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It all began here, at 33 Addicott Road,
in Weston-super-Mare,

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in 1945, when Ritchie Blackmore was born.

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He would go on not only
to write one of rock's most famous riffs,

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but to explore a number of
musical forms including Bach,

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classical symphonic rock, hard rock,
blues and medieval ballads.

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Ritchie was interested in the guitar
from an early age

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but his father insisted
he took proper lessons.

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My father insisted I went to music lessons
when I was eleven.

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He said to me at the time,

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"if you don't learn this properly,
I'm gonna put it across your head."

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I used to cycle about four miles
to the guy who was teaching me.

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And I'd often fall off my bike.

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Throughout his life, Ritchie has been
the object of much criticism,

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adulation and speculation.

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But until now, he has never given the world
his take on his story.

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A story with more than its fair share
of tantrums, break-ups, rivalry and rouse.

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He was such an advanced musician,
way ahead of his time,

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way, way ahead.

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He's a fire ball, you know,
he really is beyond belief.

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His technique is incredible.
Where did that come from? I have no idea.

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And this is before Hendrix.

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Ritchie really is a great originator
and creator of the wild electric guitar.

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The way he holds the guitar and everything,
it's sort of ingrained in my mind

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as that's what a cool guitar player
is supposed to look like,

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that's how they are supposed to behave.

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In a lot of ways,
it's a little tragic that Ritchie didn't stand up

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and shine the light on himself.

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Which is why I'm happy to be here.

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He needs the light right on him,

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because unlike many people
he actually deserves it.

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It's like a sword,
almost like a clean sharp sword,

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that weighs a real lot, you know.

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His precision when he plays was stunning.

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A true pioneer as somebody who was
truly unique and original.

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To me he was like the Caucasian Hendrix.

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It actually changed my life.
It was my first gig ever.

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We got right up against the stage,
right in front of Ritchie.

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He came out and Purple came out
and he just blew me away.

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It was way more than I expected,
it was just a lot.

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After that I was dazed,

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I went home to my mum and dad and said,
"I need a guitar, I have to have a guitar."

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He is measured, he is thoughtful.

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He knows the value of clear space,
of daylight between the notes.

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It's not all about...

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It's about phrasing, it's about time.
It's about...

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The spaces are as important
as the notes that they separate.

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It's a mystery. I still find Ritchie Blackmore
a complete mystery.

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It's also a mystery
that people don't talk about him that much.

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It's odd because he's absolutely there
as one of the pioneers.

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The pioneering Ritchie was single-minded
from an early age.

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I won't do what I'm told to do.

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That seemed to go back to when I was five.

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I've seen pictures of me at five,

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and I remember distinctively, my mother
saying, "Smile for the cameraman."

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And I'm going, "No",

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and I felt resentment to the cameraman.

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Why do you need...

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And I used to say to my mother,
"Why do you need a picture of me?"

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She goes, "Because to remember you,
you're five."

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"Well, I'm here now."
And I couldn't understand the principle.

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There's something in there psychologically.

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Why was I so uptight at the age of five?

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But before he was in his teens,

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Ritchie made a promise to himself to be
the best there was, whatever it took.

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I was such a poor pupil

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and I was always near the bottom
of the class, in my tests.

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I thought, "You know what I'm gonna do?

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"I'm going to excel in music, on the guitar."

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So they go, "Well, he was a terrible pupil,
but he was a really good guitar player."

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And I had that thought in my head,
ever since I was 12, onwards.

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Well, he doesn't know anything,
but he can really play the guitar.

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And I always wanted the teachers to say that.

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From the age of eighteen,
Ritchie worked for producer Joe Meek,

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as a sessions musician in London
and toured with Screaming Lord Sutch.

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And later with Gene Vincent
and Jerry Lee Lewis

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until the gigs dried up in 1968.

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I was working in a dry cleaners,

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I had about sixteen telegrams
from Chris Curtis,

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who was in the band The Searchers,
who I had met in Hamburg.

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And he really liked my playing,

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and he said, "I have a backer,
I want you to come to England,

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"I'm gonna start a band,
you're gonna play second guitar."

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Okay, who's playing first guitar?

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"I am", Chris Curtis.

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Okay, good.

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Who's playing drums then?
'Cause he's a drummer.

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He said, "I'm playing drums."

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Bass? He goes, "I'm bass player."

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"Yeah, I kind of thought
that was gonna happen."

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I said, "ls there anybody else in this band?"

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He said, "We have a keyboard player,
Jon Lord."

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It was the start of a partnership
that would last for 25 years.

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We played together for a little bit,
and I realised how good he was.

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And it was mutual.

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I said, "I can get a brilliant drummer."

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Jon said, "I know a really good bass player."
It was Nick Simper.

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And so we just needed a singer.

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They took on Rod Evans as vocalist.

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And Chris Curtis soon dropped out
to be replaced by Ian Paice on drums.

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All they needed now was a name.

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Jon put in Orpheus.

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The drummer put in The Hill.
And I put in Deep Purple.

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Just 'cause of the song Deep Purple,

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my grandmother used to play it on the piano.

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And they seemed to like that.

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In those days you have to have
a double-barrel name.

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Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple.

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It was a name that would become
synonymous with British hard rock,

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and launched the career
of Ritchie Blackmore.

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We did the usual,
going away to a cottage in the country.

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Which was the in thing to do at the time.

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Proverbial cottage, we were practising.

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Thief's hole, I think it was called.
And it was haunted. it had to be haunted.

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And we made that record,
the first one in 24 hours.

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We did it in two days. The whole thing.

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And while it wasn't an amazing record
in its own right,

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you do get struck by the fact
that there are times on the record

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when Ritchie Blackmore's
guitar performances

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were different to anything else.

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They weren't a copy of Hendrix.

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Even though you could hear
little bits of notations

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that maybe led towards Hendrix.

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They weren't a copy of anybody else.

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They were influenced by,
yet taking its own direction.

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He had a classical feel, the rock feel
and a rock and roll feel.

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Some tracks also had a distinctly pop feel.

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And it was a cover
of a Joe South song, Hush,

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which launched the band in the U.S.A.

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Back in England,
Ritchie heard Robert Plant singing.

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There was a place called Mothers
in Birmingham,

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Robert started singing and I'm going,
"My God, who's this? This amazing singer."

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He had the range, the voice and the look.

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That's when I decided
we have to get someone

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who can belt it out and project.

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That when we got Ian Gillan.

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As soon as I heard him scream,
I went, "That's the guy for us."

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He looked like Jim Morrison,
which I knew that would go down well.

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So we have someone
who looks like Jim Morrison

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and who can scream like Arthur Brown
and Edgar Winter.

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That scream was his identity.

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In came Ian Gillan and his scream
and new bassist Roger Glover.

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And out went Evans and Simper.

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Ritchie was now lead guitar

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in what was to become
the classic Deep Purple line-up.

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It became, I suppose,

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obvious to all of us that they were
not just another flash-in-the-pan

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pop rock band,
but there was something more of substance.

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And Ritchie was a figure of mystery
and wonder already, you know.

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Ritchie Blackmore was something incredible.

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I mean, nobody could play like
that in those days.

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No, it's not just speed, you know,

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there are a lot of people who can play fast,
you know, now.

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But they can't be Ritchie Blackmore.

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He plays right on the money

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and leaves enough space
to allow the music to breathe

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and the listener to become enveloped in

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the whole atmosphere of what's being
performed and created and generated.

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I went through a period of shredding

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and thinking that everything revolved
around speed.

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And now I go, "That really
doesn't mean anything."

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It's good to be fast now and again,
but you have to say something thoughtful.

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You can't just go, look at me...

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Am I not great?

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Ritchie will take you on a couple of hours'
journey of guitar playing,

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which will cover a lot more ground.

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It's not just like tipping a pot
of multi-coloured paint over somebody,

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this is about drawing people into your
dark mysterious web.

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But while Ritchie was keen
to develop Deep Purple as a rock band,

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his co-founder Jon Lord
had other ambitions.

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Jon Lord was inspired to write
a concerto for group and orchestra,

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and it was a big challenging venture.

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The band Nice had previously
recorded with orchestras

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and had classical aspirations.

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But Jon Lord wanted to write a really sort of
important piece that would

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include the group with an orchestra
in a kind of artistic way,

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a way that would work effectively.

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And they tried it out at the Royal Albert Hall.

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And it was a big success, a big challenge.

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You can see Ritchie in the video
for the Albert Hall concert,

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and he plays great,
but you could feel he's very constrained.

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He's sort of itching to break out somewhere.

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He has this edge to him,

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which is indefinable and not quite tameable.

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The first record we did,
I thought was not bad.

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The two after that

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were lacking in direction.

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We were going in the studio
with, really, no ideas,

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'cause we were on the road all the time.

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It wasn't until we did the concerto
with Jon and the orchestra,

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and I said to them, "I really don't want
to play with orchestras any more.

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"Let's do a rock and roll record."

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I said, "Jon, we'll do the whole thing
as a rock and roll record,

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"and if it doesn't work, we'll play with
orchestras for the rest of our lives."

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So he said, "Yeah, that's sounds fair."

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We had Zeppelin starting Black Sabbath.

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Everybody was hitting with hard rock.

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Gave me an idea to play the hard rock stuff.

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I was going through kind of a angry, uptight,

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"Come on, let's get on with it."

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I'd had enough of playing with orchestras
and everything being wishy-washy.

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The wishy-washy orchestra
versus hard rock debate

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was resolved when the band wrote
and recorded Black Night.

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And it went to number two in the UK charts.

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We were in the studio
doing Deep Purple in Rock

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and the management came in.

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Amazing, you know, these people that go,

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"You know, what you need is a hit record."

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And you go, "I never thought of that.
A hit record, yeah."

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And I started playing.

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I just started playing.

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Okay, let's have a verse.

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Put a verse in there.

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And we did that very quickly.

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Very quickly.

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And all of a sudden,
of course that went to number one

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or number two, number one.

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It was funny how it was written like that,
very quickly,

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and that's the best way to write a song.

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And that is based on...

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Ricky Nelson put out a tune
called Summertime in 1958.

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Which, he's singing, "Summertime..."

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"...and the living is easy."

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That was the base riff, the top line was...

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Right? Adds that.

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So right there you got two hit records.
'Cause if you go...

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"Hey Joe..."

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As soon as I heard Hendrix play that intro,

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I thought, "He got that from the same record
that we got the base riff from."

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The band were on a roll.

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And in 1970,
their fourth album Deep Purple in Rock

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reached number four in the UK charts
and went gold in Britain and America.

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I just knew I was happy with it at the time,

235
00:17:36,973 --> 00:17:38,808
because the previous three,

236
00:17:38,892 --> 00:17:41,186
lthoughL
"We don't know where we're going.

237
00:17:41,311 --> 00:17:43,897
"We're dilly-dallying,
we're going all over the place."

238
00:17:43,980 --> 00:17:48,943
Ballads, a bit of blues, folk,
it was like mishmash.

239
00:17:49,027 --> 00:17:52,655
People like to get a record and put it on,

240
00:17:52,781 --> 00:17:55,909
and go, "I can leave that on
and it's party time."

241
00:17:55,992 --> 00:17:59,579
The Deep Purple in Rock, of course,
was the definitive album,

242
00:17:59,662 --> 00:18:02,082
I think, for Deep Purple.

243
00:18:02,165 --> 00:18:05,251
It was the era of Black Sabbath, of course,
and Led Zeppelin.

244
00:18:05,335 --> 00:18:08,880
Soto see Deep Purple really focusing,

245
00:18:09,005 --> 00:18:12,383
get down to it on their rock album

246
00:18:12,509 --> 00:18:15,553
that really convinced
the vast mass of their fans.

247
00:18:15,678 --> 00:18:22,060
And really for the first time Deep Purple
became among the top three British bands.

248
00:18:22,185 --> 00:18:26,106
I think what really inspired me more than
anything else was the In Rock album.

249
00:18:26,189 --> 00:18:28,858
But it was the fire and it was the passion
that really spoke.

250
00:18:28,983 --> 00:18:31,152
That was the bit I wanted to bottle and keep.

251
00:18:31,361 --> 00:18:32,654
When you hear Speed King,

252
00:18:32,737 --> 00:18:35,949
you're looking at, really,
proto thrash, proto metal.

253
00:18:36,032 --> 00:18:40,787
This was so influential
in what came later in metal terms,

254
00:18:40,870 --> 00:18:45,458
and was really Blackmore delivering
a dynamic riff

255
00:18:45,542 --> 00:18:50,380
on which Gillan held his vocals
and which Lord played off with keyboard.

256
00:19:05,228 --> 00:19:10,191
And Child in Time is just phenomenal,
it's a remarkable piece of epic music.

257
00:19:10,275 --> 00:19:15,947
It's a story. It's almost biblical in the way
it reaches out and envelops you.

258
00:19:16,072 --> 00:19:18,116
This was a classical piece of music.

259
00:19:18,241 --> 00:19:21,786
This was a performance
by a band on an orchestral level.

