1
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It all began here, at 33 Addicott Road,
in Weston-super-Mare,

2
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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,

5
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classical symphonic rock, hard rock,
blues and medieval ballads.

6
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Ritchie was interested in the guitar
from an early age

7
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but his father insisted
he took proper lessons.

8
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My father insisted I went to music lessons
when I was eleven.

9
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He said to me at the time,

10
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"If you don't learn this properly,
I'm gonna put it across your head."

11
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I used to cycle about four miles
to the guy who was teaching me.

12
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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,

14
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adulation and speculation.

15
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But until now, he has never given the world
his take on his story.

16
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A story with more than its fair share
of tantrums, break-ups, rivalry and rouse.

17
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He was such an advanced musician,
way ahead of his time,

18
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way, way ahead.

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He's a fire ball, you know,
he really is beyond belief.

20
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His technique is incredible.
Where did that come from? I have no idea.

21
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And this is before Hendrix.

22
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Ritchie really is a great originator
and creator of the wild electric guitar.

23
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The way he holds the guitar and everything,
it's sort of ingrained in my mind

24
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as that's what a cool guitar player
is supposed to look like,

25
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that's how they are supposed to behave.

26
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In a lot of ways, ifs a little
tragic that Ritchie didn't stand up

27
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and shine the light on himself.

28
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Which is why I'm happy to be here.

29
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He needs the light right on him,

30
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because unlike many people
he actually deserves it.

31
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It's like a sword'
almost like a clean sharp sword,

32
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that weighs a real lot, you know.

33
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His precision when he plays was stunning.

34
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A true pioneer as somebody who was
truly unique and original.

35
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To me he was like the Caucasian Hendrix.

36
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It actually changed my life.
It was my first gig ever.

37
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We got right up against the stage,
right in front of Ritchie.

38
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He came out and Purple came out
and he just blew me away.

39
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It was way more than I expected,
it was just a lot.

40
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After that I was dazed,

41
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I went home to my mum and dad and said,
"I need a guitar, I have to have a guitar."

42
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He is measured, he is thoughtful.

43
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He knows the value of clear space,
of daylight between the notes.

44
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It's not all about...

45
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It's about phrasing, it's about time.
It's about...

46
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The spaces are as important
as the notes that they separate.

47
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It's a mystery. I still find Ritchie
Blackmore a complete mystery.

48
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It's also a mystery
that people don't talk about him that much.

49
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<i>It's odd because he's absolutely there
as one of the pioneers.</i>

50
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The pioneering Ritchie was single-minded
from an early age.

51
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I won't do what I'm told to do.

52
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That seemed to go back to when I was five.

53
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I've seen pictures of me at five,

54
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and I remember distinctively, my mother
saying, "Smile for the cameraman."

55
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And I'm going, "No",

56
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and I felt resentment to the cameraman.

57
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Why do you need...

58
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And I used to say to my mother,
"Why do you need a picture of me?"

59
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She goes, "Because to remember you,
you're five."

60
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"Well, I'm here now."
And I couldn't understand the principle.

61
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There's something in there psychologically.

62
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Why was I so uptight at the age of five?

63
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But before he was in his teens,

64
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Ritchie made a promise to himself to be
the best there was, whatever it took.

65
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I was such a poor pupil

66
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and I was always near the bottom
of the class, in my tests.

67
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I thought, "You know what I'm gonna do?"

68
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"I'm going to excel in
music, on the guitar."

69
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So they go, "Well, he was a terrible pupil,
but he was a really good guitar player."

70
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And I had that thought in my head,
ever since I was 12, onwards.

71
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Well, he doesn't know anything,
but he can really play the guitar.

72
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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,

74
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as a sessions musician in London
and toured with Screaming Lord Sutch.

75
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And later with Gene Vincent
and Jerry Lee Lewis

76
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until the gigs dried up in 1968.

77
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I was working in a dry cleaners,

78
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I had about sixteen telegrams
from Chris Curtis,

79
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who was in the band The Searchers,
who I had met in Hamburg.

80
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And he really liked my playing,

81
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and he said, "I have a backer,
I want you to come to England",

82
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"I'm gonna start a band,
you're gonna play second guitar."

83
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Okay, who's playing first guitar?

84
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"I am", Chris Curtis.

85
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Okay, good.

86
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Who's playing drums then?
'Cause he's a drummer.

87
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He said, "I'm playing drums."

88
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Bass? He goes, "I'm bass player."

89
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"Yeah, I kind of thought
that was gonna happen."

90
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I said, "ls there anybody
else in this band?"

91
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He said, "We have a keyboard player,
Jon Lord.“"

92
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It was the start of a partnership
that would last for 25 years.

93
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We played together for a little bit,
and I realised how good he was.

94
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And it was mutual.

95
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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.

97
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And so we just needed a singer.

98
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<i>They took on Rod Evans as vocalist.</i>

99
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And Chris Curtis soon dropped out
to be replaced by Ian Paice on drums.

100
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All they needed now was a name.

101
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Jon put in Orpheus.

102
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The drummer put in The Hill.
And I put in Deep Purple.

103
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Just 'cause of the song Deep Purple,

104
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my grandmother used to
play it on the piano.

105
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And they seemed to like that.

106
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In those days you have to have
a double-barrel name.

107
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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,

109
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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.

111
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Which was the in thing to do at the time.

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Proverbial cottage, we were practicing.

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Thief's hole, I think it was called.
And it was haunted. It had to be haunted.

114
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And we made that record,
the first one in 24 hours.

115
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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

118
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when Ritchie Blackmore's
guitar performances

119
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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.

126
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Some tracks also had a distinctly pop feel.

127
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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.

130
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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.

133
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That's when I decided
we have to get someone

134
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who can belt it out and project.

135
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That when we got Ian Gillan.

136
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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.

138
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So we have someone
who looks like Jim Morrison

139
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and who can scream like Arthur Brown
and Edgar Winter.

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That scream was his identity.

141
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In came Ian Gillan and his scream
and new bassist Roger Glover.

142
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And out went Evans and Simper.

143
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Ritchie was now lead guitar

144
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in what was to become
the classic Deep Purple line-up.

145
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It became, I suppose,

146
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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.

148
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And Ritchie was a figure of mystery
and wonder already, you know.

149
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Ritchie Blackmore was something incredible.

150
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I mean, nobody could play like
that in those days.

151
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No, it's not just speed, you know,

152
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there are a lot of people who
can play fast, you know, now.

153
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But they can't be Ritchie Blackmore.

154
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He plays right on the money

155
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and leaves enough space
to allow the music to breathe

156
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and the listener to become enveloped in

157
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the whole atmosphere of what's being
performed and created and generated.

158
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I went through a period of shredding

159
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and thinking that everything revolved
around speed.

160
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And now I go, "That really
doesn't mean anything."

161
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It's good to be fast now and again,
but you have to say something thoughtful.

162
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You can't just go, look at me...

163
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Am I not great?

164
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Ritchie will lake you on a couple of hours'
journey of guitar playing,

165
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which will cover a lot more ground.

166
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It's not just like tipping a pot
of multi-coloured paint over somebody,

167
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this is about drawing people into your
dark mysterious web.

168
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But while Ritchie was keen
to develop Deep Purple as a rock band,

169
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his co-founder Jon Lord
had other ambitions.

170
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Jon Lord was inspired to write
a concerto for group and orchestra,

171
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and it was a big challenging venture.

172
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The band Nice had previously
recorded with orchestras

173
00:12:07,589 --> 00:12:11,245
and had classical aspirations.

174
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But Jon Lord wanted to write a really
sort of important piece that would

175
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include the group with an orchestra
in a kind of artistic way,

176
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a way that would work effectively.

177
00:12:21,541 --> 00:12:23,789
And they tried it out at
the Royal Albert Hall.

178
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And it was a big success, a big challenge.

179
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You can see Ritchie in the video
for the Albert Hall concert,

180
00:12:51,396 --> 00:12:54,702
and he plays great,
but you could feel he's very constrained.

181
00:12:54,820 --> 00:12:57,166
He's sort of itching to
break out somewhere.

182
00:12:57,252 --> 00:12:58,540
He has this edge to him,

183
00:12:58,660 --> 00:13:01,421
which is indefinable and
not quite tameable.

184
00:13:01,508 --> 00:13:04,454
The first record we did,
I thought was not bad.

185
00:13:05,796 --> 00:13:07,498
The two after that

186
00:13:07,876 --> 00:13:10,277
were lacking in direction.

187
00:13:11,172 --> 00:13:13,518
We were going in the studio
with, really, no ideas,

188
00:13:13,572 --> 00:13:16,299
'cause we were on the road all the time.

189
00:13:16,420 --> 00:13:21,702
It wasn't until we did the concerto
with Jon and the orchestra,

190
00:13:21,796 --> 00:13:25,353
and I said to them, "I really don't want
to play with orchestras any more."

191
00:13:25,412 --> 00:13:27,911
"Let's do a rock and roll record."

192
00:13:28,420 --> 00:13:31,911
I said, "Jon, we'll do the whole thing
as a rock and roll record",

193
00:13:31,972 --> 00:13:35,464
"and if it doesn't work, we'll play with
orchestras for the rest of our lives."

194
00:13:35,556 --> 00:13:36,778
So he said, "Yeah, that's sounds fair."

195
00:13:36,900 --> 00:13:40,108
We had Zeppelin starting Black Sabbath.

196
00:13:40,196 --> 00:13:41,996
Everybody was hitting with hard rock.

197
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Gave me an idea to play
the hard rock stuff.

198
00:13:45,156 --> 00:13:48,942
I was going through kind
of a angry, uptight,

199
00:13:49,028 --> 00:13:51,822
"Come on, let's get on with it."

200
00:13:51,940 --> 00:13:56,392
I'd had enough of playing with orchestras
and everything being wishy-washy.

201
00:13:56,452 --> 00:13:59,311
The wishy-washy orchestra
versus hard rock debate

202
00:13:59,395 --> 00:14:02,156
was resolved when the band wrote
and recorded Black Night.

