Jon Lord, most famous for his distorted keyboard runs with Deep Purple was always, underneath that long mane of hair, a musician’s musician. He had created orchestral pieces and concertos so when he was asked to create a masterpiece that mixed rock music with classical, Lord knew what he was doing, even if it took a lot of prodding by the German conductor Eberhard Schoener. Lord remembers, “Eberhard came to me and said, ‘you must write another rock meets classic thing.’ I hate that phrase, but he kept on at me and at Tony Edwards, who was my manager at the time.” Eventually, Lord agreed and the result is his best loved, and most well known mixing of the two genres.

The show was recorded in September of 1975 at the Stadthalle Oer-Erkenschwick, near Düsseldorf, Germany with the Dieter Dierks Mobile Recording Studio. Future iconic producer Martin Birth remixed the master tapes in Munich and the album was done. Lord admits, “I wanted to call the album Baroque’n'roll, but Eberhard wouldn’t let me. He said this was a joke and the album must be serious. But I don’t write serious music. I write from the heart, and I like the enjoyment factor to be part of it. There are little jokes throughout Windows and the Concerto for Group and Orchestra. In the Concerto there’s the big joke where the orchestra gets the little stupid tune and starts to run away with it and the band says, ‘right, that’s enough! Bam-bam-bam! There are also little musical jokes in Sarabande, so I thought Baroque’n'roll was a good little title. But I think he was probably right. It was better not to call it that.”