260
00:19:48,897 --> 00:19:52,275
With the pressure on to follow up
the success of Deep Purple in Rock,

261
00:19:52,358 --> 00:19:53,610
Ritchie and the band once again

262
00:19:53,693 --> 00:19:56,154
locked themselves away from the world
to write.

263
00:19:56,279 --> 00:20:00,825
We rented this old dilapidated house
down in Devon.

264
00:20:02,243 --> 00:20:04,996
And everybody had their bedroom.

265
00:20:06,122 --> 00:20:09,167
And mine was full of flies,
and it was a dreadful place,

266
00:20:09,292 --> 00:20:11,794
but it had a good vibe to it or two.

267
00:20:11,920 --> 00:20:14,797
We were into doing lots of séances
at the time.

268
00:20:14,881 --> 00:20:21,638
And I always felt that to do a séance,
the best thing was to have a cross.

269
00:20:22,222 --> 00:20:25,850
It was in the early days when I kind of
believed in that,

270
00:20:25,975 --> 00:20:30,521
and that was kind of a...
As a form of protection.

271
00:20:31,481 --> 00:20:33,816
Of course I didn't have a cross on me.

272
00:20:34,192 --> 00:20:38,321
And I went up to Jon Lord's wife and said,

273
00:20:38,404 --> 00:20:42,116
"Do you have cross I could borrow?"
She said, "I'm Jewish."

274
00:20:42,200 --> 00:20:44,494
That didn't go down too well.

275
00:20:44,661 --> 00:20:47,163
So I went, "Roger! Roger will have a cross."

276
00:20:47,247 --> 00:20:50,750
And I went to his bedroom outside,
he'd gone to sleep.

277
00:20:51,000 --> 00:20:53,044
"Roger?" "What?"

278
00:20:53,169 --> 00:20:54,712
"Do you have a cross?" "Yeah."

279
00:20:54,837 --> 00:20:56,381
"I need the cross, we're doing a seance."

280
00:20:56,714 --> 00:20:58,549
"No, leave me alone."

281
00:20:58,841 --> 00:21:00,969
So, I got this axe,

282
00:21:01,052 --> 00:21:05,056
so I went crash crash at the door

283
00:21:05,181 --> 00:21:09,602
and made a hole,
and I'm axing the door down.

284
00:21:10,520 --> 00:21:13,690
I pulled it and I got through the hole
and went over to him.

285
00:21:13,815 --> 00:21:16,985
"I want your cross." "Go on, get off, get off."

286
00:21:17,068 --> 00:21:20,405
Roger is a very gentle man.

287
00:21:20,530 --> 00:21:24,826
Violence doesn't often occur to him
as a means to anything.

288
00:21:24,909 --> 00:21:26,077
It was very un-Roger like,

289
00:21:26,202 --> 00:21:32,041
what followed, Roger chasing Ritchie
around the house with said axe.

290
00:21:33,084 --> 00:21:35,169
You know, I said, "Roger, wow."

291
00:21:35,253 --> 00:21:36,462
So that was a lot of fun.

292
00:21:44,762 --> 00:21:48,683
In 1971 they released a new single,
Strange Kind of Woman

293
00:21:48,766 --> 00:21:53,354
and a follow-up to their landmark
Deep Purple in Rock, the album Fireball.

294
00:21:54,230 --> 00:21:57,066
It was great because,

295
00:21:57,191 --> 00:22:01,988
all of a sudden,
starving for a few years before that,

296
00:22:02,071 --> 00:22:03,990
and we were suddenly in vogue

297
00:22:04,073 --> 00:22:08,161
and everybody had Deep Purple in Rock
until we replaced it with Fireball.

298
00:22:08,244 --> 00:22:10,872
Fireball was put together too quickly,

299
00:22:11,831 --> 00:22:15,084
for my liking, we didn't have the ideas.

300
00:22:15,168 --> 00:22:18,129
Fireball to me was artificial, contrived.

301
00:22:19,922 --> 00:22:21,591
Despite Ritchie's misgivings,

302
00:22:21,674 --> 00:22:24,093
Fireball reached number one
on the UK charts,

303
00:22:24,218 --> 00:22:27,430
and the band set to work on
what would be their third album,

304
00:22:27,513 --> 00:22:28,723
Machine Head.

305
00:22:29,807 --> 00:22:33,061
Machine Head, I have great memories of,
we did that in the Swiss Alps,

306
00:22:33,144 --> 00:22:34,645
and that was fantastic.

307
00:22:34,771 --> 00:22:38,399
And we did it in three weeks
and the ideas were just flowing.

308
00:22:38,566 --> 00:22:42,070
I had written a few things in my time off,
so I had those,

309
00:22:42,153 --> 00:22:45,239
like Highway Star.

310
00:22:46,449 --> 00:22:49,786
I had written the solo basically at home,
worked it out,

311
00:22:49,869 --> 00:22:51,662
which I had never done before.

312
00:22:51,788 --> 00:22:55,666
It was always on the fly,
you know, just jamming.

313
00:22:55,792 --> 00:22:59,629
But, so we had a lot of constructive ideas.

314
00:22:59,754 --> 00:23:04,217
Roger Glover had written Maybe I'm a Leo,
which I thought was a great tune.

315
00:23:05,426 --> 00:23:07,136
They were due to record in the casino,

316
00:23:07,220 --> 00:23:09,722
which was then the main concert venue
in Montreux.

317
00:23:09,806 --> 00:23:11,307
But the evening before
they were due to start,

318
00:23:11,391 --> 00:23:15,353
a fire ignited during a Frank Zappa concert,
burning it to the ground.

319
00:23:19,565 --> 00:23:23,194
Festival organiser Claude Nobs
came to their rescue.

320
00:23:23,820 --> 00:23:27,031
Claude with enormous selflessness said,

321
00:23:27,156 --> 00:23:30,993
"Don't worry, I'll help you to find
somewhere else to record."

322
00:23:31,911 --> 00:23:33,121
Where? Anyway.

323
00:23:33,204 --> 00:23:39,544
So, there was this amazing
Victorian glass-walled pavilion

324
00:23:40,378 --> 00:23:43,506
in some gardens,
some lovely lakeside gardens.

325
00:23:44,090 --> 00:23:49,762
And with enormous disregard for anyone
who might live within 10 or 12 miles of it,

326
00:23:49,846 --> 00:23:52,849
we set up in there, you know.

327
00:23:54,350 --> 00:23:59,439
And it was a very ill-chosen place,

328
00:23:59,522 --> 00:24:01,732
but it was a stopgap.

329
00:24:02,275 --> 00:24:05,027
The recording session was back on track.

330
00:24:05,570 --> 00:24:11,075
Ritchie was astonishingly prolific
with guitar riffs.

331
00:24:11,200 --> 00:24:12,201
Profligate almost, you know?

332
00:24:12,285 --> 00:24:13,953
They would just tumble out of him.

333
00:24:14,036 --> 00:24:18,833
And that was heaven,
absolute heaven for a band,

334
00:24:18,916 --> 00:24:24,297
because here was a guitarist who just would
never tread, it seemed, the same road twice.

335
00:24:24,505 --> 00:24:27,925
And it was the fire that had destroyed
their original recording venue

336
00:24:28,050 --> 00:24:31,888
that was to inspire the song that contains
one of rock's greatest riffs.

337
00:24:32,680 --> 00:24:35,391
When we got back to the hotel, there was a...

338
00:24:35,475 --> 00:24:38,227
We looked out of the window,
I think we all had stiff brandies or something.

339
00:24:38,352 --> 00:24:40,730
We looked out of the window
and you could actually see the smoke

340
00:24:40,813 --> 00:24:42,940
from the casino coming across the lake.

341
00:24:43,065 --> 00:24:45,193
This big, billowing cloud
coming across the lake,

342
00:24:45,276 --> 00:24:48,321
hence the title Smoke on the Water,
the boys came up with that.

343
00:24:48,404 --> 00:24:52,408
The first time I heard Smoke on the Water,
of course, from Machine Head,

344
00:24:52,492 --> 00:24:55,369
it was one of those riffs
that hit you right away.

345
00:24:55,453 --> 00:24:58,915
It's a bit like Sunshine of Your Love
by Cream,

346
00:24:58,998 --> 00:25:01,125
or Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin.

347
00:25:01,250 --> 00:25:05,046
It was just... I don't know where guitarists
find these riffs from, actually.

348
00:25:05,129 --> 00:25:08,925
When we did Smoke on the Water,

349
00:25:09,008 --> 00:25:11,928
it was just Ian and myself, Paice and myself.

350
00:25:12,094 --> 00:25:15,223
I said, "What rhythm haven't we played?"
and he went...

351
00:25:16,349 --> 00:25:18,935
He laid that down, so I just went...

352
00:25:21,687 --> 00:25:26,609
That's where we were and the next minute,

353
00:25:26,734 --> 00:25:30,238
the police were knocking at the door
'cause we were making so much racket.

354
00:25:31,364 --> 00:25:33,074
And we knew it was the police,

355
00:25:33,157 --> 00:25:37,787
so we said, "Let's go for a take
before they throw us out of here."

356
00:25:39,288 --> 00:25:43,668
Every guitar player
dreams of doing with its creators.

357
00:25:43,793 --> 00:25:47,171
Every kid who ever picked up a guitar
can do...

358
00:25:47,797 --> 00:25:49,799
Funny thing is, they all do it different.

359
00:25:49,924 --> 00:25:52,802
That's the nice thing, and I found that I had it
in my head how to play it,

360
00:25:52,927 --> 00:25:55,805
and it was completely different to the way
Ritchie plays it.

361
00:25:56,472 --> 00:25:58,558
Somebody said that music

362
00:26:00,184 --> 00:26:06,315
is many different colours and one of those
colours is silence, simplicity.

363
00:26:06,440 --> 00:26:10,736
The quiet parts, the easy parts,
the parts you can immediately grasp on to

364
00:26:10,820 --> 00:26:13,155
and wonder why you didn't write it yourself.

365
00:26:13,239 --> 00:26:16,659
That's genius.
That's a genius riff. Wish I'd wrote it.

366
00:26:37,888 --> 00:26:41,851
The second record that I ever bought
in my life was Machine Head.

367
00:26:41,976 --> 00:26:44,186
What an album. Oh, my God!

368
00:26:44,270 --> 00:26:49,317
To have a record like that
and to have a guitar player like Ritchie

369
00:26:49,400 --> 00:26:54,864
in your radar and your field,
it was just the greatest.

370
00:26:54,989 --> 00:26:58,492
You just think, "What would my life have
been like without that?"

371
00:27:27,897 --> 00:27:32,151
It's the way Ritchie plays the riff.
It's not the way that

372
00:27:32,234 --> 00:27:36,530
two generations of kids have played it
in the guitar shop and driven people mad,

373
00:27:36,614 --> 00:27:38,157
to the point where in some shops in London

374
00:27:38,240 --> 00:27:42,203
it says, "if you are trying out a guitar please
don't play Smoke on the Water."

375
00:27:42,286 --> 00:27:45,623
The first guitar, that guitar, right over there.

376
00:27:45,748 --> 00:27:48,959
You see the Strat with the maple body,

377
00:27:49,085 --> 00:27:51,712
that was my first real guitar.

378
00:27:51,796 --> 00:27:57,593
And I got it because of the poster on my wall
in my bedroom of Ritchie playing.

379
00:27:57,677 --> 00:27:59,553
It was that guitar.

380
00:27:59,637 --> 00:28:02,848
And that's what I wanted.
I wanted the Ritchie Blackmore Strat.

381
00:28:15,111 --> 00:28:17,863
Ritchie's solo on
Machine Head's Highway Star

382
00:28:17,947 --> 00:28:20,908
was also set to become
a Deep Purple statement.

383
00:28:21,242 --> 00:28:26,497
Highway Star is... That's crazy.
That's just a crazy song for a guitar player.

384
00:28:26,622 --> 00:28:30,042
It makes everyone who thinks they are
a guitar player need to pick up their guitar

385
00:28:30,126 --> 00:28:33,921
and see,
"Well, if I'm that good, can I do that?"

386
00:28:34,630 --> 00:28:39,135
Highway Star solo was one of the first
things I could get my head around.

387
00:28:39,218 --> 00:28:42,304
Even when I was like 16 or 17,

388
00:28:42,430 --> 00:28:46,016
it wasn't the standard notes you'd use.
It wasn't just the blues scale.

389
00:28:46,142 --> 00:28:52,189
It was classically... There was classical stuff
coming in there and with this aggression.

390
00:28:52,314 --> 00:28:55,568
Ritchie was really looking to expand
on his solos

391
00:28:55,651 --> 00:28:57,653
and wanted a particular sequence,

392
00:28:57,778 --> 00:28:59,613
which is actually
almost a classical sequence.

393
00:28:59,697 --> 00:29:02,992
It's probably the defining moment

394
00:29:03,117 --> 00:29:08,622
for Ritchie's soloing, Highway Star to me.
It's the most recognisable solo.

395
00:29:08,706 --> 00:29:11,333
I like solos where you know them,

396
00:29:11,459 --> 00:29:14,336
solos where it's just a... Nothing.

397
00:29:14,837 --> 00:29:19,091
So I think Highway Star was just stunning
for that effect.