203
00:14:02,212 --> 00:14:05,093
And it went to number two in the UK charts.

204
00:14:05,251 --> 00:14:09,703
We were in the studio
doing Deep Purple in Rock

205
00:14:09,795 --> 00:14:11,814
and the management came in.

206
00:14:13,539 --> 00:14:16,780
Amazing, you know, these people that go,

207
00:14:16,900 --> 00:14:19,780
"You know, what you need is a hit record."

208
00:14:19,875 --> 00:14:23,978
And you go, "I never thought of that.
A hit record, yeah."

209
00:14:24,132 --> 00:14:26,380
And I started playing.

210
00:14:27,620 --> 00:14:29,257
I just started playing.

211
00:14:34,915 --> 00:14:36,453
Okay, let's have a verse.

212
00:14:38,979 --> 00:14:40,714
Put a verse in there.

213
00:14:46,307 --> 00:14:49,035
And we did that very quickly.

214
00:14:49,091 --> 00:14:50,150
Very quickly.

215
00:14:50,211 --> 00:14:51,979
And all of a sudden,
of course that went to number one

216
00:14:52,067 --> 00:14:53,900
or number two, number one.

217
00:14:55,011 --> 00:14:57,121
It was funny how it was written like that,
very quickly,

218
00:14:57,155 --> 00:14:59,108
and that's the best way to write a song.

219
00:15:06,531 --> 00:15:07,972
And that is based on...

220
00:15:14,659 --> 00:15:19,078
Ricky Nelson put out a tune
called Summertime in 1958.

221
00:15:21,411 --> 00:15:23,309
Which, he's singing, "Summertime..."

222
00:15:27,266 --> 00:15:29,416
"and the living is easy."

223
00:15:29,667 --> 00:15:32,711
That was the base riff, the top line was...

224
00:15:37,666 --> 00:15:39,237
Right? Adds that.

225
00:15:44,450 --> 00:15:47,429
So right there you got two hit records.
'Cause if you go...

226
00:15:59,587 --> 00:16:01,005
"Hey Joe..."

227
00:16:02,434 --> 00:16:06,340
<i>As soon as I heard Hendrix play that intro,</i>

228
00:16:08,674 --> 00:16:12,428
I thought' "He got that from the same
record that we got the base riff from."

229
00:16:39,170 --> 00:16:40,555
The band were on a roll.

230
00:16:40,610 --> 00:16:43,970
And in 1970,
their fourth album Deep Purple in Rock

231
00:16:44,065 --> 00:16:48,582
reached number four in the UK charts
and went gold in Britain and America.

232
00:16:48,674 --> 00:16:51,718
I just knew I was happy
with it at the time,

233
00:16:51,810 --> 00:16:53,577
because the previous three,

234
00:16:53,665 --> 00:16:55,881
I thought,
"We don't know where we're going."

235
00:16:55,970 --> 00:16:58,469
"We're dilly-dallying,
we're going all over the place."

236
00:16:58,530 --> 00:17:03,298
Ballads, a bit of blues, folk,
it was like mishmash.

237
00:17:03,394 --> 00:17:06,853
People like to get a record and put it on,

238
00:17:06,978 --> 00:17:09,989
and go, "I can leave that on
and it's party time."

239
00:17:10,049 --> 00:17:13,509
The Deep Purple in Rock, of course,
was the definitive album,

240
00:17:13,569 --> 00:17:15,915
I think, for Deep Purple.

241
00:17:15,969 --> 00:17:18,948
It was the era of Black Sabbath, of course,
and Led Zeppelin.

242
00:17:19,010 --> 00:17:22,436
Soto see Deep Purple really focusing,

243
00:17:22,529 --> 00:17:25,802
get down to it on their rock album

244
00:17:25,889 --> 00:17:28,835
<i>that really convinced
the vast mass of their fans.</i>

245
00:17:28,929 --> 00:17:35,083
And really for the first time Deep Purple
became among the top three British bands.

246
00:17:35,169 --> 00:17:38,955
I think what really inspired me more than
anything else was the In Rock album.

247
00:17:39,009 --> 00:17:41,574
But it was the fire and it was the passion
that really spoke.

248
00:17:41,697 --> 00:17:43,781
That was the bit I wanted
to bottle and keep.

249
00:17:43,969 --> 00:17:45,224
When you hear Speed King,

250
00:17:45,313 --> 00:17:48,390
you're looking at, really,
proto thrash, proto metal.

251
00:17:48,449 --> 00:17:53,032
This was so influential
in what came later in metal terms,

252
00:17:53,089 --> 00:17:57,508
and was really Blackmore delivering
a dynamic riff

253
00:17:57,568 --> 00:18:02,217
on which Gillan held his vocals
and which Lord played off with keyboard.

254
00:18:16,449 --> 00:18:21,217
And Child in Time is just phenomenal,
it's a remarkable piece of epic music.

255
00:18:21,312 --> 00:18:26,757
It's a story. It's almost biblical in the
way it reaches out and envelops you.

256
00:18:26,848 --> 00:18:28,835
This was a classical piece of music.

257
00:18:28,929 --> 00:18:32,355
This was a performance
by a band on an orchestral level.

258
00:18:58,336 --> 00:19:01,577
With the pressure on to follow up
the success of Deep Purple in Rock,

259
00:19:01,664 --> 00:19:02,853
Ritchie and the band once again

260
00:19:02,944 --> 00:19:05,323
locked themselves away from the world
to write.

261
00:19:05,408 --> 00:19:09,795
We rented this old dilapidated house
down in Devon.

262
00:19:11,135 --> 00:19:13,798
And everybody had their bedroom.

263
00:19:14,848 --> 00:19:17,794
And mine was full of flies,
and it was a dreadful place,

264
00:19:17,888 --> 00:19:20,288
but it had a good vibe to it or two.

265
00:19:20,416 --> 00:19:23,177
We were into doing lots of séances
at the time.

266
00:19:23,263 --> 00:19:29,734
And I always felt that to do a séance,
the best thing was to have a cross.

267
00:19:30,304 --> 00:19:33,795
It was in the early days when I kind of
believed in that,

268
00:19:33,887 --> 00:19:38,274
and that was kind of a...
As a form of protection.

269
00:19:39,168 --> 00:19:41,416
Of course I didn't have a cross on me.

270
00:19:41,792 --> 00:19:45,730
And I went up to Jon Lord's wife and said,

271
00:19:45,824 --> 00:19:49,381
"Do you have cross I could borrow?"
She said, "I'm Jewish."

272
00:19:49,472 --> 00:19:51,654
That didn't go down too well.

273
00:19:51,807 --> 00:19:54,207
So I went, "Roger! Roger
will have a cross."

274
00:19:54,303 --> 00:19:57,664
And I went to his bedroom outside,
he'd gone to sleep.

275
00:19:57,887 --> 00:19:59,873
"Roger?" "What?"

276
00:19:59,967 --> 00:20:01,473
"Do you have a cross?" "Yeah."

277
00:20:01,567 --> 00:20:03,140
"I need the cross, we're doing a séance."

278
00:20:03,391 --> 00:20:05,159
"No, leave me alone."

279
00:20:05,407 --> 00:20:07,458
So, I got this axe,

280
00:20:07,551 --> 00:20:11,392
so I went crash crash at the door

281
00:20:11,487 --> 00:20:15,754
and made a hole,
and I'm axing the door down.

282
00:20:16,607 --> 00:20:19,651
I pulled it and I got through the hole
and went over to him.

283
00:20:19,775 --> 00:20:22,819
"I want your cross." "Go
on, get off, get off."

284
00:20:22,911 --> 00:20:26,119
Roger is a very gentle man.

285
00:20:26,207 --> 00:20:30,343
<i>Violence doesn't often occur to him
as a means to anything.</i>

286
00:20:30,431 --> 00:20:31,555
<i>It was very un-Roger like,</i>

287
00:20:31,647 --> 00:20:37,255
what followed, Roger chasing Ritchie
around the house with said axe.

288
00:20:38,271 --> 00:20:40,257
You know, I said, "Roger, wow."

289
00:20:40,351 --> 00:20:41,508
So that was a lot of fun.

290
00:20:49,470 --> 00:20:53,224
In 1971 they released a new single,
Strange Kind of Woman

291
00:20:53,310 --> 00:20:57,697
and a follow-up to their landmark
Deep Purple in Rock, the album Fireball.

292
00:20:58,527 --> 00:21:01,254
<i>It was great because,</i>

293
00:21:01,375 --> 00:21:05,991
all of a sudden,
starving for a few years before that,

294
00:21:06,046 --> 00:21:07,913
and we were suddenly in vogue

295
00:21:07,966 --> 00:21:11,905
and everybody had Deep Purple in Rock
until we replaced it with Fireball.

296
00:21:11,966 --> 00:21:14,498
Fireball was put together loo quickly,

297
00:21:15,423 --> 00:21:18,533
for my liking, we didn't have the ideas.

298
00:21:18,622 --> 00:21:21,481
Fireball to me was artificial, contrived.

299
00:21:23,166 --> 00:21:24,770
Despite Ritchie's misgivings,

300
00:21:24,862 --> 00:21:27,176
Fireball reached number one
on the UK charts,

301
00:21:27,295 --> 00:21:30,372
and the band set to work on
what would be their third album,

302
00:21:30,462 --> 00:21:31,619
Machine Head.

303
00:21:32,670 --> 00:21:35,780
Machine Head, I have great memories of,
we did that in the Swiss Alps,

304
00:21:35,870 --> 00:21:37,311
and that was fantastic.

305
00:21:37,406 --> 00:21:40,897
And we did it in three weeks
and the ideas were just flowing.

306
00:21:41,054 --> 00:21:44,414
I had written a few things in my time off,
so I had those,

307
00:21:44,510 --> 00:21:47,456
like Highway Star.

