Deep Purple star Ian Gillan is urging fans not to read too much into the last track on the band's new album Now What?! insisting there's no deep Satanic meaning behind the song Vincent Price.

The heavy rock icon admits he and his bandmates gave all the tracks on the hit comeback album working titles and the name Vincent Price stuck.

But he reveals there's nothing dark and mysterious about the tune, named after the late horror movie legend - the song just sounded like the theme from a spooky film.

Gillan tells Wenn, "Everything emerges from the jam sessions we have every day and this is typical Purple. When an idea spins out, you set it aside and start thinking, 'We've got to look at the arrangement to this and the key'. You can't just identify them as number one and number two and number three, and so we give them working titles and this one sounded to everyone like the soundtrack to a horror movie, so we called it Vincent Price.

"We've all worked with Vincent Price - bandmate Roger (Glover) and I did some work with him years ago and (producer) Bob Ezrin has recorded him. Roger came out to my place in Portugal and we had a week there to fine tune a few details and look at things that maybe had slipped through and I said, 'What would be the essential ingredients of a 1960s horror movie featuring Vincent Price? It would obviously be creaking chains, rattling doors, thunder and lightning, bloodsucking vampires, sacrificial virgins, howling dogs, zombies etc. - oh, hang on a minute, we've got the lyrics.'

"That's how it came about. It was just a bit of fun."