398
00:29:59,799 --> 00:30:03,677
I always thought American players always go
right to the edge of the cliff and fall off

399
00:30:03,761 --> 00:30:06,222
and wave as they are going down.

400
00:30:06,347 --> 00:30:11,393
But the British players seem to take
that one half a step back from the cliff

401
00:30:11,519 --> 00:30:14,980
and so it's together
right till the end of the song,

402
00:30:15,064 --> 00:30:17,566
but it's still extremely thrilling.

403
00:30:17,650 --> 00:30:22,696
And funny thing about that song is that,

404
00:30:22,780 --> 00:30:26,659
having played it, you can get carried away
with the emotion of the song,

405
00:30:26,742 --> 00:30:27,993
the intensity of it,

406
00:30:28,077 --> 00:30:31,580
of what you're doing, and it ruins it in a way.

407
00:30:31,664 --> 00:30:37,503
And that's part of Ritchie's charm for me
is his restraint at the right moments,

408
00:30:37,586 --> 00:30:40,840
and it creates a lot of drama in his parts.

409
00:30:40,923 --> 00:30:41,924
It was a game changer,

410
00:30:42,007 --> 00:30:43,884
I thought Machine Head
was a game changer myself.

411
00:30:44,426 --> 00:30:48,097
Machine Head reached number seven
and went double platinum in the USA

412
00:30:48,222 --> 00:30:50,683
and gold at number one in the UK.

413
00:30:50,766 --> 00:30:53,936
But Ritchie's desire to control events
was now leading to clashes

414
00:30:54,019 --> 00:30:56,021
with vocalist Ian Gillan.

415
00:30:57,606 --> 00:31:00,609
He was, as they say, an alpha guy. So was I.

416
00:31:00,734 --> 00:31:05,614
He wanted to control, I wanted to control,
so we butted heads because of that.

417
00:31:06,323 --> 00:31:09,577
We still respected each other,
but we never got on.

418
00:31:09,660 --> 00:31:11,954
And we just couldn't be in the same room.

419
00:31:12,079 --> 00:31:13,122
That was the problem.

420
00:31:13,205 --> 00:31:16,166
I wasn't speaking to him,
he wasn't speaking to me.

421
00:31:17,960 --> 00:31:19,503
We weren't being creative.

422
00:31:19,837 --> 00:31:21,171
The band then toured Japan

423
00:31:21,297 --> 00:31:26,886
which produced their hugely successful
1972 live album, Made in Japan.

424
00:31:26,969 --> 00:31:30,222
Things were coming to a head
with Ian Gillan.

425
00:31:30,306 --> 00:31:34,518
I think it started with coming back
on the Japanese flight.

426
00:31:36,020 --> 00:31:40,774
Paul Rodgers, you know,
to me was just mind-blowing, his voice.

427
00:31:41,901 --> 00:31:44,153
I wanted Ian to be able to do that,

428
00:31:44,278 --> 00:31:47,823
and I couldn't relate to Ian's
screaming and yelling

429
00:31:47,907 --> 00:31:50,117
and the Elvis Presley impersonation.

430
00:31:51,285 --> 00:31:55,456
He said, "So, how do you want me to sing?
I'll sing any way you want me to sing".

431
00:31:55,539 --> 00:32:02,087
And I went, "lan, you can't sing that way,
that's a blues thing", you know?

432
00:32:03,297 --> 00:32:06,675
I think after that, that turned him off.

433
00:32:07,134 --> 00:32:10,346
He was rejected,
so we went downhill from there.

434
00:32:18,103 --> 00:32:20,689
The aptly titled Who Do We Think We Are

435
00:32:20,814 --> 00:32:25,027
was to be the final album before
Ian Gillan and Roger Glover left the band.

436
00:32:26,946 --> 00:32:30,991
I think Ritchie Blackmore spent a lot of
his career looking for the perfect line-up.

437
00:32:31,075 --> 00:32:33,494
And when he found it,
he still wasn't happy with it.

438
00:32:33,702 --> 00:32:34,870
We started looking for other people,

439
00:32:34,995 --> 00:32:37,831
we found Glenn Hughes
and David Coverdale.

440
00:32:37,915 --> 00:32:38,916
I'd left art college,

441
00:32:39,041 --> 00:32:42,544
and I was working in a boutique
in Redcar in the north of England.

442
00:32:42,628 --> 00:32:44,797
And I read in the Melody Maker that...

443
00:32:44,880 --> 00:32:48,884
it was a picture of Jon at his organ,
very Monty Python,

444
00:32:48,968 --> 00:32:55,391
saying, "Deep Purple still haven't found
a singer and are considering unknowns."

445
00:32:56,100 --> 00:33:00,354
Which was basically a little ding moment.

446
00:33:00,437 --> 00:33:02,022
Paice played me this tape, he said,

447
00:33:02,106 --> 00:33:04,066
"What do you think of this singer?"
And it was David Coverdale.

448
00:33:04,149 --> 00:33:05,985
And Jon would go,
"What's wrong with him?"

449
00:33:06,068 --> 00:33:09,113
And I'd go, "You can't have him after Gillan."

450
00:33:09,863 --> 00:33:12,741
Gillan was this God with the women,

451
00:33:12,825 --> 00:33:16,620
and we've got to have someone that can

452
00:33:16,745 --> 00:33:20,332
fire up the female interest there.

453
00:33:21,083 --> 00:33:24,586
And they said, "No, we disagree."

454
00:33:25,295 --> 00:33:27,715
The girls in the office think he is cute.

455
00:33:27,798 --> 00:33:29,675
I'm going, "Cute? Okay."

456
00:33:56,994 --> 00:34:00,581
Then we did Mistreated, which is
a bluesy thing, and we had that voice,

457
00:34:00,706 --> 00:34:03,625
Paul Rodgers kind of overturned to it.

458
00:34:03,834 --> 00:34:06,128
And Burn itself, the song worked,

459
00:34:06,253 --> 00:34:08,797
I felt we had some good songs there.

460
00:34:27,149 --> 00:34:30,444
And, of course, Glenn was very effervescent.

461
00:34:30,527 --> 00:34:34,156
He had a great funky way of playing the bass.

462
00:34:35,115 --> 00:34:36,909
He was a very rhythmic bass player.

463
00:34:47,920 --> 00:34:51,423
'Cause before that we had more of a...

464
00:34:52,049 --> 00:34:54,802
Glenn was more...

465
00:34:54,885 --> 00:34:56,678
There would be this rhythmic...

466
00:34:57,513 --> 00:35:01,725
He was very good
with his rhythmic syncopation.

467
00:35:15,531 --> 00:35:18,951
You know, it bears noting that,
for me, Ritchie Blackmore,

468
00:35:19,034 --> 00:35:21,870
unlike many guitar players,

469
00:35:22,788 --> 00:35:27,543
never lost his edge, if it were.

470
00:35:28,335 --> 00:35:32,172
Burn is every bit as important
as Space Truckin'

471
00:35:32,256 --> 00:35:34,716
and some of the later stuff.

472
00:35:34,842 --> 00:35:39,888
You can actually hear a guitar player
at the top of his game.

473
00:36:14,756 --> 00:36:17,801
Ritchie is convinced that the clock in his bar
is haunted

474
00:36:17,926 --> 00:36:20,262
and chimes whenever it is happy.

475
00:36:22,472 --> 00:36:23,932
Very haPPY-

476
00:36:25,142 --> 00:36:27,477
- It doesn't do it at a set time or anything?
-No.

477
00:36:27,603 --> 00:36:29,271
- It does it just...
-No, only when it's happy.

478
00:36:29,396 --> 00:36:31,356
It will stay off for months.

479
00:36:32,107 --> 00:36:33,775
It's haunted, it was given to me by a friend.

480
00:36:41,867 --> 00:36:45,287
Ritchie's lifelong interest in haunting
and practical jokes

481
00:36:45,412 --> 00:36:48,790
was something else newcomer Coverdale
had to get used to.

482
00:36:48,916 --> 00:36:51,585
Some of them were very close to the knuckle.

483
00:36:51,668 --> 00:36:54,838
We were at Clearwell Castle
in Gloucestershire, Forest of Dean.

484
00:36:55,297 --> 00:37:00,469
A guy called Tony Ashton was coming down
from London for the weekend, for the hang.

485
00:37:01,803 --> 00:37:06,016
So Ritchie and I had the crew empty
the guest bedroom

486
00:37:06,141 --> 00:37:09,728
of all the furniture and took up the carpets,
took up the floor boards,

487
00:37:09,811 --> 00:37:13,065
and put a huge speaker, I mean, a really
big Marshall speaker

488
00:37:13,148 --> 00:37:16,818
underneath the bed.

489
00:37:16,944 --> 00:37:21,114
Put the boards back in,
put the carpets back over,

490
00:37:21,198 --> 00:37:23,283
everything just looking normal.

491
00:37:23,450 --> 00:37:26,745
Fed the wires down to another room
down the way,

492
00:37:26,828 --> 00:37:31,750
and sat up and waited for Tony Ashton
to come back from the pub.

493
00:37:31,833 --> 00:37:35,671
And as we hear the steps coming down
the corridor

494
00:37:35,796 --> 00:37:39,299
and Tony's door close.

495
00:37:39,383 --> 00:37:43,929
So we give him time to bathroom
and whatever and get into bed.

496
00:37:44,012 --> 00:37:48,517
And then we turn the speaker,
the microphone on, and I went up,

497
00:37:48,642 --> 00:37:53,897
started scratching against a board,
which you can imagine, this is under a bed,

498
00:37:54,022 --> 00:37:57,526
and saying, "Let me out."

499
00:37:59,027 --> 00:38:01,280
Well...

500
00:38:01,363 --> 00:38:04,700
We heard the most unearthly scream and...

501
00:38:04,783 --> 00:38:08,412
Which, you know, and panicking footsteps
running down the corridor.

502
00:38:08,537 --> 00:38:10,831
It certainly wasn't a guy's voice.

503
00:38:10,914 --> 00:38:12,124
Tony was still at the pub,

504
00:38:12,207 --> 00:38:14,710
this was a guest of the family
who owned the castle,

505
00:38:14,835 --> 00:38:19,047
who'd actuallyjust come back from Bristol
after seeing The Exorcist movie.

506
00:38:19,131 --> 00:38:23,802
So, and was last seen heading
into the deep, dark forest.

507
00:38:24,553 --> 00:38:30,475
He has no boundaries
when it comes to his pranks, his japes.

508
00:38:34,563 --> 00:38:38,317
This is Ontario, 40 miles east of Los Angeles.

509
00:38:38,400 --> 00:38:41,361
The only sound you'll hear today are the
railway track to the south

510
00:38:41,445 --> 00:38:43,238
and the highway to the north.

511
00:38:44,656 --> 00:38:49,494
But the 40,000 plus people who gathered
here for the 1974 Cal Jam festival

512
00:38:49,578 --> 00:38:52,831
were about to witness Ritchie
at his most theatrical.

513
00:38:54,207 --> 00:38:59,588
Cal Jam, it was pretty romantic
when it happened, I'll tell you, it was.

514
00:38:59,671 --> 00:39:03,175
I remember a beautiful
southern California day.

515
00:39:07,763 --> 00:39:10,932
I'd come from driving a little
transit van's local gigs

516
00:39:11,058 --> 00:39:15,729
into flying in a customised, private 707, 727.

517
00:39:15,812 --> 00:39:19,775
The star ship, which is how we flew
into that environment.

518
00:39:19,858 --> 00:39:21,568
It was breath-taking to me.

519
00:39:21,860 --> 00:39:24,654
There must have been 350,000 people there.

520
00:39:24,780 --> 00:39:28,950
I think 100,000 burned the fence down.

521
00:39:29,076 --> 00:39:30,869
Then it was probably 350,000.

522
00:39:30,994 --> 00:39:34,331
When we look at the visual images
from above,

523
00:39:34,456 --> 00:39:39,961
you cannot imagine what it's like
to walk onto a stage and you can't see...

524
00:39:41,088 --> 00:39:45,634
You can see the skyline,
but in the skyline there is people.

525
00:39:45,801 --> 00:39:47,969
It really was stunning.

526
00:39:48,136 --> 00:39:50,305
There was a whole host,
the Emerson, Lake and Palmer

527
00:39:50,430 --> 00:39:54,684
and Black Sabbath, Earth, Wind and Fire,
Seals and Crofts,

528
00:39:54,810 --> 00:39:58,688
Black Oak Arkansas and Rare Earth.
I think that was the bill.

529
00:39:58,814 --> 00:40:01,691
And we were offered the headline slot.

530
00:40:01,817 --> 00:40:05,862
John Coletta, the management,
called me up six months before that festival

531
00:40:05,987 --> 00:40:09,324
and said, "They want you
to do California Jam."

532
00:40:09,449 --> 00:40:12,536
I said, "No, thanks.
I'm not interested in any more festivals."

533
00:40:12,661 --> 00:40:14,621
They are a nightmare, they always will be,

534
00:40:14,704 --> 00:40:17,624
there is always
complete catastrophe backstage.

535
00:40:17,707 --> 00:40:21,503
Nothing ever goes right,
you're always on late or early.