308
00:21:48,606 --> 00:21:51,814
I had written the solo basically at home,
worked it out,

309
00:21:51,902 --> 00:21:53,637
which I had never done before.

310
00:21:53,725 --> 00:21:57,479
It was always on the fly,
you know, just jamming.

311
00:21:57,565 --> 00:22:01,254
But, so we had a lot of constructive ideas.

312
00:22:01,374 --> 00:22:05,661
Roger Glover had written Maybe I'm a Leo,
which I thought was a great tune.

313
00:22:06,813 --> 00:22:08,450
They were due to record in the casino,

314
00:22:08,541 --> 00:22:10,942
which was then the main concert venue
in Montreux.

315
00:22:11,005 --> 00:22:12,446
But the evening before
they were due to start,

316
00:22:12,542 --> 00:22:16,350
a fire ignited during a Frank Zappa
concert, burning it to the ground.

317
00:22:20,382 --> 00:22:23,873
Festival organizer Claude Nobs
came to their rescue.

318
00:22:24,445 --> 00:22:27,555
Claude with enormous selflessness said,

319
00:22:27,645 --> 00:22:31,334
"Don't worry, I'll help you to find
somewhere else to record."

320
00:22:32,222 --> 00:22:33,378
Where? Anyway.

321
00:22:33,469 --> 00:22:39,558
So, there was this amazing
Victorian glass-walled pavilion

322
00:22:40,350 --> 00:22:43,328
in some gardens,
some lovely lakeside gardens.

323
00:22:43,901 --> 00:22:49,346
And with enormous disregard for anyone
who might live within 10 or 12 miles of it,

324
00:22:49,405 --> 00:22:52,286
we set up in there, you know.

325
00:22:53,725 --> 00:22:58,625
And it was a very ill-chosen place,

326
00:22:58,685 --> 00:23:00,834
but it was a stopgap.

327
00:23:01,341 --> 00:23:03,970
The recording session was back on track.

328
00:23:04,508 --> 00:23:09,790
Ritchie was astonishingly prolific
with guitar riffs.

329
00:23:09,885 --> 00:23:10,845
Profligate almost, you know?

330
00:23:10,941 --> 00:23:12,545
They would just tumble out of him.

331
00:23:12,605 --> 00:23:17,220
And that was heaven,
absolute heaven for a band,

332
00:23:17,309 --> 00:23:22,470
because here was a guitarist who just would
never tread, it seemed, the same road twice.

333
00:23:22,652 --> 00:23:25,958
And it was the fire that had destroyed
their original recording venue

334
00:23:26,044 --> 00:23:29,733
that was to inspire the song that contains
one of rock's greatest riffs.

335
00:23:30,492 --> 00:23:33,089
When we got back to the
hotel, there was a...

336
00:23:33,181 --> 00:23:35,810
We looked out of the window, I think we
all had stiff brandies or something.

337
00:23:35,933 --> 00:23:38,214
We looked out of the window
and you could actually see the smoke

338
00:23:38,301 --> 00:23:40,352
from the casino coming across the lake.

339
00:23:40,444 --> 00:23:42,496
This big, billowing cloud
coming across the lake,

340
00:23:42,589 --> 00:23:45,502
hence the title Smoke on the Water,
the boys came up with that.

341
00:23:45,565 --> 00:23:49,405
The first time I heard Smoke on the Water,
of course, from Machine Head,

342
00:23:49,500 --> 00:23:52,261
it was one of those riffs
that hit you right away.

343
00:23:52,349 --> 00:23:55,654
It's a bit like Sunshine of Your Love
by Cream,

344
00:23:55,741 --> 00:23:57,792
or Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin.

345
00:23:57,884 --> 00:24:01,540
It was just... I don't know where
guitarists find these riffs from, actually.

346
00:24:01,628 --> 00:24:05,250
When we did Smoke on the Water,

347
00:24:05,341 --> 00:24:08,134
it was-just Ian and
myself, Paice and myself.

348
00:24:08,284 --> 00:24:11,295
I said, "What rhythm haven't we played?"
and he went...

349
00:24:12,380 --> 00:24:14,846
He laid that down, so I just went...

350
00:24:17,500 --> 00:24:22,214
That's where we were and the next minute,

351
00:24:22,332 --> 00:24:25,692
the police were knocking at the door
'cause we were making so much racket.

352
00:24:26,780 --> 00:24:28,417
And we knew it was the police,

353
00:24:28,508 --> 00:24:32,927
so we said, "Let's go for a take
before they throw us out of here."

354
00:24:34,364 --> 00:24:38,598
Every guitar player
dreams of doing with its creators.

355
00:24:38,684 --> 00:24:41,957
Every kid who ever picked up a guitar
can do...

356
00:24:42,524 --> 00:24:44,444
Funny thing is, they all do it different.

357
00:24:44,572 --> 00:24:47,410
That's the nice thing, and I found that
I had it in my head how to play it,

358
00:24:47,452 --> 00:24:50,213
and it was completely different to the way
Ritchie plays it.

359
00:24:50,844 --> 00:24:52,862
Somebody said that music

360
00:24:54,428 --> 00:25:00,287
is many different colours and one of those
colours is silence, simplicity.

361
00:25:00,412 --> 00:25:04,547
The quiet pans, the easy parts,
the parts you can immediately grasp on to

362
00:25:04,604 --> 00:25:06,852
and wonder why you didn't
write it yourself.

363
00:25:06,939 --> 00:25:10,212
That's genius.
That's a genius riff. Wish I'd wrote it.

364
00:25:30,587 --> 00:25:34,373
The second record that I ever bought
in my life was Machine Head.

365
00:25:34,491 --> 00:25:36,608
What an album. Oh, my God!

366
00:25:36,699 --> 00:25:41,532
To have a record like that
and to have a guitar player like Ritchie

367
00:25:41,627 --> 00:25:46,854
in your radar and your field,
it was just the greatest.

368
00:25:46,971 --> 00:25:50,331
You just think, "What would my life have
been like without that?"

369
00:26:18,523 --> 00:26:22,626
It's the way Ritchie plays the riff.
It's not the way that

370
00:26:22,682 --> 00:26:26,818
two generations of kids have played it
in the guitar shop and driven people mad,

371
00:26:26,907 --> 00:26:28,380
to the point where in some shops in London

372
00:26:28,442 --> 00:26:32,250
it says, "If you are trying out a guitar
please don't play Smoke on the Water."

373
00:26:32,346 --> 00:26:35,554
The first guitar, that
guitar, right over there.

374
00:26:35,643 --> 00:26:38,753
You see the Strat with the maple body,

375
00:26:38,842 --> 00:26:41,374
that was my first real guitar.

376
00:26:41,466 --> 00:26:47,009
And I got it because of the poster on my
wall in my bedroom of Ritchie playing.

377
00:26:47,098 --> 00:26:48,898
It was that guitar.

378
00:26:48,986 --> 00:26:52,064
And that's what I wanted.
I wanted the Ritchie Blackmore Strat.

379
00:27:03,802 --> 00:27:06,464
Ritchie's solo on
Machine Head's Highway Star

380
00:27:06,522 --> 00:27:09,381
was also set to become
a Deep Purple statement.

381
00:27:09,690 --> 00:27:14,753
Highway Star is... That's crazy. That's
just a crazy song for a guitar player.

382
00:27:14,842 --> 00:27:18,148
It makes everyone who thinks they are a
guitar player need to pick up their guitar

383
00:27:18,201 --> 00:27:21,857
and see,
"Well, if I'm that good, can I do that?"

384
00:27:22,522 --> 00:27:26,843
Highway Star solo was one of the first
things I could get my head around.

385
00:27:26,938 --> 00:27:29,884
Even when I was like 16 or 17,

386
00:27:30,010 --> 00:27:33,469
it wasn't the standard notes you'd use.
It wasn't just the blues scale.

387
00:27:33,561 --> 00:27:39,388
It was classically... There was classical stuff
coming in there and with this aggression.

388
00:27:39,481 --> 00:27:42,624
Ritchie was really looking to expand
on his solos

389
00:27:42,682 --> 00:27:44,602
and wanted a particular sequence,

390
00:27:44,729 --> 00:27:46,497
which is actually
almost a classical sequence.

391
00:27:46,586 --> 00:27:49,729
It's probably the defining moment

392
00:27:49,849 --> 00:27:55,131
for Ritchie's soloing, Highway Star to me.
It's the most recognizable solo.

393
00:27:55,226 --> 00:27:57,725
I like solos where you know them,

394
00:27:57,850 --> 00:28:00,611
solos where it's just a.” Nothing.

395
00:28:01,082 --> 00:28:05,184
So I think Highway Star was just stunning
for that effect.

396
00:28:44,217 --> 00:28:47,938
I always thought American players always go
right to the edge of the cliff and fall off

397
00:28:48,025 --> 00:28:50,371
and wave as they are going down.

398
00:28:50,489 --> 00:28:55,322
But the British players seem to take
that one half a step back from the cliff

399
00:28:55,449 --> 00:28:58,777
and so it's together
right till the end of the song,

400
00:28:58,841 --> 00:29:01,241
but it's still extremely thrilling.

401
00:29:01,336 --> 00:29:06,170
And funny thing about that song is that,

402
00:29:06,265 --> 00:29:09,986
having played it, you can get carried away
with the emotion of the song,

403
00:29:10,041 --> 00:29:11,262
the intensity of it,

404
00:29:11,321 --> 00:29:14,681
of what you're doing, and
it ruins it in a way.

405
00:29:14,776 --> 00:29:20,385
And that's part of Ritchie's charm for me
is his restraint at the right moments,

406
00:29:20,440 --> 00:29:23,583
and it creates a lot of drama in his parts.

407
00:29:23,640 --> 00:29:24,600
It was a game changer,

408
00:29:24,696 --> 00:29:26,538
I thought Machine Head
was a game changer myself.

409
00:29:27,000 --> 00:29:30,524
Machine Head reached number seven
and went double platinum in the USA

410
00:29:30,648 --> 00:29:33,027
and gold at number one in the UK.

