is still going, Morse himself has since left the band, and Deep Purple have released multiple albums inside their own farewell. They announced the ending, then quietly declined to arrive at it.

That puts them in direct opposition to what the farewell tour has become: an industry. Black Sabbath branded their exit The End and sold it as an event. Ozzy Osbourne’s Back to the Beginning in 2025 was a full ceremonial send-off — one last show, one last bow, cameras everywhere. KISS ran End of the Road for years like a victory-lap franchise. The final gig is now a product category, and it’s a lucrative one: scarcity sells tickets.

Deep Purple are the counter-example. The band that arguably had the most dramatic ending in rock history — the 1976 collapse of the Mk IV lineup (fans number Deep Purple’s eras like lab experiments; that was the fourth) — is the one refusing to stage a second, tidier one. No date circled on the calendar, no “last ever” merch. Just a new record and 86 more nights of work. The Long Goodbye turned out to be less a farewell than a philosophy: keep playing until you can’t, and skip the hoopla entirely.

We’re going deeper on that 1976 collapse — and why Deep Purple’s first ending explains their refusal to script a second one — in a full Lab piece landing July 17.

The lab question: if the farewell tour is now the most bankable product in legacy rock, is Deep Purple’s refusal to have one the last genuinely rebellious move left — and who else could pull it off?

Sources: Noise11 — video interview with Roger Glover by Paul Cashmere (the original interview, July 2026); quote wording verified against Blabbermouth’s transcription of that video.