536
00:40:21,628 --> 00:40:24,840
The billing is all wrong, it's just awful.

537
00:40:24,923 --> 00:40:28,343
I said, "You know what, I might do it,

538
00:40:28,427 --> 00:40:32,514
"but we have to write down
all these conditions,

539
00:40:32,639 --> 00:40:35,183
"because I'm tired of doing festivals."

540
00:40:35,308 --> 00:40:39,729
We're gonna go on at dusk,
which is 9:00, around there.

541
00:40:39,855 --> 00:40:42,858
And I said, "We'll be the first band
with lights, 'cause that's important."

542
00:40:42,941 --> 00:40:45,193
It's a subliminal thing, people see lights,

543
00:40:45,318 --> 00:40:48,238
and they go, "I really like this band
compared to the rest of them."

544
00:40:48,363 --> 00:40:51,032
It's only 'cause they've got lights going on,

545
00:40:51,158 --> 00:40:55,662
and it's a psychological thing
that I've noticed, so I insisted on that.

546
00:40:56,788 --> 00:40:58,957
And they said, "Absolutely no problem."

547
00:40:59,374 --> 00:41:03,462
In the event, the organisers demanded
the band go on when it was still light.

548
00:41:03,545 --> 00:41:06,089
But Ritchie stuck to his guns.

549
00:41:06,214 --> 00:41:10,260
People were yelling and screaming
and threatening this and threatening that,

550
00:41:10,385 --> 00:41:14,681
and I just get the door bolted,
and I'd have a few drinks playing the guitar.

551
00:41:14,764 --> 00:41:16,224
I was not gonna go on.

552
00:41:16,683 --> 00:41:20,854
Finally when it was dark,
Ritchie, the musician, went on stage.

553
00:41:21,062 --> 00:41:24,900
You look fucking great from here.
Really good.

554
00:41:25,734 --> 00:41:27,777
And they were terrific on stage,
they were absolutely terrific.

555
00:41:27,903 --> 00:41:31,615
Ritchie is a spectacularly visual guitarist,
he was.

556
00:41:33,074 --> 00:41:36,244
He ran around, put his back to the audience,
threw his guitar around,

557
00:41:36,328 --> 00:41:38,580
and of course,
he did a bit of a Townshend sometimes,

558
00:41:38,663 --> 00:41:39,664
and smashed the guitar at the end.

559
00:41:39,748 --> 00:41:44,461
Of all the guys in Deep Purple,
it was Ritchie who was the most quixotic

560
00:41:44,586 --> 00:41:45,962
and mischievous.

561
00:41:46,588 --> 00:41:50,884
And the quixotic and mischievous Ritchie
was also on stage that night.

562
00:41:51,510 --> 00:41:56,056
He's had enough, you know,
he's playing away and you can hear,

563
00:41:56,139 --> 00:41:59,726
he said he could hear this guy going,
"Limey, get back in there, so I can..."

564
00:41:59,809 --> 00:42:01,770
You know, and all this kind of stuff,

565
00:42:01,853 --> 00:42:05,732
and he killed the camera,
it was brilliant showmanship.

566
00:42:05,815 --> 00:42:11,279
Probably among the definitive moments
of his kind of sense of spectacle

567
00:42:11,404 --> 00:42:16,034
and wanting to kind of turn it up
to another notch or whatever.

568
00:42:42,477 --> 00:42:46,189
And Ritchie had plans
for notching things up even further.

569
00:42:47,148 --> 00:42:48,984
So, I went to my roadie and said,

570
00:42:49,067 --> 00:42:52,153
"What I'm gonna do is
blow up the amplifiers."

571
00:42:52,279 --> 00:42:56,616
I said, "What I want you to do is
cover the amplifiers in petrol.

572
00:42:56,700 --> 00:43:01,413
"I'll go across one side of the stage.
You douse my Marshalls,

573
00:43:01,496 --> 00:43:03,582
"dummy Marshalls, with petrol."

574
00:43:03,665 --> 00:43:08,336
Ronnie Quinton, his beloved guitar tech,
who is no longer with us,

575
00:43:08,461 --> 00:43:13,592
loaded way too much gun powder
into Ritchie's stuff,

576
00:43:13,675 --> 00:43:17,178
so when that... it blew Paice's glasses off.
I thought I was gonna die.

577
00:43:37,949 --> 00:43:41,077
Exploded and, like, blew a hole in the stage,

578
00:43:41,202 --> 00:43:45,915
Paice's glasses got blown off, he was like...
He can't see anything.

579
00:43:46,041 --> 00:43:49,919
It made some cameraman temporarily deaf.

580
00:43:51,421 --> 00:43:52,881
But, it looked great.

581
00:43:53,840 --> 00:43:59,554
Everybody was up and happy.
Deep Purple just killed, I mean, they killed.

582
00:43:59,638 --> 00:44:05,852
Because this was still a bit of a transition
into heavy metal, still kinda new.

583
00:44:05,935 --> 00:44:08,396
They really came through, let me tell you.
They were good.

584
00:44:08,480 --> 00:44:14,319
I was a total novice outside of the remarkable

585
00:44:14,402 --> 00:44:18,740
schooling of working men's clubs
and it's just a walk in the park, you know,

586
00:44:18,823 --> 00:44:22,160
after you've played
Wingate Constitutional Club.

587
00:44:22,243 --> 00:44:25,080
Yeah, he did a great job, he pulled it off.

588
00:44:35,799 --> 00:44:37,092
And we had a helicopter,

589
00:44:37,217 --> 00:44:40,637
we were bundled into the helicopter
and flown out.

590
00:44:40,762 --> 00:44:44,224
The police were coming to arrest us,
for blowing up the stage,

591
00:44:44,307 --> 00:44:47,602
being dangerous to all the people,
what have you.

592
00:44:48,353 --> 00:44:54,067
You know, it worked, and the idea was
to upstage ELP, which I think we did.

593
00:44:55,110 --> 00:44:59,656
That was probably one of the peak moments
certainly in economic terms

594
00:44:59,781 --> 00:45:02,075
and in terms of record breaking.

595
00:45:02,158 --> 00:45:04,452
That was one of the highlights
of Deep Purple's career,

596
00:45:04,536 --> 00:45:06,830
because they played to this vast audience.

597
00:45:06,955 --> 00:45:09,165
I think it is in the Guinness Book of Records,

598
00:45:09,290 --> 00:45:12,627
some hundreds of thousands of people
at this event.

599
00:45:12,711 --> 00:45:14,671
I think it got better musically for them.

600
00:45:14,796 --> 00:45:18,341
They continued, thank God,
to progress musically.

601
00:45:18,466 --> 00:45:24,180
But, I don't know that their popularity
ever got bigger than Cal Jam ll.

602
00:45:26,307 --> 00:45:29,978
Cal Jam had radically ramped up
Ritchie's profile in America,

603
00:45:30,061 --> 00:45:34,315
but he was growing increasingly unhappy
with the funky direction the band was taking.

604
00:45:35,567 --> 00:45:38,319
My first LP Burn was great.

605
00:45:38,445 --> 00:45:42,574
We had Mistreated, Burn,
and it was all working.

606
00:45:42,657 --> 00:45:46,995
Now, the second record we made,
Stormbringer was good.

607
00:45:48,788 --> 00:45:53,334
But Jon, I think Ian, and even Dave,

608
00:45:53,418 --> 00:45:57,756
and, of course, Glenn,
were getting into this funk stuff.

609
00:46:01,176 --> 00:46:03,845
And I'm like, "That's not me."

610
00:46:04,345 --> 00:46:07,974
It's gonna be rock, blues.
I don't wanna be involved in that.

611
00:46:08,099 --> 00:46:11,102
Me, Jon and David wrote Holy Man together.

612
00:46:11,186 --> 00:46:14,481
And it was, "You can't do it right
with the one you love".

613
00:46:14,564 --> 00:46:18,610
It was group compositions, Hold On.

614
00:46:19,277 --> 00:46:22,989
Jon came up with that great
Fender Rhodes thing.

615
00:46:44,344 --> 00:46:45,929
And with his Deep Purple colleagues

616
00:46:46,054 --> 00:46:48,932
unwilling to take the music in the direction
he wanted,

617
00:46:49,057 --> 00:46:53,353
Ritchie now found someone who was,
a singer named Ronnie James Dio.

618
00:46:54,521 --> 00:46:56,773
That's when I did,

619
00:46:56,898 --> 00:46:59,400
I think, 16th Century Greensleeves
with Ronnie.

620
00:47:13,498 --> 00:47:17,877
He actually recorded an album with Ronnie
and the guys is in Elf.

621
00:47:17,961 --> 00:47:19,629
And we didn't know about this.

622
00:47:20,463 --> 00:47:21,881
And that turned out even better,

623
00:47:21,965 --> 00:47:25,844
and I went, "We've gotta form a band
'cause this is just flowing."

624
00:47:27,095 --> 00:47:30,682
There is none of this...
No committee meetings.

625
00:47:30,765 --> 00:47:33,476
And no briefcases involved

626
00:47:33,601 --> 00:47:35,812
and trying to get hold of people
that were never around.

627
00:47:36,896 --> 00:47:39,732
Because Purple became a big business,
the monster.

628
00:47:40,108 --> 00:47:44,070
So, that's when I left 'em
and formed Rainbow.

629
00:47:44,696 --> 00:47:46,155
Ritchie's new band was named after

630
00:47:46,281 --> 00:47:48,616
the famous rock and roll
Rainbow Bar and Grill

631
00:47:48,741 --> 00:47:50,952
on Sunset Boulevard in west Hollywood.

632
00:47:51,035 --> 00:47:53,162
He was his own boss at last.

633
00:48:18,062 --> 00:48:20,690
It was very exciting. We had Ronnie Dio.

634
00:48:20,815 --> 00:48:22,609
He could come around
and write a tune like that.

635
00:48:22,692 --> 00:48:27,113
I'd give him an idea, he'd put the top line
to it, everything was fresh.

636
00:48:27,196 --> 00:48:28,698
He had that ridiculous voice.

637
00:48:29,407 --> 00:48:30,658
After the first album,

638
00:48:30,742 --> 00:48:34,120
Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow became
simply Rainbow.

639
00:48:34,454 --> 00:48:37,957
We held auditions to put Rainbow together.

640
00:48:38,124 --> 00:48:41,753
And the 13th drummer was Cozy Powell.

641
00:48:43,338 --> 00:48:45,089
And he was the only one that could
play a shuffle.

642
00:48:45,673 --> 00:48:50,178
I was looking for some fire
and then Cozy came in and he did it.

643
00:49:08,196 --> 00:49:10,114
He and Ritchie got on very well together.

644
00:49:10,198 --> 00:49:15,036
They both shared a love,
apart from rock and roll, of pranking.

645
00:49:15,161 --> 00:49:17,580
Practical jokes, so...

646
00:49:17,705 --> 00:49:21,501
And, of course, Cozy is quite
a strong personality as well so,

647
00:49:21,584 --> 00:49:23,878
they respected each other
and they liked each other,

648
00:49:24,003 --> 00:49:27,048
and that was really the basis of the
success of Rainbow,

649
00:49:27,173 --> 00:49:32,261
I think, was this very powerful guitar
player, incredibly strong drummer

650
00:49:32,387 --> 00:49:34,973
and enormously talented singer.

651
00:49:35,056 --> 00:49:38,059
I think Cozy was a perfect foil for Ritchie,

652
00:49:38,142 --> 00:49:40,269
and I know even Cozy found it hard at times.

653
00:49:40,395 --> 00:49:42,689
Cozy used to tell me,
"it isn't easy, you know?"

654
00:49:42,772 --> 00:49:44,816
But I think Cozy had such
a respect for Ritchie

655
00:49:44,899 --> 00:49:47,068
and likewise the other way around.

656
00:49:47,193 --> 00:49:50,071
So, yeah, I think it was great combination.

657
00:49:50,154 --> 00:49:56,160
As a fan, it seemed like it was
one more step into what was heavy metal.

658
00:49:58,538 --> 00:50:03,584
Certainly with Dio singing,

659
00:50:03,710 --> 00:50:07,046
it was a remarkable step forward
in that genre.

660
00:50:07,130 --> 00:50:09,924
I mean, a lot of people today,
they listen to those records

661
00:50:10,008 --> 00:50:12,635
and they think that's where it really started.

662
00:50:12,760 --> 00:50:15,263
It's almost as if he is playing more
on those records,

663
00:50:15,388 --> 00:50:17,432
there is like more of Ritchie
on those records.

664
00:50:17,557 --> 00:50:21,269
It was a band in his own image,
which Deep Purple would never...

665
00:50:21,561 --> 00:50:25,398
Deep Purple were partly his image
and partly his creativity,

666
00:50:25,481 --> 00:50:27,400
but it belonged to everybody else.

667
00:50:27,483 --> 00:50:28,568
Rainbow was him.

668
00:50:28,651 --> 00:50:32,822
Rainbow was definitely his moment
of stepping into the spotlight

669
00:50:32,947 --> 00:50:35,033
and saying, "This is me,
this is where I want to go."