411
00:29:33,080 --> 00:29:36,124
but Ritchie's desire to control events
was now leading to clashes

412
00:29:36,216 --> 00:29:38,136
with vocalist Ian Gillan.

413
00:29:39,640 --> 00:29:42,521
He was, as they say, an alpha guy.
So was I.

414
00:29:42,648 --> 00:29:47,329
He wanted to control, I wanted to control,
so we butted heads because of that.

415
00:29:48,024 --> 00:29:51,134
We still respected each other,
but we never got on.

416
00:29:51,224 --> 00:29:53,407
And we just couldn't be in the same room.

417
00:29:53,528 --> 00:29:54,520
That was the problem.

418
00:29:54,616 --> 00:29:57,475
I wasn't speaking to him,
he wasn't speaking to me.

419
00:29:59,160 --> 00:30:00,666
We weren't being creative.

420
00:30:00,984 --> 00:30:02,272
The band then toured Japan

421
00:30:02,359 --> 00:30:07,739
which produced their hugely successful
1972 live album, Made in Japan.

422
00:30:07,800 --> 00:30:10,943
Things were coming to a head
with Ian Gillan.

423
00:30:10,999 --> 00:30:15,069
I think it started with coming back
on the Japanese flight.

424
00:30:16,503 --> 00:30:21,054
Paul Rodgers' you know,
to me was just mind-blowing, his voice.

425
00:30:22,136 --> 00:30:24,285
I wanted Ian to be able to do that,

426
00:30:24,407 --> 00:30:27,801
and I couldn't relate lo Ian's
screaming and yelling

427
00:30:27,895 --> 00:30:30,012
and the Elvis Presley impersonation.

428
00:30:31,127 --> 00:30:35,132
He said, "So, how do you want me to sing?
I'll sing any way you want me to sing".

429
00:30:35,223 --> 00:30:41,497
And I went, "Ian, you can't sing that way,
that's a blues thing", you know?

430
00:30:42,647 --> 00:30:45,888
I think after that, that turned him off.

431
00:30:46,327 --> 00:30:49,405
He was rejected,
so we went downhill from there.

432
00:30:56,855 --> 00:30:59,321
The aptly titled Who Do We Think We Are

433
00:30:59,448 --> 00:31:03,485
was lo be the final album before
Ian Gillan and Roger Glover left the band.

434
00:31:05,335 --> 00:31:09,209
I think Ritchie Blackmore spent a lot of
his career looking for the perfect line-up.

435
00:31:09,302 --> 00:31:11,616
And when he found it,
he still wasn't happy with it.

436
00:31:11,799 --> 00:31:12,923
We started looking for other people,

437
00:31:13,047 --> 00:31:15,774
we found Glenn Hughes
and David Coverdale.

438
00:31:15,863 --> 00:31:16,823
I'd left art college,

439
00:31:16,919 --> 00:31:20,280
and I was working in a boutique
in Redcar in the north of England.

440
00:31:20,374 --> 00:31:22,458
And I read in the Melody Maker that...

441
00:31:22,519 --> 00:31:26,360
It was a picture of Jon at his organ,
very Monty Python,

442
00:31:26,455 --> 00:31:32,609
saying, "Deep Purple still haven't found
a singer and are considering unknowns."

443
00:31:33,302 --> 00:31:37,372
Which was basically a little ding moment.

444
00:31:37,462 --> 00:31:38,968
Paice played me this tape, he said,

445
00:31:39,062 --> 00:31:40,928
"What do you think of this singer?"
And it was David Coverdale.

446
00:31:41,015 --> 00:31:42,782
And Jon would go,
"What's wrong with him?"

447
00:31:42,839 --> 00:31:45,785
And I'd go, "You can't
have him after Gillan."

448
00:31:46,487 --> 00:31:49,248
Gillan was this God with the women,

449
00:31:49,334 --> 00:31:52,990
and we've got to have someone that can

450
00:31:53,078 --> 00:31:56,538
fire up the female interest there.

451
00:31:57,239 --> 00:32:00,599
And they said, "No, we disagree."

452
00:32:01,302 --> 00:32:03,615
The girls in the office think he is cute.

453
00:32:03,702 --> 00:32:05,503
I'm going, "Cute? Okay."

454
00:32:31,702 --> 00:32:35,129
Then we did Mistreated, which is
a bluesy thing, and we had that voice,

455
00:32:35,254 --> 00:32:38,047
Paul Rodgers kind of overturned to it.

456
00:32:38,262 --> 00:32:40,445
And Burn itself, the song worked,

457
00:32:40,566 --> 00:32:42,999
I felt we had some good songs there.

458
00:33:00,598 --> 00:33:03,773
And, of course, Glenn
was very effervescent.

459
00:33:03,861 --> 00:33:07,321
He had a great funky way
of playing the bass.

460
00:33:08,245 --> 00:33:09,980
He was a very rhythmic bass player.

461
00:33:20,533 --> 00:33:23,894
'Cause before that we had more of a...

462
00:33:24,502 --> 00:33:27,131
Glenn was more...

463
00:33:27,221 --> 00:33:28,924
There would be this rhythmic...

464
00:33:29,717 --> 00:33:33,787
He was very good
with his rhythmic syncopation.

465
00:33:46,997 --> 00:33:50,302
You know, it bears noting that,
for me, Ritchie Blackmore,

466
00:33:50,357 --> 00:33:53,085
unlike many guitar players,

467
00:33:53,973 --> 00:33:58,523
never lost his edge, if it were.

468
00:33:59,285 --> 00:34:02,973
<i>Burn is every bit as important
as Space Truckin'</i>

469
00:34:03,060 --> 00:34:05,406
and some of the later stuff.

470
00:34:05,525 --> 00:34:10,359
You can actually hear a guitar player
at the lop of his game.

471
00:34:43,796 --> 00:34:46,742
Ritchie is convinced that the
clock in his bar is haunted

472
00:34:46,836 --> 00:34:49,084
and chimes whenever it is happy.

473
00:34:51,220 --> 00:34:52,606
Very happy.-

474
00:34:53,781 --> 00:34:56,028
- It doesn't do it at a set time or anything?
- No.

475
00:34:56,116 --> 00:34:57,720
- It does it just...
- No, only when it's happy.

476
00:34:57,844 --> 00:34:59,743
It will stay off for months.

477
00:35:00,436 --> 00:35:02,162
It's haunted, it was
given to me by a friend.

478
00:35:09,812 --> 00:35:13,085
Ritchie's lifelong interest in haunting
and practical jokes

479
00:35:13,204 --> 00:35:16,444
was something else newcomer Coverdale
had to get used to.

480
00:35:16,564 --> 00:35:19,129
Some of them were very
close to the knuckle.

481
00:35:19,220 --> 00:35:22,264
We were at Clearwell Castle
in Gloucestershire, Forest of Dean.

482
00:35:22,676 --> 00:35:27,641
A guy called Tony Ashton was coming down
from London for the weekend, for the hang.

483
00:35:28,916 --> 00:35:32,986
So Ritchie and I had the crew empty
the guest bedroom

484
00:35:33,076 --> 00:35:36,535
of all the furniture and took up the
carpets, took up the floor boards,

485
00:35:36,595 --> 00:35:39,738
and put a huge speaker, I mean, a really
big Marshall speaker

486
00:35:39,796 --> 00:35:43,320
underneath the bed.

487
00:35:43,444 --> 00:35:47,449
Put the boards back in,
put the carpets back over,

488
00:35:47,540 --> 00:35:49,526
everything just looking normal.

489
00:35:49,683 --> 00:35:52,859
Fed the wires down to another room
down the way,

490
00:35:52,915 --> 00:35:57,661
and sat up and waited for Tony Ashton
to come back from the pub.

491
00:35:57,715 --> 00:36:01,404
And as we hear the steps coming down
the corridor

492
00:36:01,523 --> 00:36:04,884
and Tony's door close.

493
00:36:04,979 --> 00:36:09,333
So we give him time to bathroom
and whatever and get into bed'

494
00:36:09,395 --> 00:36:13,717
And then we turn the speaker,
the microphone on, and I went up,

495
00:36:13,843 --> 00:36:18,906
started scratching against a board,
which you can imagine, this is under a bed,

496
00:36:18,995 --> 00:36:22,355
and saying, "Let me out."

497
00:36:23,795 --> 00:36:25,978
Well...

498
00:36:26,035 --> 00:36:29,243
We heard the most unearthly scream and...

499
00:36:29,331 --> 00:36:32,823
Which, you know, and panicking footsteps
running down the corridor.

500
00:36:32,915 --> 00:36:35,131
It certainly wasn't a guy's voice.

501
00:36:35,219 --> 00:36:36,376
Tony was still at the pub,

502
00:36:36,435 --> 00:36:38,835
this was a guest of the family
who owned the castle,

503
00:36:38,963 --> 00:36:43,001
who'd actually just come back from Bristol
after seeing The Exorcist movie.

504
00:36:43,091 --> 00:36:47,575
So, and was last seen heading
into the deep, dark forest.

505
00:36:48,275 --> 00:36:53,982
He has no boundaries
when it comes to his pranks, his japes.

506
00:36:57,875 --> 00:37:01,497
This is Ontario, 40 miles
east of Los Angeles.

507
00:37:01,555 --> 00:37:04,414
The only sound you'll hear today are the
railway track to the south

508
00:37:04,498 --> 00:37:06,200
and the highway to the north.

509
00:37:07,571 --> 00:37:12,219
But the 40,000 plus people who gathered
here for the 1974 Cal Jam festival

510
00:37:12,275 --> 00:37:15,418
were about to witness Ritchie
at his most theatrical.

511
00:37:16,723 --> 00:37:21,884
Cal Jam, it was pretty romantic
when it happened, I'll tell you, it was.

512
00:37:21,971 --> 00:37:25,331
I remember a beautiful
southern California day.

513
00:37:29,714 --> 00:37:32,758
I'd come from driving a little
transit van's local gigs

514
00:37:32,882 --> 00:37:37,367
into flying in a customized,
private 707, 727.

515
00:37:37,458 --> 00:37:41,244
The star ship, which is how we flew
into that environment.

516
00:37:41,331 --> 00:37:42,968
It was breath-taking to me.

517
00:37:43,251 --> 00:37:45,945
There must have been 350,000 people there.

518
00:37:46,034 --> 00:37:50,039
I think 100,000 burned the fence down.

519
00:37:50,162 --> 00:37:51,897
Then it was probably 350,000.

520
00:37:52,018 --> 00:37:55,226
When we look at the visual images
from above,

521
00:37:55,314 --> 00:38:00,596
you cannot imagine what it's like
to walk onto a stage and you can't see...

522
00:38:01,682 --> 00:38:06,036
You can see the skyline,
but in the skyline there is people.

523
00:38:06,193 --> 00:38:08,277
It really was stunning.

524
00:38:08,434 --> 00:38:10,518
<i>There was a whole host,
the Emerson, Lake & Palmer</i>

525
00:38:10,641 --> 00:38:14,744
and Black Sabbath, Earth, Wind & Fire,
Seals and Crofts,

526
00:38:14,833 --> 00:38:18,587
Black Oak Arkansas and Rare Earth.
I think that was the bill.

527
00:38:18,673 --> 00:38:21,467
And we were offered the headline slot.

528
00:38:21,553 --> 00:38:25,459
John Coletta, the management, called
me up six months before that festival

529
00:38:25,553 --> 00:38:28,761
and said, "They want you
to do California Jam."

530
00:38:28,881 --> 00:38:31,860
I said, "No, thanks.
I'm not interested in any more festivals."

531
00:38:31,954 --> 00:38:33,853
They are a nightmare, they always will be,

532
00:38:33,937 --> 00:38:36,731
there is always
complete catastrophe backstage.

533
00:38:36,817 --> 00:38:40,439
Nothing ever goes right,
you're always on late or early.

534
00:38:40,561 --> 00:38:43,639
The billing is all wrong, it's just awful.

535
00:38:43,730 --> 00:38:47,003
I said, "You know what, I might do it",

536
00:38:47,089 --> 00:38:50,995
"but we have to write down
all these conditions,"

537
00:38:51,121 --> 00:38:53,554
"because I'm tired of doing festivals."

538
00:38:53,682 --> 00:38:57,948
We're gonna go on at dusk,
which is 9:00, around there.

539
00:38:58,033 --> 00:39:00,914
And I said, "We'll be the first band
with lights, 'cause that's important."

540
00:39:01,010 --> 00:39:03,159
It's a subliminal thing, people see lights,

541
00:39:03,282 --> 00:39:06,108
and they go, "I really like this band
compared to the rest of them."

542
00:39:06,193 --> 00:39:08,758
It's only 'cause they've
got lights going on,

543
00:39:08,881 --> 00:39:13,203
and it's a psychological thing
that I've noticed, so I insisted on that.

544
00:39:14,289 --> 00:39:16,373
And they said, "Absolutely no problem."

545
00:39:16,753 --> 00:39:20,692
In the event, the organizers demanded
the band go on when it was still light.

546
00:39:20,753 --> 00:39:23,219
But Ritchie stuck to his guns.

547
00:39:23,313 --> 00:39:27,219
People were yelling and screaming
and threatening this and threatening that,

548
00:39:27,313 --> 00:39:31,448
and I just get the door bolted, and I'd
have a few drinks playing the guitar.

549
00:39:31,536 --> 00:39:32,922
I was not gonna go on.

550
00:39:33,361 --> 00:39:37,365
Finally when it was dark,
Ritchie, the musician, went on stage.

551
00:39:37,552 --> 00:39:41,241
You look fucking great from here.
Really good.

552
00:39:42,033 --> 00:39:44,019
And they were terrific on stage,
they were absolutely terrific.

553
00:39:44,112 --> 00:39:47,702
Ritchie is a spectacularly
visual guitarist, he was.

554
00:39:49,072 --> 00:39:52,116
He ran around, put his back to the
audience, threw his guitar around,

555
00:39:52,208 --> 00:39:54,358
and of course,
he did a bit of a Townshend sometimes,

556
00:39:54,449 --> 00:39:55,409
and smashed the guitar at the end.

557
00:39:55,473 --> 00:40:00,023
Of all the guys in Deep Purple,
it was Ritchie who was the most quixotic

558
00:40:00,113 --> 00:40:01,466
and mischievous.

559
00:40:02,033 --> 00:40:06,168
And the quixotic and mischievous Ritchie
was also on stage that night.

560
00:40:06,768 --> 00:40:11,122
He's had enough, you know,
he's playing away and you can hear,

561
00:40:11,216 --> 00:40:14,643
he said he could hear this guy going,
"Limey, get back in there, so I can..."

562
00:40:14,736 --> 00:40:16,602
You know, and all this kind of stuff,

563
00:40:16,689 --> 00:40:20,410
and he killed the camera,
it was brilliant showmanship.

564
00:40:20,496 --> 00:40:25,723
Probably among the definitive moments
of his kind of sense of spectacle

565
00:40:25,841 --> 00:40:30,292
and wanting to kind of turn it up
to another notch or whatever.

566
00:40:55,632 --> 00:40:59,221
And Ritchie had plans
for notching things up even further.

567
00:41:00,111 --> 00:41:01,879
So, I went to my roadie and said,

568
00:41:01,968 --> 00:41:04,914
"What I'm gonna do is
blow up the amplifiers."

569
00:41:05,040 --> 00:41:09,208
I said, "What I want you to do is
cover the amplifiers in petrol."

570
00:41:09,295 --> 00:41:13,812
"I'll go across one side of the stage.
You douse my Marshalls,"

571
00:41:13,872 --> 00:41:15,890
"dummy Marshalls, with petrol."

572
00:41:15,952 --> 00:41:20,436
Ronnie Quinton, his beloved guitar tech,
who is no longer with us,

573
00:41:20,560 --> 00:41:25,492
loaded way too much gun powder
into Ritchie's stuff,

574
00:41:25,552 --> 00:41:28,912
so when that... It blew Paice's glasses
off. I thought I was gonna die.

575
00:41:48,847 --> 00:41:51,859
Exploded and, like, blew
a hole in the stage,

576
00:41:51,951 --> 00:41:56,501
Paice's glasses got blown off, he
was like... He can't see anything.

577
00:41:56,591 --> 00:42:00,344
It made some cameraman temporarily deaf.

578
00:42:01,775 --> 00:42:03,161
But, it looked great.

579
00:42:04,079 --> 00:42:09,557
Everybody was up and happy. Deep Purple
just killed, I mean, they killed.

580
00:42:09,647 --> 00:42:15,604
Because this was still a bit of a transition
into heavy metal, still kinda new.

581
00:42:15,694 --> 00:42:18,040
They really came through, let me tell you.
They were good.

582
00:42:18,127 --> 00:42:23,735
I was a total novice
outside of the remarkable

583
00:42:23,791 --> 00:42:27,958
schooling of working men's clubs
and it's just a walk in the park, you know,

584
00:42:28,047 --> 00:42:31,255
after you've played
Wingate Constitutional Club.

585
00:42:31,310 --> 00:42:34,038
Yeah, he did a great job, he pulled it off.

586
00:42:44,334 --> 00:42:45,556
And we had a helicopter,

587
00:42:45,678 --> 00:42:48,984
we were bundled into the helicopter
and flown out.

588
00:42:49,071 --> 00:42:52,398
The police were coming to arrest us,
for blowing up the stage,

589
00:42:52,494 --> 00:42:55,637
being dangerous to all the people,
what have you.

590
00:42:56,366 --> 00:43:01,844
You know, it worked, and the idea was
to upstage ELP, which I think we did.

591
00:43:02,830 --> 00:43:07,216
That was probably one of the peak moments
certainly in economic terms

592
00:43:07,310 --> 00:43:09,526
and in terms of record breaking.

593
00:43:09,614 --> 00:43:11,797
That was one of the highlights
of Deep Purple's career,

594
00:43:11,886 --> 00:43:14,101
because they played to this vast audience.

595
00:43:14,190 --> 00:43:16,340
I think it is in the
Guinness Book of Records,

596
00:43:16,430 --> 00:43:19,638
some hundreds of thousands of people
at this event.

597
00:43:19,726 --> 00:43:21,625
I think it got better musically for them.

598
00:43:21,710 --> 00:43:25,137
They continued, thank God,
to progress musically.

599
00:43:25,230 --> 00:43:30,740
But, I don't know that their popularity
ever got bigger than Cal Jam ll'

600
00:43:32,750 --> 00:43:36,274
Cal Jam had radically ramped up
Ritchie's profile in America,

601
00:43:36,366 --> 00:43:40,436
but he was growing increasingly unhappy with
the funky direction the band was taking.

602
00:43:41,646 --> 00:43:44,275
My first LP Burn was great.

603
00:43:44,398 --> 00:43:48,370
We had Mistreated, Burn,
and it was all working.

604
00:43:48,430 --> 00:43:52,598
Now, the second record we made,
Stormbringer was good.

605
00:43:54,317 --> 00:43:58,671
But Jon, I think Ian, and even Dave,

606
00:43:58,765 --> 00:44:02,933
and, of course, Glenn,
were getting into this funk stuff.

607
00:44:06,189 --> 00:44:08,753
And I'm like, "That's not me."

608
00:44:09,229 --> 00:44:12,721
It's gonna be rock, blues.
I don't wanna be involved in that.

609
00:44:12,846 --> 00:44:15,727
Me, Jon and David wrote Holy Man together.

610
00:44:15,789 --> 00:44:18,964
And it was, "You can't do it right
with the one you love".

611
00:44:19,053 --> 00:44:22,927
It was group compositions, Hold On.