670
00:50:35,283 --> 00:50:39,120
Cozy suddenly turned up,
turned around, Cozy Powell, and said,

671
00:50:39,245 --> 00:50:41,873
"You know who my favourite band is?"

672
00:50:41,956 --> 00:50:44,751
It's "ABBA" and we went...

673
00:50:46,044 --> 00:50:47,045
"ABBA!"

674
00:50:48,046 --> 00:50:50,590
"How could you?" as in like...

675
00:50:50,673 --> 00:50:54,677
And he is like, "Yeah, I know,
but that's my favourite band."

676
00:50:54,886 --> 00:50:57,388
Then I said, "And mine."

677
00:50:59,474 --> 00:51:03,102
Then, I think
the bass player there went, "And mine."

678
00:51:03,186 --> 00:51:06,022
And we suddenly all went,
"Let's play some ABBA."

679
00:51:06,814 --> 00:51:10,943
But, unsurprisingly, no ABBA tracks made it
on to the band's second album,

680
00:51:11,027 --> 00:51:12,361
Rainbow Rising.

681
00:51:28,628 --> 00:51:33,091
Rainbow Rising was done in Munich
in the studio Arabella House, I think.

682
00:51:34,300 --> 00:51:37,720
That was clone quickly and clone very well,

683
00:51:37,845 --> 00:51:39,555
and we had a good time playing it.

684
00:51:39,680 --> 00:51:41,224
By the time we got
to Long Live Rock 'N' Roll,

685
00:51:41,349 --> 00:51:43,184
things were getting...

686
00:51:44,435 --> 00:51:47,939
Ronnie was more into his girlfriend Wendy,

687
00:51:48,064 --> 00:51:50,358
and things were starting to slow down
for ideas.

688
00:51:50,441 --> 00:51:54,195
I don't think Rainbow ever equalled
the success of Deep Purple,

689
00:51:54,320 --> 00:51:58,783
not in the public's perception
or in the critics' minds, should we say.

690
00:51:59,575 --> 00:52:02,203
Despite the fact that it did produce
some great music.

691
00:52:02,286 --> 00:52:04,789
It was very... And it was a great live band.

692
00:52:04,872 --> 00:52:06,124
It was very entertaining,

693
00:52:06,207 --> 00:52:09,710
and gave Ritchie Blackmore opportunities
to play with other people.

694
00:52:10,253 --> 00:52:13,047
As far as the personnel changes go,

695
00:52:13,131 --> 00:52:18,010
you would need an abacus
and a Cray Computer

696
00:52:18,094 --> 00:52:20,429
to figure that one out.

697
00:52:20,555 --> 00:52:24,767
But, that family tree is tall, wide
and complicated.

698
00:52:24,892 --> 00:52:27,895
But through it all, there is Ritchie Blackmore.

699
00:52:51,294 --> 00:52:55,923
And a Ritchie Blackmore who was still
unpredictable and more than a little scary.

700
00:52:56,090 --> 00:52:59,093
I have seen Ritchie lose it with someone,
I better not say who it is.

701
00:52:59,218 --> 00:53:02,930
But it was very explosive.

702
00:53:03,055 --> 00:53:06,893
Yeah, he doesn't suffer people to be fools.

703
00:53:06,976 --> 00:53:09,937
And I know Ritchie can be quite physical.

704
00:53:10,271 --> 00:53:14,442
Ritchie got physical in Vienna in 1977.

705
00:53:15,610 --> 00:53:20,823
We were playing in Austria to
about 5,000-7,000 people.

706
00:53:20,948 --> 00:53:25,953
A good show and this little girl comes
up to the front stage,

707
00:53:26,078 --> 00:53:29,624
she had come up and handed up a note,

708
00:53:29,749 --> 00:53:33,377
like, "I'm a big fan of the band"
or something like that, I don't know.

709
00:53:33,461 --> 00:53:35,129
And I'm just watching her

710
00:53:35,213 --> 00:53:39,800
and the next minute she gets hit by this
guy with a truncheon and this bouncer,

711
00:53:40,635 --> 00:53:43,930
and, of course, I thought,
"He is not gonna get away with that."

712
00:53:44,013 --> 00:53:46,265
So I kicked him.

713
00:53:46,349 --> 00:53:50,353
And I have strong legs,
so of course I broke his jaw

714
00:53:50,478 --> 00:53:53,606
and he went down, blood, and lwent...

715
00:53:53,981 --> 00:53:57,985
The resourceful stage crew hid Ritchie
in a large flight case

716
00:53:58,110 --> 00:53:59,904
and pushed him towards the exit.

717
00:54:00,029 --> 00:54:04,450
Every exit had police helmets and dogs.

718
00:54:04,533 --> 00:54:08,996
And they were about to push me up
into the truck, into the lorry.

719
00:54:09,372 --> 00:54:14,001
And they insisted, opened it up,
and, of course,

720
00:54:14,126 --> 00:54:17,630
I just came out like a Jack in the box,
"Hi, everybody."

721
00:54:18,506 --> 00:54:21,926
And then they locked me up for four days,
which was pretty miserable.

722
00:54:22,343 --> 00:54:26,180
'Cause the first night, they would just like,
throw me on the floor.

723
00:54:27,348 --> 00:54:30,226
And they wanted to beat the shit out of me
because I just hit one of their guys.

724
00:54:30,685 --> 00:54:33,229
The consulate was of no use whatsoever,

725
00:54:33,354 --> 00:54:36,148
they just came and said,
"You have done a really bad thing.

726
00:54:36,232 --> 00:54:38,359
"You might be here forever."

727
00:54:39,402 --> 00:54:40,736
That's a wakeup call.

728
00:54:40,861 --> 00:54:45,491
You know, I had a bad temper.
My temper is not so bad any more

729
00:54:45,574 --> 00:54:46,617
'cause I always think about that.

730
00:54:46,951 --> 00:54:49,078
As well as his unscheduled jail visit,

731
00:54:49,203 --> 00:54:52,206
Ritchie now had to contend with
a changing music market

732
00:54:52,290 --> 00:54:53,958
and an unchanging Ronnie.

733
00:55:09,724 --> 00:55:12,768
Ronnie Dio and Ritchie Blackmore
had a chemistry,

734
00:55:12,893 --> 00:55:17,189
but then, as Blackmore got further
into the Rainbow career,

735
00:55:17,273 --> 00:55:21,569
he saw himself as wanting to become
a little bit more commercial.

736
00:55:21,652 --> 00:55:26,991
And Dio very much wanted to stay
into the myths and the dragons feel

737
00:55:27,074 --> 00:55:31,203
that he would put forward
in the lyrics, metaphorical,

738
00:55:31,287 --> 00:55:33,414
rather than physical, than actual.

739
00:55:33,539 --> 00:55:36,417
So that the two of them went their
separate ways, as we know.

740
00:55:37,043 --> 00:55:40,504
But that isn't the whole story,
as Ritchie now reveals.

741
00:55:41,213 --> 00:55:44,300
Wendy, apparently,
had told him transatlantically,

742
00:55:44,425 --> 00:55:46,886
she said, called him up and said, "Ronnie,

743
00:55:46,969 --> 00:55:50,639
"Ritchie is on the front page
of Circus magazine in America

744
00:55:50,765 --> 00:55:52,224
"and you two aren't.

745
00:55:52,308 --> 00:55:54,185
"There should have been the three of us."

746
00:55:54,685 --> 00:55:56,395
That's what did it.

747
00:55:56,479 --> 00:56:02,401
And he said to me, "Cozy and I are not
gonna... We are not your sidekicks,

748
00:56:02,485 --> 00:56:04,987
"and we are not standing for it."

749
00:56:05,363 --> 00:56:08,699
I don't want to work with someone
who is that trivial, that ridiculous.

750
00:56:08,783 --> 00:56:13,454
I said, "I can't work with this guy any more,
just get him out of my life."

751
00:56:13,579 --> 00:56:19,126
And I remembered Graham Bonnet
from the Marbles,

752
00:56:19,210 --> 00:56:23,339
and I said to Roger Glover, I said,
"What about trying to find him?

753
00:56:23,464 --> 00:56:24,965
"I wonder what he is doing these days."

754
00:56:25,049 --> 00:56:28,511
So I had to learn a Rainbow song
because I knew nothing.

755
00:56:28,636 --> 00:56:31,138
I didn't know who Rainbow was,
I had no clue.

756
00:56:31,222 --> 00:56:33,599
So I had to go out and buy albums
and listen to the music.

757
00:56:33,682 --> 00:56:37,186
And I thought,
"I don't think this is really me."

758
00:56:37,395 --> 00:56:40,314
I'm more into like RandB and pop kind of stuff.

759
00:56:40,481 --> 00:56:43,317
That guy had an amazing voice.

760
00:56:43,401 --> 00:56:46,570
Could sing an F-sharp above Top C
and that was going some.

761
00:56:46,654 --> 00:56:48,114
I remember going over there one afternoon,

762
00:56:48,197 --> 00:56:50,032
and I heard this
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

763
00:56:50,157 --> 00:56:52,535
or something in the background,
and it was off of my album.

764
00:56:52,660 --> 00:56:55,913
I said to Roger, "Why is he playing that?"
He says, "He just loves your voice."

765
00:56:55,996 --> 00:56:59,417
Ritchie also loved the idea of
being more commercial.

766
00:57:23,399 --> 00:57:24,775
We needed some radio play.

767
00:57:24,859 --> 00:57:27,027
We got a little bit too underground.

768
00:57:27,111 --> 00:57:29,029
Since You've Been Gone, we got rid of that,
and we...

769
00:57:29,113 --> 00:57:32,616
'Cause it's a number one, all of a sudden
we were a big band.

770
00:57:33,868 --> 00:57:38,539
We were riding high at that time,
1980 was our biggest moment, I think.

771
00:57:39,457 --> 00:57:41,125
We were quite big in England.

772
00:57:41,584 --> 00:57:42,877
I love Since You've Been Gone.

773
00:57:42,960 --> 00:57:48,340
It's uncompromising and it has the perfect
element of pop, which is you can sing it

774
00:57:48,424 --> 00:57:51,552
and it's in your head all day,
and it's passionate.

775
00:57:51,635 --> 00:57:56,807
It has a real tug on your emotions.

776
00:57:56,891 --> 00:58:00,394
But Ritchie's in it,
and Ritchie is powering the whole thing.

777
00:58:00,478 --> 00:58:02,062
The under solo is just brilliant.

778
00:58:19,663 --> 00:58:21,499
They did the immortal version of it.

779
00:58:22,500 --> 00:58:24,960
Powered by their more commercial sound,

780
00:58:25,085 --> 00:58:29,423
Rainbow headlined the first ever
Monsters of Rock festival at Donington.

781
00:58:30,466 --> 00:58:32,009
The critics hated us.

782
00:58:32,676 --> 00:58:35,930
For whatever reason,
we were not a fashionable,

783
00:58:36,013 --> 00:58:38,224
on the front page of Rolling Stones
type of band.

784
00:58:38,307 --> 00:58:41,769
We were... They just hated us.

785
00:58:41,852 --> 00:58:43,562
But the more they hated us,

786
00:58:43,646 --> 00:58:47,149
the more the people kind of went,
"We love them."

787
00:58:47,650 --> 00:58:49,443
The fans may have loved Rainbow,

788
00:58:49,568 --> 00:58:53,280
but Ritchie was now having a problem
with Graham Bonnet's hair.

789
00:58:53,405 --> 00:58:57,451
Ritchie was 100% behind me being
in the band,

790
00:58:57,535 --> 00:59:00,204
but 100% against my haircut.

791
00:59:01,038 --> 00:59:03,249
There was a hair situation.

792
00:59:03,332 --> 00:59:07,586
We were known to have Denim people
following us,

793
00:59:07,670 --> 00:59:10,297
and most people were kind of growing
their hair long in those days.

794
00:59:10,506 --> 00:59:13,217
I went to get my hair cut in Sheffield
really short.

795
00:59:13,300 --> 00:59:15,469
I mean, like, spiky and the whole thing.

796
00:59:20,975 --> 00:59:23,769
And I went on stage
and Ritchie hadn't seen me all day,

797
00:59:23,852 --> 00:59:26,313
and there he was playing his guitar,
and the first song comes up

798
00:59:26,397 --> 00:59:27,648
and he turns to me and he goes...

799
00:59:27,773 --> 00:59:29,483
You know, his mouth dropped.

800
00:59:29,567 --> 00:59:31,777
He was singing to the audience
and doing his bit,

801
00:59:31,860 --> 00:59:34,989
and I saw the back of the shaved neck,
you know that.

802
00:59:35,072 --> 00:59:40,160
You know, very cut hair and I went,

803
00:59:40,244 --> 00:59:42,830
"I'm just gonna put my guitar across
his head."

804
00:59:42,913 --> 00:59:44,164
But then I might...

805
00:59:44,248 --> 00:59:46,333
I'll be back in prison again, you know.

806
00:59:46,458 --> 00:59:49,962
I really was, like, so tempted just to
take it off and go whack.

807
01:00:01,265 --> 01:00:03,892
Graham Bonnet and his hair lived to sing
another day.