612
00:44:23,566 --> 00:44:27,123
Jon came up with that great
Fender Rhodes thing.

613
00:44:47,597 --> 00:44:49,135
And with his Deep Purple colleagues

614
00:44:49,229 --> 00:44:52,023
unwilling to take the music
in the direction he wanted,

615
00:44:52,109 --> 00:44:56,245
Ritchie now found someone who was,
a singer named Ronnie James Dio.

616
00:44:57,357 --> 00:44:59,540
That's when I did,

617
00:44:59,629 --> 00:45:02,029
I think, 16th Century Greensleeves
with Ronnie.

618
00:45:15,564 --> 00:45:19,765
He actually recorded an album with Ronnie
and the guys is in Elf.

619
00:45:19,852 --> 00:45:21,456
And we didn't know about this.

620
00:45:22,252 --> 00:45:23,606
And that turned out even better,

621
00:45:23,692 --> 00:45:27,413
and I went, "We've gotta form a band
'cause this is just flowing."

622
00:45:28,589 --> 00:45:32,048
There is none of this...
No committee meetings.

623
00:45:32,108 --> 00:45:34,738
And no briefcases involved

624
00:45:34,828 --> 00:45:36,977
and trying to get hold of people
that were never around.

625
00:45:37,996 --> 00:45:40,723
Because Purple became a big business,
the monster.

626
00:45:41,069 --> 00:45:44,877
So, that's when I left 'em
and formed Rainbow.

627
00:45:45,484 --> 00:45:46,902
Ritchie's new band was named after

628
00:45:46,988 --> 00:45:49,236
the famous rock and roll
Rainbow Bar and Grill

629
00:45:49,357 --> 00:45:51,473
on Sunset Boulevard in west Hollywood.

630
00:45:51,564 --> 00:45:53,616
<i>He was his own boss at last.</i>

631
00:46:17,484 --> 00:46:20,016
It was very exciting. We had Ronnie Dio.

632
00:46:20,108 --> 00:46:21,843
He could come around
and write a tune like that.

633
00:46:21,932 --> 00:46:26,166
I'd give him an idea, he'd put the top line
to it, everything was fresh.

634
00:46:26,251 --> 00:46:27,692
He had that ridiculous voice.

635
00:46:28,364 --> 00:46:29,553
After the first album,

636
00:46:29,643 --> 00:46:32,884
Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow became
simply Rainbow.

637
00:46:33,196 --> 00:46:36,556
We held auditions to put Rainbow together.

638
00:46:36,715 --> 00:46:40,207
And the 13th drummer was Cozy Powell.

639
00:46:41,707 --> 00:46:43,587
And he was the only one that could
play a shuffle.

640
00:46:43,947 --> 00:46:48,269
I was looking for some fire
and then Cozy came in and he did it.

641
00:47:05,548 --> 00:47:07,414
He and Ritchie got on very well together.

642
00:47:07,468 --> 00:47:12,116
They both shared a love,
apart from rock and roll, of pranking.

643
00:47:12,235 --> 00:47:14,581
Practical jokes, so...

644
00:47:14,667 --> 00:47:18,323
And, of course, Cozy is quite
a strong personality as well so,

645
00:47:18,411 --> 00:47:20,594
they respected each other
and they liked each other,

646
00:47:20,715 --> 00:47:23,628
and that was really the basis of the
success of Rainbow,

647
00:47:23,755 --> 00:47:28,654
I think, was this very powerful guitar
player, incredibly strong drummer

648
00:47:28,746 --> 00:47:31,246
and enormously talented singer.

649
00:47:31,307 --> 00:47:34,188
I think Cozy was a perfect
foil for Ritchie,

650
00:47:34,283 --> 00:47:36,334
and I know even Cozy
found it hard at times.

651
00:47:36,426 --> 00:47:38,642
Cozy used to tell me,
"It isn't easy, you know?"

652
00:47:38,731 --> 00:47:40,684
But I think Cozy had such
a respect for Ritchie

653
00:47:40,747 --> 00:47:42,831
and likewise the other way around.

654
00:47:42,954 --> 00:47:45,716
So, yeah, I think it was great combination.

655
00:47:45,803 --> 00:47:51,564
As a fan, it seemed like it was
one more step into what was heavy metal.

656
00:47:53,835 --> 00:47:58,668
Certainly with Dio singing,

657
00:47:58,795 --> 00:48:02,003
it was a remarkable step forward
in that genre.

658
00:48:02,090 --> 00:48:04,752
I mean, a lot of people today,
they listen to those records

659
00:48:04,842 --> 00:48:07,374
and they think that's
where it really started.

660
00:48:07,466 --> 00:48:09,867
It's almost as if he is playing more
on those records,

661
00:48:09,994 --> 00:48:11,948
there is like more of Ritchie
on those records.

662
00:48:12,074 --> 00:48:15,631
It was a band in his own image,
which Deep Purple would never...

663
00:48:15,914 --> 00:48:19,603
Deep Purple were partly his image
and partly his creativity,

664
00:48:19,690 --> 00:48:21,523
but it belonged to everybody else.

665
00:48:21,610 --> 00:48:22,636
Rainbow was him.

666
00:48:22,730 --> 00:48:26,735
Rainbow was definitely his moment
of stepping into the spotlight

667
00:48:26,826 --> 00:48:28,845
and saying, "This is me,
this is where I want to go."

668
00:48:29,067 --> 00:48:32,755
Cozy suddenly turned up,
turned around, Cozy Powell, and said,

669
00:48:32,874 --> 00:48:35,406
"You know who my favourite band is?"

670
00:48:35,466 --> 00:48:38,161
It's "ABBA“ and we went..."

671
00:48:39,402 --> 00:48:40,362
"ABBA!"

672
00:48:41,322 --> 00:48:43,755
"How could you?“ as in like...

673
00:48:43,850 --> 00:48:47,691
And he is like, "Yeah, I know,
but that's my favourite band."

674
00:48:47,882 --> 00:48:50,282
<i>Then I said, "And mine."</i>

675
00:48:52,265 --> 00:48:55,757
Then, I think
the bass player there went, "And mine."

676
00:48:55,849 --> 00:48:58,577
And we suddenly all went,
"Let's play some ABBA."

677
00:48:59,306 --> 00:49:03,278
But, unsurprisingly, no ABBA tracks made it
on to the band's second album,

678
00:49:03,370 --> 00:49:04,658
Rainbow Rising.

679
00:49:20,234 --> 00:49:24,521
Rainbow Rising was done in Munich
in the studio Arabella House, I think.

680
00:49:25,673 --> 00:49:28,979
That was done quickly and done very well,

681
00:49:29,065 --> 00:49:30,735
and we had a good time playing it.

682
00:49:30,825 --> 00:49:32,331
By the time we got
to Long Live Rock 'N' Roll,

683
00:49:32,426 --> 00:49:34,193
things were getting...

684
00:49:35,402 --> 00:49:38,762
Ronnie was more into his girlfriend Wendy,

685
00:49:38,890 --> 00:49:41,072
and things were starting to slow down
for ideas.

686
00:49:41,162 --> 00:49:44,751
I don't think Rainbow ever equalled
the success of Deep Purple,

687
00:49:44,873 --> 00:49:49,161
not in the public's perception
or in the critics' minds, should we say.

688
00:49:49,929 --> 00:49:52,428
Despite the fact that it did produce
some great music.

689
00:49:52,521 --> 00:49:54,922
It was very... And it
was a great live band.

690
00:49:54,985 --> 00:49:56,207
It was very entertaining,

691
00:49:56,265 --> 00:49:59,626
and gave Ritchie Blackmore opportunities
to play with other people.

692
00:50:00,169 --> 00:50:02,831
As far as the personnel changes go,

693
00:50:02,921 --> 00:50:07,602
you would need an abacus
and a Cray Computer

694
00:50:07,689 --> 00:50:09,937
to figure that one out.

695
00:50:10,024 --> 00:50:14,095
But, that family tree is tall, wide
and complicated.

696
00:50:14,185 --> 00:50:17,066
But through it all, there
is Ritchie Blackmore.

697
00:50:39,528 --> 00:50:43,947
And a Ritchie Blackmore who was still
unpredictable and more than a little scary.

698
00:50:44,105 --> 00:50:46,985
I have seen Ritchie lose it with someone,
I better not say who it is.

699
00:50:47,112 --> 00:50:50,669
but it was very explosive.

700
00:50:50,793 --> 00:50:54,481
Yeah, he doesn't suffer people to be fools.

701
00:50:54,569 --> 00:50:57,395
And I know Ritchie can be quite physical.

702
00:50:57,705 --> 00:51:01,709
Ritchie got physical in Vienna in 1977.

703
00:51:02,824 --> 00:51:07,854
We were playing in Austria to
about 5,000-7,000 people.

704
00:51:07,944 --> 00:51:12,745
A good show and this little girl comes
up to the front stage,

705
00:51:12,873 --> 00:51:16,266
she had come up and handed up a note,

706
00:51:16,392 --> 00:51:19,884
like, "I'm a big fan of the band"
or something like that, I don't know.

707
00:51:19,944 --> 00:51:21,549
And I'm just watching her

708
00:51:21,640 --> 00:51:26,027
and the next minute she gets hit by this
guy with a truncheon and this bouncer,

709
00:51:26,824 --> 00:51:29,999
and, of course, I thought,
"He is not gonna get away with that."

710
00:51:30,088 --> 00:51:32,237
So I kicked him.

711
00:51:32,327 --> 00:51:36,168
And I have strong legs,
so of course I broke his jaw

712
00:51:36,264 --> 00:51:39,276
and he went down, blood, and I went...

713
00:51:39,624 --> 00:51:43,465
The resourceful stage crew hid Ritchie
in a large flight case

714
00:51:43,592 --> 00:51:45,327
and pushed him towards the exit.

715
00:51:45,448 --> 00:51:49,682
Every exit had police helmets and dogs.

716
00:51:49,767 --> 00:51:54,034
And they were about to push me up
into the truck, into the lorry.

717
00:51:54,407 --> 00:51:58,826
And they insisted, opened it up,
and, of course,

718
00:51:58,952 --> 00:52:02,312
I just came out like a Jack in the box,
"Hi, everybody.“"

719
00:52:03,144 --> 00:52:06,450
And then they locked me up for four days,
which was pretty miserable.

720
00:52:06,824 --> 00:52:10,512
'Cause the first night, they would
just like, throw me on the floor.

721
00:52:11,624 --> 00:52:14,654
And they wanted to beat the shit out of me
because I just hit one of their guys.

722
00:52:14,823 --> 00:52:17,289
The consulate was of no use whatsoever,

723
00:52:17,384 --> 00:52:20,078
they just came and said,
"You have done a really bad thing."

724
00:52:20,168 --> 00:52:22,186
"You might be here forever."

725
00:52:23,207 --> 00:52:24,495
That's a wakeup call.

726
00:52:24,583 --> 00:52:29,035
You know, I had a bad temper.
My temper is not so bad any more

727
00:52:29,127 --> 00:52:30,393
'cause I always think about that.

728
00:52:30,439 --> 00:52:32,490
As well as his unscheduled jail visit,

729
00:52:32,583 --> 00:52:35,464
Ritchie now had to contend with
a changing music market

730
00:52:35,559 --> 00:52:37,164
and an unchanging Ronnie.

731
00:52:52,262 --> 00:52:55,209
Ronnie Dio and Ritchie Blackmore
had a chemistry,

732
00:52:55,303 --> 00:52:59,438
but then, as Blackmore got further
into the Rainbow career,

733
00:52:59,527 --> 00:53:03,630
he saw himself as wanting to become
a little bit more commercial.

734
00:53:03,719 --> 00:53:08,848
And Dio very much wanted to stay
into the myths and the dragons feel

735
00:53:08,903 --> 00:53:12,875
that he would put forward
in the lyrics, metaphorical,

736
00:53:12,967 --> 00:53:14,986
rather than physical, than actual.

737
00:53:15,110 --> 00:53:17,871
So that the two of them went their
separate ways, as we know.

738
00:53:18,471 --> 00:53:21,799
But that isn't the whole story,
as Ritchie now reveals.

739
00:53:22,471 --> 00:53:25,450
Wendy, apparently,
had told him transatlantically,

740
00:53:25,543 --> 00:53:27,921
she said, called him up and said, "Ronnie",

741
00:53:28,006 --> 00:53:31,531
"Ritchie is on the front page
of Circus magazine in America"

742
00:53:31,622 --> 00:53:33,040
"and you two aren't."

743
00:53:33,127 --> 00:53:34,927
"There should have been the three of us."

744
00:53:35,399 --> 00:53:37,036
That's what did it.

745
00:53:37,126 --> 00:53:42,799
And he said to me, "Cozy and I are not
gonna... We are not your sidekicks",

746
00:53:42,886 --> 00:53:45,286
"and we are not standing for it."

747
00:53:45,638 --> 00:53:48,846
I don't want to work with someone
who is that trivial, that ridiculous.

748
00:53:48,902 --> 00:53:53,386
I said, "I can't work with this guy any
more, just get him out of my life."

749
00:53:53,510 --> 00:53:58,824
And I remembered Graham Bonnet
from the Marbles,

750
00:53:58,918 --> 00:54:02,890
and I said to Roger Glover, I said,
"What about trying to find him?"

751
00:54:02,982 --> 00:54:04,478
"I wonder what he is doing these days."

752
00:54:04,518 --> 00:54:07,845
So I had to learn a Rainbow song
because I knew nothing.

753
00:54:07,942 --> 00:54:10,343
I didn't know who Rainbow was,
I had no clue.

754
00:54:10,438 --> 00:54:12,718
So I had to go out and buy albums
and listen to the music.

755
00:54:12,806 --> 00:54:16,166
And I thought,
"I don't think this is really me."

756
00:54:16,358 --> 00:54:19,151
I'm more into like R&B
and pop kind of stuff.

757
00:54:19,302 --> 00:54:22,030
That guy had an amazing voice.

758
00:54:22,118 --> 00:54:25,162
Could sing an F-sharp above Top C
and that was going some.

759
00:54:25,222 --> 00:54:26,641
I remember going over there one afternoon,

760
00:54:26,726 --> 00:54:28,529
and I heard this
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

761
00:54:28,582 --> 00:54:30,895
or something in the background,
and it was off of my album.

762
00:54:30,982 --> 00:54:34,125
<i>I said to Roger, "Why is he playing that?"
He says, "He just loves your voice."</i>

763
00:54:34,181 --> 00:54:37,487
Ritchie also loved the idea of
being more commercial.

764
00:55:00,486 --> 00:55:01,806
We needed some radio play.

765
00:55:01,861 --> 00:55:03,945
We got a little bit too underground.

766
00:55:04,037 --> 00:55:05,870
<i>Since You've Been Gone, we got rid of that,
and we...</i>

767
00:55:05,957 --> 00:55:09,317
'Cause it's a number one, all of a sudden
we were a big band.

768
00:55:10,501 --> 00:55:14,985
We were riding high at that time,
1980 was our biggest moment, I think.

769
00:55:15,877 --> 00:55:17,482
We were quite big in England.

770
00:55:17,925 --> 00:55:19,146
I love Since You've Been Gone.

771
00:55:19,238 --> 00:55:24,399
It's uncompromising and it has the perfect
element of pop, which is you can sing it

772
00:55:24,485 --> 00:55:27,464
and it's in your head all day,
and it's passionate.

773
00:55:27,557 --> 00:55:32,522
It has a real tug on your emotions.

774
00:55:32,581 --> 00:55:35,941
But Ritchie's in it,
and Ritchie is powering the whole thing.

775
00:55:36,037 --> 00:55:37,543
The under solo is just brilliant.

776
00:55:54,437 --> 00:55:56,204
They did the immortal version of it.

777
00:55:57,157 --> 00:55:59,535
Powered by their more commercial sound,

778
00:55:59,620 --> 00:56:03,788
Rainbow headlined the first ever
Monsters of Rock festival at Donington.

779
00:56:04,805 --> 00:56:06,278
The critics hated us.

780
00:56:06,917 --> 00:56:10,027
For whatever reason,
we were not a fashionable,

781
00:56:10,117 --> 00:56:12,233
on the front page of Rolling Stones
type of band.

782
00:56:12,325 --> 00:56:15,630
We were... They just hated us.

783
00:56:15,717 --> 00:56:17,354
But the more they hated us,

784
00:56:17,444 --> 00:56:20,804
the more the people kind of went,
"We love them."

785
00:56:21,284 --> 00:56:22,986
The fans may have loved Rainbow,

786
00:56:23,108 --> 00:56:26,665
but Ritchie was now having a problem
with Graham Bannet's hair.

787
00:56:26,789 --> 00:56:30,662
Ritchie was 100% behind me being
in the band,

788
00:56:30,756 --> 00:56:33,321
but 100% against my haircut.

789
00:56:34,117 --> 00:56:36,233
There was a hair situation.

790
00:56:36,324 --> 00:56:40,394
We were known to have Denim people
following us,

791
00:56:40,484 --> 00:56:43,015
and most people were kind of growing
their hair long in those days.

792
00:56:43,204 --> 00:56:45,801
I went to get my hair cut in Sheffield
really short.

793
00:56:45,860 --> 00:56:47,944
I mean, like, spiky and the whole thing.

794
00:56:53,220 --> 00:56:55,914
And I went on stage
and Ritchie hadn't seen me all day,

795
00:56:56,004 --> 00:56:58,349
and there he was playing his guitar,
and the first song comes up

796
00:56:58,436 --> 00:56:59,702
and he turns to me and he goes...

797
00:56:59,748 --> 00:57:01,385
You know, his mouth dropped.

798
00:57:01,476 --> 00:57:03,592
He was singing to the audience
and doing his bit,

799
00:57:03,683 --> 00:57:06,662
and I saw the back of the shaved neck,
you know that.

800
00:57:06,756 --> 00:57:11,622
You know, very cut hair and I went,

801
00:57:11,715 --> 00:57:14,181
"I'm just gonna put my guitar across
his head."

802
00:57:14,276 --> 00:57:15,465
but then I might...

803
00:57:15,555 --> 00:57:17,541
I'll be back in prison again, you know.

804
00:57:17,668 --> 00:57:21,028
I really was, like, so tempted just to
take it off and go whack.

805
00:57:31,875 --> 00:57:34,407
Graham Bonnet and his hair lived to sing
another day.

806
00:57:34,499 --> 00:57:37,859
But he had no luck persuading drummer
Cozy Powell to stay on board.

807
00:57:38,147 --> 00:57:42,250
Powell didn't like the overtly
commercial work the band was now doing.

808
00:57:42,659 --> 00:57:43,751
And he was gone.

809
00:57:43,843 --> 00:57:49,070
And it was a very sad day,
and he left the band and later I did.

810
00:57:49,155 --> 00:57:52,363
That was my last show too,
but I didn't know this at that time.

811
00:57:52,419 --> 00:57:54,089
Graham Bonnet was a great singer

812
00:57:54,179 --> 00:57:57,638
and Down to Earth was a thoroughly
undervalued Rainbow album.

813
00:57:57,699 --> 00:58:00,426
But again, the problem was
that Blackmore saw Bonnet

814
00:58:00,547 --> 00:58:03,690
not quite as having what it took
in terms of personality,

815
00:58:03,779 --> 00:58:06,027
to allow Blackmore to be himself.

816
00:58:06,627 --> 00:58:09,061
Song writing wasn't good,
the way we wanted it to.

817
00:58:09,187 --> 00:58:10,409
It was very slow.

818
00:58:10,499 --> 00:58:14,634
Nothing was happening, we had one song
and that was the song Russ Ballard wrote.