808
01:00:04,018 --> 01:00:07,521
But he had no luck persuading drummer
Cozy Powell to stay on board.

809
01:00:07,813 --> 01:00:12,067
Powell didn't like the overtly
commercial work the band was now doing.

810
01:00:12,526 --> 01:00:13,652
And he was gone.

811
01:00:13,736 --> 01:00:19,199
And it was a very sad day,
and he left the band and later I did.

812
01:00:19,283 --> 01:00:22,620
That was my last show too,
but I didn't know this at that time.

813
01:00:22,703 --> 01:00:24,413
Graham Bonnet was a great singer

814
01:00:24,538 --> 01:00:28,125
and Down to Earth was a thoroughly
undervalued Rainbow album.

815
01:00:28,208 --> 01:00:31,045
But again, the problem was
that Blackmore saw Bonnet

816
01:00:31,170 --> 01:00:34,423
not quite as having what it took
in terms of personality,

817
01:00:34,548 --> 01:00:36,884
to allow Blackmore to be himself.

818
01:00:37,509 --> 01:00:40,054
Song writing wasn't good,
the way we wanted it to.

819
01:00:40,179 --> 01:00:41,430
It was very slow.

820
01:00:41,555 --> 01:00:45,851
Nothing was happening, we had one song
and that was the song Russ Ballard wrote.

821
01:00:45,934 --> 01:00:47,895
I Surrender, the song was called.

822
01:00:48,020 --> 01:00:49,271
And that's all we had.

823
01:00:49,396 --> 01:00:51,899
And so we... It was...

824
01:00:51,982 --> 01:00:54,526
I left because Ritchie didn't
come to rehearsal sometimes.

825
01:01:07,956 --> 01:01:10,125
Graham left the band in 1980.

826
01:01:10,626 --> 01:01:14,046
Like a month or so later, I thought,
"What have I done?"

827
01:01:14,129 --> 01:01:17,257
I have left something that was great.

828
01:01:17,341 --> 01:01:20,803
It would be nice to see him again
'cause I like him very much.

829
01:01:20,928 --> 01:01:26,350
He was a good friend, and he taught me a lot
about the music I was suddenly pushed into,

830
01:01:26,433 --> 01:01:29,269
which I knew nothing about,
and he was a great teacher.

831
01:01:29,770 --> 01:01:33,190
Ritchie's friend Barry Ambrosio suggested
Joe Lynn Turner

832
01:01:33,273 --> 01:01:35,401
as a replacement for Graham Bonnet.

833
01:01:36,068 --> 01:01:37,945
He said, "Listen to this record."

834
01:01:38,070 --> 01:01:42,533
I said "Look, Barry, I've heard
so many singers, I can't hear any more.

835
01:01:42,616 --> 01:01:44,076
"I've got to get out of here."

836
01:01:44,159 --> 01:01:47,830
He said, "Just listen to this,"
and he played one track as I was leaving.

837
01:01:47,955 --> 01:01:49,164
And I went,

838
01:01:49,289 --> 01:01:51,792
"Actually, that sounds interesting,
who is this guy?"

839
01:01:51,875 --> 01:01:53,919
And he said, "Guy from New Jersey."

840
01:01:54,086 --> 01:01:56,797
I didn't know that he came to see me.

841
01:01:56,922 --> 01:02:00,134
I later found out when I got a phone call,

842
01:02:00,217 --> 01:02:04,346
living in Manhattan, lower Manhattan
in the west village,

843
01:02:04,680 --> 01:02:07,307
one-room studio, I think you call it.

844
01:02:07,474 --> 01:02:09,560
And mattress on the floor,

845
01:02:09,643 --> 01:02:11,311
money running out.

846
01:02:11,437 --> 01:02:14,940
And got a phone call from Barry Ambrosio,

847
01:02:15,023 --> 01:02:17,651
and he put Ritchie on the phone,

848
01:02:17,776 --> 01:02:20,487
and of course I... Complete disbelief.

849
01:02:20,612 --> 01:02:24,116
And he said, "No, it's really me."
And I said, "Well, all right."

850
01:02:24,199 --> 01:02:26,535
And they told...
They put their road manager on

851
01:02:26,660 --> 01:02:29,830
and told me the train to take
and to go out to the studio.

852
01:02:56,899 --> 01:02:59,526
I was playing in New Jersey,
and I went to see him.

853
01:02:59,651 --> 01:03:03,947
And I really liked his voice,
very resonant and warm.

854
01:03:04,031 --> 01:03:06,867
He came in with a couple of beers
and said, "You got the job if you want it."

855
01:03:06,992 --> 01:03:09,161
And I said, "Want it? I need it."

856
01:03:09,620 --> 01:03:14,082
And kept me there in the studio
and we just kept being creative,

857
01:03:14,208 --> 01:03:17,628
and Glover and I started to write more lyrics,

858
01:03:17,711 --> 01:03:22,007
and we finished the album Difficult to Cure,
like, in a couple of weeks, I think,

859
01:03:22,090 --> 01:03:23,550
since my entrance.

860
01:03:24,384 --> 01:03:27,888
Ritchie recorded three Rainbow albums
with Joe Lynn Turner.

861
01:03:29,681 --> 01:03:33,852
I think I wrote, with Joe,

862
01:03:33,936 --> 01:03:37,189
one of my favourite tunes
which is Street of Dreams.

863
01:03:37,272 --> 01:03:41,735
That, to me, was the ultimate Rainbow song.
I love that song.

864
01:03:42,319 --> 01:03:45,364
Come on the jukebox,
I go, "I'm proud of that."

865
01:03:45,781 --> 01:03:47,866
'Cause it was exactly where I wanted to go.

866
01:03:47,991 --> 01:03:50,035
When we heard it,
we knew we had something.

867
01:03:50,118 --> 01:03:54,331
There was just chills up and down our...
We felt it.

868
01:03:54,414 --> 01:03:56,667
We said, "Man, this is deep,
this is something."

869
01:04:15,394 --> 01:04:18,438
And the fact that I could kind of
write something that was poppy

870
01:04:18,564 --> 01:04:20,566
was something new for me.

871
01:04:20,649 --> 01:04:21,984
And I liked that groove.

872
01:04:22,109 --> 01:04:26,238
I just don't want to play, crash, crash, crash
for the sake of it.

873
01:04:26,321 --> 01:04:27,698
I've got to hear a melody.

874
01:04:27,823 --> 01:04:32,452
Melody was always at the bottom of,
for me musically, where I was going.

875
01:04:50,804 --> 01:04:52,848
While Ritchie had been developing Rainbow,

876
01:04:52,973 --> 01:04:58,270
his Deep Purple fans still wanted to see the
classic Mark ll line-up back together again.

877
01:04:59,813 --> 01:05:05,861
1983, I think, the management called me up
and said, "Purple wants to re-form."

878
01:05:05,986 --> 01:05:07,779
I said, "Well, I have to think about it."

879
01:05:07,863 --> 01:05:11,950
Rainbow was just now taking off really big
in America.

880
01:05:12,034 --> 01:05:15,996
And we were really getting somewhere,
we were doing big shows.

881
01:05:16,121 --> 01:05:20,334
I don't know if I want... It's so easy
to just go back to Purple, you know.

882
01:05:21,001 --> 01:05:22,961
I was like...

883
01:05:23,045 --> 01:05:24,838
And Gillan was really up for it.

884
01:05:24,963 --> 01:05:28,342
And I'm like, "Okay, let's try it."

885
01:05:29,092 --> 01:05:34,348
I put up no fuss, no fight, no nothing
like that, so I really felt good about it.

886
01:05:34,431 --> 01:05:36,558
And also at that point in time,

887
01:05:36,683 --> 01:05:40,270
I had a solo album for Elektra Records,

888
01:05:40,354 --> 01:05:41,730
and things were going well for me.

889
01:05:41,855 --> 01:05:44,858
And Ritchie and I promised to get back
together again anyway.

890
01:05:44,942 --> 01:05:48,862
So, I had no compunction about it.
I felt good about it.

891
01:05:49,488 --> 01:05:51,657
Of course there was money entered into it.

892
01:05:51,740 --> 01:05:55,827
And the management is going,
"it's worth X amount..."

893
01:05:55,911 --> 01:05:59,831
I'm like, "Might be an interesting idea.
Okay, I'll try it."

894
01:06:00,749 --> 01:06:02,376
Cut a long story short.

895
01:06:03,001 --> 01:06:04,711
So we did it.

896
01:06:05,003 --> 01:06:08,507
You know, we had a good time,
Perfect Strangers is a good record.

897
01:06:08,757 --> 01:06:10,342
And we all had a good time doing it.

898
01:06:10,884 --> 01:06:12,844
It was very comfortable being with them.

899
01:06:29,403 --> 01:06:32,280
Perfect Strangers was a brilliant
comeback album by Purple.

900
01:06:32,406 --> 01:06:34,616
It was a phenomenal performance

901
01:06:34,741 --> 01:06:37,160
because it got Mark ll back together.

902
01:06:37,244 --> 01:06:39,037
They did it in the mid-80's fashion.

903
01:06:39,121 --> 01:06:40,455
They weren't living in the past.

904
01:06:40,580 --> 01:06:43,583
They weren't living in 1971, 72,

905
01:06:43,709 --> 01:06:47,254
they were actually being part of
the modern hard rock world.

906
01:06:48,547 --> 01:06:51,591
I think the relationship at the time
between Gillan and Blackmore,

907
01:06:51,675 --> 01:06:55,345
which is always pointed out
as being the problem, was quite amicable.

908
01:06:56,263 --> 01:06:59,766
The amicable band
toured in support of the album.

909
01:07:00,267 --> 01:07:01,268
They were trying to say

910
01:07:01,351 --> 01:07:03,311
that Bruce Springsteen
was doing the biggest business.

911
01:07:03,437 --> 01:07:07,607
Biggest business was us and Grateful Dead,
then Bruce Springsteen.

912
01:07:08,567 --> 01:07:11,945
I don't know what people see
in Bruce Springsteen whatsoever.

913
01:07:12,070 --> 01:07:13,113
I have never got that.

914
01:07:13,989 --> 01:07:17,075
The ticket sales showed
that the old magic was still there,

915
01:07:17,159 --> 01:07:19,536
but so were the old rivalries with Gillan.

916
01:07:19,703 --> 01:07:25,167
I put it down to he wanted to kind of
maybe steer the band,

917
01:07:25,292 --> 01:07:26,877
and I was steering the band.

918
01:07:26,960 --> 01:07:29,671
So I think it was that more than anything.

919
01:07:29,838 --> 01:07:32,883
Of course it worked, I thought,
Perfect Strangers worked.

920
01:07:32,966 --> 01:07:36,678
Everybody was on form, we played,
it worked.

921
01:07:36,803 --> 01:07:39,056
But, we should have stopped right there.

922
01:07:39,681 --> 01:07:43,143
And then we did...
House of Blue Light, to me, was disastrous.

923
01:08:09,544 --> 01:08:13,173
And the relationship with Ian
was soon back in the disaster zone too.

924
01:08:13,840 --> 01:08:15,467
He had lost his voice completely.

925
01:08:15,550 --> 01:08:17,219
And we are going, "What are we gonna do?"

926
01:08:17,344 --> 01:08:21,389
I was always already disgusted with Ian,
we weren't getting along.

927
01:08:21,515 --> 01:08:24,810
Soto me, I was like,
"We gotta get another singer.

928
01:08:24,893 --> 01:08:26,019
"I mean, this is just a joke."

929
01:08:27,187 --> 01:08:31,942
By 1987 Ritchie had played with scores
of musicians and dozens of bands.

930
01:08:32,025 --> 01:08:35,529
A self-confessed wind-up merchant
who thrived on conflict.

931
01:08:35,654 --> 01:08:38,615
The uneasy rider
was about to meet his match.

932
01:08:38,698 --> 01:08:41,201
Appropriately enough, on the football field.

933
01:08:42,035 --> 01:08:45,205
I used to have my roadie call up
radio stations too.

934
01:08:45,288 --> 01:08:49,376
Deep purple would like to do
a game of soccer against you,

935
01:08:49,501 --> 01:08:51,628
if you feel like playing a charity.

936
01:08:51,711 --> 01:08:54,548
It's kind of my fairy tale Cinderella story

937
01:08:54,673 --> 01:08:58,468
because I was working for this radio station
on Long Island.

938
01:08:58,552 --> 01:08:59,719
I was interning there.

939
01:08:59,803 --> 01:09:02,722
And apparently somebody from Deep Purple
had called up.

940
01:09:03,390 --> 01:09:04,975
So the DJs came out and they played,

941
01:09:05,058 --> 01:09:07,352
and Purple showed up,
it was Ritchie and Roger.

942
01:09:07,435 --> 01:09:10,105
He signed an autograph for me
and he looked up at me and said,

943
01:09:10,230 --> 01:09:13,150
in that very classy English accent
that I'm sure you are familiar with,

944
01:09:13,650 --> 01:09:16,319
"You are very beautiful girl."
And I went, "That's nice."

945
01:09:16,403 --> 01:09:17,946
And that would have been
my Ritchie Blackmore story

946
01:09:18,071 --> 01:09:19,322
that he said I was beautiful.

947
01:09:19,406 --> 01:09:21,032
And that was enough at that point.

948
01:09:21,116 --> 01:09:22,951
And I said, "Thank you",
and I walked off the field.

949
01:09:23,076 --> 01:09:26,246
And he sent his roadies through the crowd
to find out who I was

950
01:09:26,329 --> 01:09:28,290
and to ask me to meet him at a pub later.

951
01:09:28,665 --> 01:09:33,795
Candice Night was a musical New Yorker,
who had been modelling from age 12.

952
01:09:33,920 --> 01:09:35,505
She had her own radio rock show,

953
01:09:35,589 --> 01:09:40,635
and had studied communications
at New York Institute of Technology.

954
01:09:40,760 --> 01:09:44,931
And Ritchie had the most brilliant, proper

955
01:09:45,015 --> 01:09:47,976
upper-class English way of breaking the ice.

956
01:09:48,101 --> 01:09:51,021
- He was taking off his soccer cleats.
-Oh, right.

957
01:09:51,104 --> 01:09:53,899
And his dirty, mud-filled,
sweaty soccer socks

958
01:09:53,982 --> 01:09:57,277
and he balled one up
and threw it right in my face.

959
01:09:58,820 --> 01:10:00,447
That's the way to get a girl.

960
01:10:00,530 --> 01:10:02,365
And I didn't worry about my nails
after that any more

961
01:10:02,449 --> 01:10:04,242
'cause I thought this is ridiculous,
and we just...

962
01:10:04,326 --> 01:10:05,952
After that, there was really nothing...

963
01:10:06,036 --> 01:10:08,163
That totally relaxed

964
01:10:08,288 --> 01:10:10,916
-the whole entire environment.
-it was a magical smell.

965
01:10:11,499 --> 01:10:14,753
He said to me that
when I walked into the room,

966
01:10:14,836 --> 01:10:17,047
meeting him at that pub that afternoon.

967
01:10:17,130 --> 01:10:22,052
He said, "I felt like, when you walked in
that an old friend had walked into the room.

968
01:10:22,135 --> 01:10:23,595
"Like it felt like home."

969
01:10:23,678 --> 01:10:26,264
Ritchie now had an ally who put him at ease.

970
01:10:26,348 --> 01:10:31,019
Soon their shared interest in medieval life
and music was to take centre stage.

971
01:10:31,144 --> 01:10:34,147
But first, a replacement had to be found
for Gillan.

972
01:10:34,231 --> 01:10:37,943
Ritchie approached his Rainbow vocalist,
Joe Lynn Turner.

973
01:10:38,109 --> 01:10:40,820
At first, Joe hesitated, I think.

974
01:10:40,904 --> 01:10:43,823
You know, Paice is going well
and he was in Rainbow.

975
01:10:43,949 --> 01:10:45,951
So I was like, "Yeah, well..."

976
01:10:46,034 --> 01:10:47,410
Got any other ideas?

977
01:10:48,286 --> 01:10:51,665
And Jon's like, "Yeah, sounds great."

978
01:10:51,790 --> 01:10:54,084
So we tried him out, it worked,
and then he was in.

979
01:10:54,834 --> 01:10:58,213
He started playing Hey Joe,
I grabbed the mike, started singing it.

980
01:10:58,338 --> 01:11:00,840
Never even said, "Hello" to Jon or Ian
at that point.

981
01:11:00,924 --> 01:11:03,093
Finished the song and then there were
some handshakes.

982
01:11:03,176 --> 01:11:06,680
And Jon started to play this keyboard bit,

983
01:11:06,763 --> 01:11:09,766
which later became on the Purple album
The Cut Runs Deep.

984
01:11:09,849 --> 01:11:12,435
And I started singing the exact lyric

985
01:11:12,519 --> 01:11:15,897
as Ritchie always called it,
I had a magic bag of lyrics.

986
01:11:16,022 --> 01:11:19,734
And I would just pull out a lyric that suited
this and sing a melody,

987
01:11:19,859 --> 01:11:23,863
and it was the exact lyric... There it was.
There's the song.

988
01:11:23,947 --> 01:11:26,866
So Jon and Ian were convinced
that I should be the guy.

989
01:11:48,471 --> 01:11:51,558
But it was to be Joe Lynn's only album
with Deep Purple.

990
01:11:51,641 --> 01:11:53,685
He left the band in 1992.

991
01:11:54,394 --> 01:11:57,230
There was a lot of frustration going on,

992
01:11:57,355 --> 01:11:59,149
lot of unhappiness.

993
01:11:59,316 --> 01:12:04,446
The guys, I believe it was Ian and Jon,
and I say this with all love and respect,

994
01:12:04,571 --> 01:12:07,073
felt they needed Ian Gillan back in the band.

995
01:12:07,157 --> 01:12:11,411
And Ritchie was staunch about me staying
in the band and there was a...

996
01:12:11,494 --> 01:12:17,417
And there just wasn't any way that I could
deal with the emotions that were happening.

997
01:12:17,500 --> 01:12:21,755
So, I think I quit and got fired
at the same time.

998
01:12:21,838 --> 01:12:23,757
Whatever, doesn't really matter.

999
01:12:23,840 --> 01:12:28,261
But, it was nerve-racking and just turmoil

1000
01:12:28,345 --> 01:12:30,930
and very stressful.

1001
01:12:32,057 --> 01:12:35,310
Meanwhile, Ritchie and Candice
had moved in together.

1002
01:12:35,435 --> 01:12:38,021
- By '91 I had moved in with you.
-Yeah.

1003
01:12:38,104 --> 01:12:40,857
She moved in but I didn't know who she was.

1004
01:12:41,733 --> 01:12:44,736
I just knew that there was a great female
in the house.

1005
01:12:44,819 --> 01:12:45,779
I'm not gonna knock it.

1006
01:12:45,904 --> 01:12:48,198
- I don't know who she is.
-I locked my door every night, I bolted it.

1007
01:12:48,281 --> 01:12:50,450
I was on tour as his girlfriend, yes.

1008
01:12:50,575 --> 01:12:53,370
But at our parties at the house...

1009
01:12:53,453 --> 01:12:57,040
When we have parties at our house,
everybody has to contribute something,

1010
01:12:57,123 --> 01:12:59,751
so if Ritchie is going to bring out
the acoustic guitar and play for people,

1011
01:12:59,834 --> 01:13:01,920
he wants everybody to give
a little bit of themselves.

1012
01:13:02,003 --> 01:13:05,298
So he doesn't care if it's a speech
about the Alamo, right?

1013
01:13:05,382 --> 01:13:09,803
Or tap dance or a song
or something, anything.

1014
01:13:09,886 --> 01:13:14,641
So, when I was at the parties with Ritchie,

1015
01:13:14,724 --> 01:13:16,684
he and I would be doing songs together.

1016
01:13:16,810 --> 01:13:19,020
That's how he first got me singing with him.

1017
01:13:19,771 --> 01:13:22,774
The first song they wrote together
was a wedding anniversary present

1018
01:13:22,857 --> 01:13:24,776
for Candice's parents.

1019
01:13:25,735 --> 01:13:29,823
This is something that Rainbow
would never have done,

1020
01:13:29,948 --> 01:13:31,950
play a waltz.

1021
01:13:32,409 --> 01:13:33,910
A waltz, go.

1022
01:13:54,264 --> 01:13:55,265
Just follow me.

1023
01:13:55,348 --> 01:13:56,766
With what we didn't see...

1024
01:14:00,687 --> 01:14:02,439
That was very subtle.

1025
01:14:16,786 --> 01:14:18,705
- First song we wrote?
-Be Mine Tonight.

1026
01:14:18,872 --> 01:14:20,623
That's what makes me laugh
when people say,

1027
01:14:20,707 --> 01:14:22,667
"She must have made him do
Renaissance music"

1028
01:14:22,750 --> 01:14:24,961
because you don't make him do anything.

1029
01:14:25,044 --> 01:14:27,464
You never make Ritchie Blackmore
do anything.

1030
01:14:27,547 --> 01:14:32,719
Everything that he...
His choice of direction is solely up to him,

1031
01:14:32,844 --> 01:14:36,222
and I feel like I'm really on a journey
that he has led the way and taken...

1032
01:14:36,347 --> 01:14:39,267
He is the captain of this journey.

1033
01:14:39,392 --> 01:14:40,977
I'll be the co-captain, that's fine.

1034
01:14:42,020 --> 01:14:44,939
Ritchie would make one more album
with Deep Purple.

1035
01:14:45,064 --> 01:14:46,399
With Joe Lynn Turner gone,

1036
01:14:46,483 --> 01:14:50,278
the band put down backing tracks
and looked for a singer.

1037
01:14:50,403 --> 01:14:54,240
The band thinks that we should get Gillan
back, and the record label,

1038
01:14:54,324 --> 01:14:59,037
they sent the tapes of Ian singing,
like, three songs that we had done.

1039
01:14:59,120 --> 01:15:01,748
Three backing tracks
he had put his voice over.

1040
01:15:01,915 --> 01:15:04,751
And I'm like...

1041
01:15:04,876 --> 01:15:07,587
"This is absolutely dreadful.

1042
01:15:07,670 --> 01:15:12,091
"This is rotten to the core,
this is just rubbish."

1043
01:15:12,217 --> 01:15:13,927
That's how bad it was to me.

1044
01:15:14,010 --> 01:15:15,720
It was deadly.

1045
01:15:16,346 --> 01:15:21,976
And then he said, "How much would you take
to work with that?"

1046
01:15:22,936 --> 01:15:25,438
I said, "Well, it really doesn't come into it."

1047
01:15:27,106 --> 01:15:29,234
The album was made with Gillan on vocals.

1048
01:15:29,317 --> 01:15:33,613
Then the record company wanted the band
to go on tour to promote it.

1049
01:15:33,696 --> 01:15:36,616
It was also the 25th anniversary of Mark ll.

1050
01:15:36,741 --> 01:15:40,328
Ritchie demanded a vast fee
thinking it would be refused,

1051
01:15:40,453 --> 01:15:42,539
but his strategy backfired.

1052
01:15:43,623 --> 01:15:48,461
I went, "You know what? I'll take X amount",
which was over the top.

1053
01:15:49,045 --> 01:15:53,216
Just to get them off my back
so I could look for another singer.

1054
01:15:53,299 --> 01:15:56,386
And they came back with BMG,

1055
01:15:56,469 --> 01:15:59,556
"Okay, they'll pay you that
if you work with Gillan."

1056
01:15:59,639 --> 01:16:03,142
And I went, "Now I'm caught."

1057
01:16:29,002 --> 01:16:32,505
Of course I got halfway through the tour
and I was like, "I can't take this any more."

1058
01:16:32,672 --> 01:16:38,845
I'm selling my soul here, this is awful.
This is dreadful, certainly, you know.

1059
01:16:40,847 --> 01:16:45,768
Ian and I had a showdown with spaghetti,
and it was in Cleveland.

1060
01:16:46,644 --> 01:16:50,148
Jim picked up my food from catering,

1061
01:16:50,273 --> 01:16:53,318
and Ian had gone, "Who is that for?"

1062
01:16:53,401 --> 01:16:55,111
And Jim goes, "it's Ritchie's food."

1063
01:16:55,194 --> 01:17:00,366
He says, "Let me add some ketchup to it."
And, of course, he put ketchup all over it.

1064
01:17:00,450 --> 01:17:05,246
And I went up to him and I said,
"Did you do this to my food?"

1065
01:17:05,371 --> 01:17:07,749
And he went, "Yeah."

1066
01:17:07,874 --> 01:17:10,335
And with that, I saw Jon Lord go...

1067
01:17:11,836 --> 01:17:16,549
And they all parted,
it was like a high noon, you know.

1068
01:17:16,633 --> 01:17:18,468
I Went, "Really?"

1069
01:17:19,844 --> 01:17:22,138
And then I got it and went, right in his face.

1070
01:17:26,059 --> 01:17:27,602
Well, battle rages on,

1071
01:17:27,727 --> 01:17:29,812
this was the first time we played
in Czechoslovakia,

1072
01:17:29,896 --> 01:17:33,983
and he asked me to sing the...

1073
01:17:34,067 --> 01:17:37,445
Just like a vocal partjust...
Like background...

1074
01:17:37,570 --> 01:17:40,615
Candice was singing off stage
and out of sight,

1075
01:17:40,740 --> 01:17:43,368
which confused some local reviewers.

1076
01:17:43,701 --> 01:17:47,163
There was a Czechoslovakian paper
who had written the review and said that,

1077
01:17:47,246 --> 01:17:52,085
"Jon Lord must have sampled
a female vocal into his keyboards

1078
01:17:52,168 --> 01:17:55,004
"because they could
clearly hear some girl singing."

1079
01:18:03,304 --> 01:18:08,851
I knew if I went to the manager and I said,
"I want to leave Bruce Payne management."

1080
01:18:09,310 --> 01:18:12,939
That would go no further
and I'd be back at square one.

1081
01:18:13,022 --> 01:18:17,402
So I thought, "I'm gonna have to write a letter
to the band to explain how I feel,

1082
01:18:17,485 --> 01:18:19,070
"and I've got to leave,

1083
01:18:19,153 --> 01:18:21,447
"and I'll not be going to Japan with them."

1084
01:18:37,547 --> 01:18:41,259
Ritchie played his last concert
with Deep Purple in Helsinki

1085
01:18:41,342 --> 01:18:43,970
on 17th November, 1993.

1086
01:18:46,305 --> 01:18:49,475
So we went back to the hotel,

1087
01:18:49,559 --> 01:18:52,353
and we proceeded to say goodbyes.

1088
01:18:52,478 --> 01:18:55,481
I think I said goodbye to Ian Paice,
that was it.

1089
01:18:55,565 --> 01:18:57,483
Everybody else just ran away.

1090
01:18:57,984 --> 01:19:01,446
Paice came up to me and said,
"Make some good decisions"

1091
01:19:01,529 --> 01:19:04,657
-and left, and Candice was with me.
-That's right.

1092
01:19:04,741 --> 01:19:07,160
And I think Jon was too embarrassed
to say anything.

1093
01:19:07,285 --> 01:19:08,703
- Jon went right up to his room.
-Yeah.

1094
01:19:11,372 --> 01:19:12,832
It was such a relief.

1095
01:19:14,625 --> 01:19:18,337
Ritchie reformed Rainbow,
now with Doogie White on vocals

1096
01:19:18,463 --> 01:19:21,883
and made one final album with them too,
Stranger in Us All.

1097
01:19:38,983 --> 01:19:42,028
I think Rainbow probably gave him
a little bit more freedom in that regard,

1098
01:19:42,111 --> 01:19:46,365
and then the album I did certainly did
give him more freedom.

1099
01:19:46,824 --> 01:19:49,118
This freedom also enabled Ritchie
and Candice

1100
01:19:49,202 --> 01:19:51,245
to develop their writing partnership,

1101
01:19:51,370 --> 01:19:55,124
and the album included one of
the first songs they wrote together, Ariel.

1102
01:20:13,726 --> 01:20:17,313
The Blackmore side thing kind of happened
when we were doing the last Rainbow record.

1103
01:20:17,855 --> 01:20:21,192
We would kind of get together as a sort of
a jam night thing at the end of the evening

1104
01:20:21,275 --> 01:20:24,153
when we were recording at
Long View Farm in Massachusetts.

1105
01:20:24,237 --> 01:20:28,241
And we would just kind of sit around
the fire and they were just gonna jam,

1106
01:20:28,366 --> 01:20:32,662
and they would do stuff, Renaissance stuff
like Greensleeves, that sort of thing.

1107
01:20:32,995 --> 01:20:34,872
When I was 10,

1108
01:20:34,956 --> 01:20:39,418
there was this kid singing Greensleeves,
and I was really taken by that mode.

1109
01:20:42,588 --> 01:20:46,676
Just, it was very reminiscent of another time,

1110
01:20:46,759 --> 01:20:48,261
almost spiritual, I thought.

1111
01:21:02,942 --> 01:21:07,572
And it just seemed to go straight to my soul.

1112
01:21:07,655 --> 01:21:08,739
And I have always been that way.

1113
01:21:08,823 --> 01:21:11,576
If I hear medieval music,
I'll immediately come alive.

1114
01:21:14,996 --> 01:21:17,456
Ritchie and Candice
formed Blackmore's Night

1115
01:21:17,540 --> 01:21:21,419
and made their first album
Shadow of the Moon in 1997.

1116
01:21:22,503 --> 01:21:27,884
His escape from the stress and pressures
of that rock and roll world

1117
01:21:27,967 --> 01:21:31,470
wound up being just to sit
and just open up on acoustic.

1118
01:21:31,596 --> 01:21:35,141
And just really look into the fire place
and just go someplace else.

1119
01:21:35,266 --> 01:21:39,186
And that's where I think the beginning of
our project happened, really.

1120
01:21:56,245 --> 01:21:59,332
He often says that if you listen to
Smoke on the Water,

1121
01:21:59,415 --> 01:22:03,252
you'll hear medieval fourths and fifths,
the modal scales of that era.

1122
01:22:03,336 --> 01:22:06,297
So that was going back to 1971,
so that was in him there as well,

1123
01:22:06,380 --> 01:22:09,467
and then of course, fast-forward to Rainbow
and you've got

1124
01:22:09,550 --> 01:22:12,511
everything from Temple of The King,
16th Century Greensleeves.

1125
01:22:12,637 --> 01:22:16,140
So it's a lot of medieval flare
in a lot of those songs.

1126
01:22:37,703 --> 01:22:41,624
And we are still scratching the surface,
it's like,

1127
01:22:41,707 --> 01:22:45,002
I still feel there's so far to go with it.

1128
01:22:45,086 --> 01:22:48,255
Whereas with the others I felt
we were at the end.

1129
01:22:48,589 --> 01:22:50,800
One of the best compliments I had was,

1130
01:22:50,883 --> 01:22:54,929
"I hate medieval and Renaissance music,
but I love your music."

1131
01:22:55,262 --> 01:23:00,685
And I went, "That's a big compliment,
much more than you think."

1132
01:23:16,534 --> 01:23:22,331
With our show, it's more the audience is
part of us, we are there to entertain them.

1133
01:23:22,415 --> 01:23:25,251
We are not there to show off
and wiggle our hips.

1134
01:23:26,085 --> 01:23:28,713
Since that first album in 1997,

1135
01:23:28,796 --> 01:23:31,590
Ritchie and Candice
have made another nine together.

1136
01:23:40,766 --> 01:23:42,852
When Ritchie plunged into medieval music,

1137
01:23:42,935 --> 01:23:47,356
it wasn't so much as a surprise
as a natural course of events.

1138
01:24:08,127 --> 01:24:12,339
I also feel that urge because somehow
when you've clone all the big heavy stuff,

1139
01:24:12,465 --> 01:24:15,176
it's always attractive but you want to
explore the other side.

1140
01:24:15,593 --> 01:24:21,515
The minstrels, the peasant,
kind of walking from town to town,

1141
01:24:21,640 --> 01:24:25,853
just telling the news from the last town,
bit of gossip,

1142
01:24:25,978 --> 01:24:28,647
plays a few tunes, that's what I relate to.

1143
01:24:29,440 --> 01:24:33,736
That doesn't mean that some of the songs
don't still include modern rock influences.

1144
01:24:49,210 --> 01:24:51,045
It's like me, I love what I do.

1145
01:24:51,170 --> 01:24:54,548
I truly love what I do, and I can hear
that Ritchie loves what he does,

1146
01:24:54,673 --> 01:24:55,966
and I salute him for it.

1147
01:25:11,982 --> 01:25:17,863
True musicians, people who don't
have a choice, you know,

1148
01:25:17,947 --> 01:25:21,200
they just love music
and that's the path they follow.

1149
01:25:21,742 --> 01:25:25,371
If he wants to switch into something else,

1150
01:25:25,496 --> 01:25:28,916
that's because his inner musical inspiration
pulls him there,

1151
01:25:29,041 --> 01:25:33,420
and true musicians are almost slaves to that.

1152
01:25:34,171 --> 01:25:36,298
The music may be historically inspired,

1153
01:25:36,382 --> 01:25:41,595
but Ritchie's electric guitar virtuosity is still
very much a part of their medieval journey.

1154
01:26:02,741 --> 01:26:06,120
He sees himself, I think,
as the quiet musketeer.

1155
01:26:06,245 --> 01:26:09,582
His rather romantic sort of
heroic dashing figure.

1156
01:26:09,665 --> 01:26:11,709
I never feel like we are done, we're just like...

1157
01:26:11,792 --> 01:26:13,043
We are still learning so much about

1158
01:26:13,127 --> 01:26:15,379
the instruments and the songs
and ourselves, really.

1159
01:26:32,062 --> 01:26:33,939
It takes me back to another life.

1160
01:26:34,064 --> 01:26:38,652
It might be a past life, reincarnation.

1161
01:26:38,777 --> 01:26:42,865
I just love to be in the 1500's,
without getting the plague,

1162
01:26:42,948 --> 01:26:46,118
and having central heating
and a satellite dish.

1163
01:26:46,202 --> 01:26:50,539
Whereas if I hear rock and roll,
I've heard it all before, Christ.

1164
01:26:50,623 --> 01:26:54,960
It all ended about 30 years ago,
everybody now is so generic.

1165
01:26:56,045 --> 01:26:59,506
How long can you keep flogging something?

1166
01:27:00,424 --> 01:27:03,677
It's nearly 50 years since
the young school boy from Heston

1167
01:27:03,802 --> 01:27:06,347
decided to show his teachers
they were wrong about him,

1168
01:27:06,472 --> 01:27:08,682
by achieving true excellence on the guitar.

1169
01:27:08,807 --> 01:27:11,227
And to make good on the faith
his parents had shown in him

1170
01:27:11,310 --> 01:27:14,021
by putting the music first.

1171
01:27:14,146 --> 01:27:15,648
Of all the great guitar players,

1172
01:27:15,773 --> 01:27:18,442
he was the one that people knew least about,
I think,

1173
01:27:18,525 --> 01:27:19,944
and that was partly his own doing.

1174
01:27:20,027 --> 01:27:23,948
His confidence was overwhelming.

1175
01:27:24,031 --> 01:27:25,449
It was frightening.

1176
01:27:25,532 --> 01:27:27,117
Inspiring and frightening.

1177
01:27:27,451 --> 01:27:32,998
I think Ritchie will be remembered as
somebody wild and untamed

1178
01:27:33,082 --> 01:27:34,166
to the end of his days.

1179
01:27:34,291 --> 01:27:36,794
And I think that's a magnificent thing to be.

1180
01:27:36,919 --> 01:27:42,341
I can buy a Strat, you can buy a Strat, right?
We can get a Marshall, he can get a Marshall.

1181
01:27:42,424 --> 01:27:45,261
But, none of us ever wind up
sounding like Ritchie.

1182
01:27:45,636 --> 01:27:50,432
A high degree of being completely
in the moment, impulsive,

1183
01:27:50,516 --> 01:27:54,353
and just being kind of true to himself

1184
01:27:54,478 --> 01:27:59,066
and true to what his perception of
that moment was in a live situation.

1185
01:27:59,191 --> 01:28:01,694
He is not an extrovert,
he is very much an introvert.

1186
01:28:01,819 --> 01:28:05,239
And when you have somebody like that,
they create brilliantly,

1187
01:28:05,364 --> 01:28:09,576
but there is also a lot of depth
that they are always constantly dealing with.

1188
01:28:09,785 --> 01:28:14,206
There is nothing better than just sitting
with the guitar and emoting.

1189
01:28:14,331 --> 01:28:16,125
I can be in Hawaii,

1190
01:28:16,208 --> 01:28:19,336
and everybody is on water skis and things.

1191
01:28:19,420 --> 01:28:22,256
I'm watching the dolphins,
but I'm in my room just looking out,

1192
01:28:22,381 --> 01:28:25,759
looking at the horizons, gotta be playing.

1193
01:28:25,884 --> 01:28:29,847
And that's my friend that
I'm kind of emoting with.

1194
01:28:30,389 --> 01:28:33,851
My gut feeling is that Ritchie is probably
at his best when he

1195
01:28:33,934 --> 01:28:40,065
tends to actually live out the rather quiet,

1196
01:28:40,149 --> 01:28:46,113
withdrawn, artistic and thoughtful person
that I think really

1197
01:28:46,238 --> 01:28:48,073
is what he is ultimately about.

1198
01:28:48,157 --> 01:28:50,200
When people get things all in perspective,

1199
01:28:50,284 --> 01:28:55,164
Ritchie will be right there as one of the
cornerstones of what rock and roll is today.

1200
01:28:55,247 --> 01:28:58,250
There's a long list of rock guitar players

1201
01:28:58,334 --> 01:29:00,586
that wouldn't exist
without Ritchie Blackmore.

1202
01:29:01,003 --> 01:29:06,008
There are people who enter this band thing
for lots of different reasons,

1203
01:29:06,091 --> 01:29:09,303
for money, for fame and for the chicks.

1204
01:29:09,428 --> 01:29:13,807
It seems to me Ritchie Blackmore
entered into this for the music.

1205
01:29:14,683 --> 01:29:19,646
And for the two people who encouraged
him to take guitar lessons in the first place,

1206
01:29:19,772 --> 01:29:22,858
his mother and especially his father.

1207
01:29:23,484 --> 01:29:27,154
He came to the Albert Hall
when we did the orchestra thing,

1208
01:29:27,279 --> 01:29:30,699
Deep Purple and the orchestra, he loved that.

1209
01:29:30,783 --> 01:29:35,454
I think then he suddenly realised,
"I think my son's doing something, yeah."

1210
01:29:35,537 --> 01:29:39,041
5,000 people and there's an orchestra.

1211
01:29:40,626 --> 01:29:43,420
If that childhood photograph
was taken today,

1212
01:29:43,504 --> 01:29:45,798
they'd probably all be smiling.