819
00:58:14,723 --> 00:58:16,589
I Surrender, the song was called.

820
00:58:16,707 --> 00:58:17,929
And that's all we had.

821
00:58:18,019 --> 00:58:20,419
And so we... It was...

822
00:58:20,515 --> 00:58:22,948
I left because Ritchie didn't
come to rehearsal sometimes.

823
00:58:35,842 --> 00:58:37,926
Graham left the band in 1980.

824
00:58:38,403 --> 00:58:41,676
Like a month or so later, I thought,
"What have I done?"

825
00:58:41,762 --> 00:58:44,741
I have left something that was great.

826
00:58:44,834 --> 00:58:48,162
It would be nice to see him again
'cause I like him very much.

827
00:58:48,259 --> 00:58:53,486
He was a good friend, and he taught me a lot
about the music I was suddenly pushed into,

828
00:58:53,538 --> 00:58:56,266
which I knew nothing about,
and he was a great teacher.

829
00:58:56,739 --> 00:59:00,044
Ritchie's friend Barry Ambrosio suggested
Joe Lynn Turner

830
00:59:00,098 --> 00:59:02,149
as a replacement for Graham Bonnet.

831
00:59:02,786 --> 00:59:04,586
He said, "Listen to this record."

832
00:59:04,706 --> 00:59:08,994
I said "Look, Barry, I've heard
so many singers, I can! Hear any more."

833
00:59:09,058 --> 00:59:10,477
"I've got to get out of here."

834
00:59:10,562 --> 00:59:14,087
He said, "Just listen to this,"
and he played one track as I was leaving.

835
00:59:14,179 --> 00:59:15,368
And I went,

836
00:59:15,458 --> 00:59:17,858
"Actually, that sounds interesting,
who is this guy?“

837
00:59:17,954 --> 00:59:19,908
And he said, "Guy from New Jersey."

838
00:59:20,066 --> 00:59:22,663
I didn't know that he came to see me.

839
00:59:22,786 --> 00:59:25,863
I later found oui when I got a phone call,

840
00:59:25,955 --> 00:59:29,927
living in Manhattan, lower Manhattan
in the west village,

841
00:59:30,242 --> 00:59:32,742
one-room studio, I think you call it.

842
00:59:32,898 --> 00:59:34,917
And mattress on the floor,

843
00:59:34,978 --> 00:59:36,582
money running out.

844
00:59:36,706 --> 00:59:40,067
And got a phone call from Barry Ambrosio,

845
00:59:40,162 --> 00:59:42,661
and he put Ritchie on the phone,

846
00:59:42,785 --> 00:59:45,383
and of course I... Complete disbelief.

847
00:59:45,506 --> 00:59:48,867
And he said, "No, it's really me."
And I said, "Well, all right."

848
00:59:48,962 --> 00:59:51,210
And they told...
They put their road manager on

849
00:59:51,298 --> 00:59:54,342
and told me the train to take
and to go out to the studio.

850
01:00:20,321 --> 01:00:22,820
I was playing in New Jersey,
and I went to see him.

851
01:00:22,946 --> 01:00:27,081
And I really liked his voice,
very resonant and warm.

852
01:00:27,138 --> 01:00:29,865
He came in with a couple of beers
and said, "You got the job if you want it."

853
01:00:29,985 --> 01:00:32,069
<i>And I said, "Want it? I need it."</i>

854
01:00:32,513 --> 01:00:36,801
And kept me there in the studio
and we just kept being creative,

855
01:00:36,897 --> 01:00:40,203
and Glover and I started
to write more lyrics,

856
01:00:40,257 --> 01:00:44,393
and we finished the album Difficult to
Cure, like, in a couple of weeks, I think,

857
01:00:44,481 --> 01:00:45,867
since my entrance.

858
01:00:46,657 --> 01:00:50,017
Ritchie recorded three Rainbow albums
with Joe Lynn Turner.

859
01:00:51,745 --> 01:00:55,750
I think I wrote, with Joe,

860
01:00:55,840 --> 01:00:58,951
one of my favourite tunes
which is Street of Dreams.

861
01:00:59,041 --> 01:01:03,307
That, to me, was the ultimate Rainbow song.
I love that song.

862
01:01:03,873 --> 01:01:06,787
Come on the jukebox,
I go, "I'm proud of that."

863
01:01:07,201 --> 01:01:09,187
'Cause it was exactly where I wanted to go.

864
01:01:09,313 --> 01:01:11,266
When we heard it,
we knew we had something.

865
01:01:11,360 --> 01:01:15,398
There was just chills up and down our...
We felt it.

866
01:01:15,456 --> 01:01:17,639
We said, "Man, this is deep,
this is something."

867
01:01:35,585 --> 01:01:38,498
And the fact that I could kind of
write something that was poppy

868
01:01:38,625 --> 01:01:40,545
was something new for me.

869
01:01:40,641 --> 01:01:41,929
And I liked that groove.

870
01:01:42,017 --> 01:01:45,989
I just don't want to play, crash,
crash, crash for the sake of it.

871
01:01:46,080 --> 01:01:47,401
I've got to hear a melody.

872
01:01:47,521 --> 01:01:51,940
Melody was always at the bottom of,
for me musically, where I was going.

873
01:02:09,536 --> 01:02:11,522
While Ritchie had been developing Rainbow,

874
01:02:11,616 --> 01:02:16,712
his Deep Purple fans still wanted to see the
classic Mark ll line-up back together again.

875
01:02:18,176 --> 01:02:24,003
1983, I think, the management called me up
and said, "Purple wants to re-form."

876
01:02:24,096 --> 01:02:25,831
I said, "Well, I have to think about it."

877
01:02:25,920 --> 01:02:29,826
Rainbow was just now taking off really big
in America.

878
01:02:29,919 --> 01:02:33,706
And we were really getting somewhere,
we were doing big shows.

879
01:02:33,824 --> 01:02:37,861
I don't know if I want... It's so easy
to just go back to Purple, you know.

880
01:02:38,496 --> 01:02:40,395
I was like...

881
01:02:40,479 --> 01:02:42,181
And Gillan was really up for it.

882
01:02:42,303 --> 01:02:45,544
And I'm like, "Okay, let's try it."

883
01:02:46,272 --> 01:02:51,302
I put up no fuss, no fight, no nothing
like that, so I really felt good about it.

884
01:02:51,392 --> 01:02:53,443
And also at that point in time,

885
01:02:53,535 --> 01:02:56,995
I had a solo album for Elektra Records,

886
01:02:57,055 --> 01:02:58,408
and things were going well for me.

887
01:02:58,495 --> 01:03:01,376
And Ritchie and I promised to get back
together again anyway.

888
01:03:01,471 --> 01:03:05,225
So, I had no compunction about it.
I felt good about it.

889
01:03:05,823 --> 01:03:07,907
Of course there was money entered into it.

890
01:03:07,999 --> 01:03:11,906
And the management is going,
"It's worth X amount..."

891
01:03:12,000 --> 01:03:15,753
I'm like, "Might be an interesting idea.
Okay, I'll try it.“"

892
01:03:16,639 --> 01:03:18,178
Cut a long story short.

893
01:03:18,783 --> 01:03:20,420
So we did it.

894
01:03:20,703 --> 01:03:24,063
You know, we had a good time,
Perfect Strangers is a good record.

895
01:03:24,319 --> 01:03:25,825
And we all had a good time doing it.

896
01:03:26,335 --> 01:03:28,234
It was very comfortable being with them.

897
01:03:44,094 --> 01:03:46,888
Perfect Strangers was a brilliant
comeback album by Purple.

898
01:03:46,974 --> 01:03:49,124
It was a phenomenal performance

899
01:03:49,215 --> 01:03:51,560
because it got Mark ll back together.

900
01:03:51,615 --> 01:03:53,350
They did it in the mid-80's fashion.

901
01:03:53,438 --> 01:03:54,726
They weren't living in the past.

902
01:03:54,814 --> 01:03:57,695
They weren't living in 1971, 72,

903
01:03:57,823 --> 01:04:01,216
they were actually being part of
the modern hard rock world.

904
01:04:02,463 --> 01:04:05,376
I think the relationship at the time
between Gillan and Blackmore,

905
01:04:05,470 --> 01:04:08,995
which is always pointed out
as being the problem, was quite amicable.

906
01:04:09,855 --> 01:04:13,215
The amicable band
toured in support of the album.

907
01:04:13,695 --> 01:04:14,655
They were trying to say

908
01:04:14,751 --> 01:04:16,650
that Bruce Springsteen
was doing the biggest business.

909
01:04:16,734 --> 01:04:20,739
Biggest business was us and Grateful Dead,
then Bruce Springsteen.

910
01:04:21,663 --> 01:04:24,903
I don't know what people see
in Bruce Springsteen whatsoever.

911
01:04:25,022 --> 01:04:26,015
I have never got that.

912
01:04:26,879 --> 01:04:29,825
The ticket sales showed
that the old magic was still there,

913
01:04:29,918 --> 01:04:32,198
but so were the old rivalries with Gillan.

914
01:04:32,350 --> 01:04:37,599
I put it down to he wanted to kind of
maybe steer the band,

915
01:04:37,695 --> 01:04:39,233
and I was steering the band.

916
01:04:39,294 --> 01:04:41,924
So I think it was that more than anything.

917
01:04:42,078 --> 01:04:44,992
Of course it worked, I thought,
Perfect Strangers worked.

918
01:04:45,054 --> 01:04:48,644
Everybody was on form, we played,
it worked.

919
01:04:48,734 --> 01:04:50,917
But, we should have stopped right there.

920
01:04:51,518 --> 01:04:54,824
And then we did...
House of Blue Light, to me, was disastrous.

921
01:05:20,158 --> 01:05:23,617
And the relationship with Ian
was soon back in the disaster zone too.

922
01:05:24,254 --> 01:05:25,824
He had lost his voice completely.

923
01:05:25,917 --> 01:05:27,522
And we are going, "What are we gonna do?"

924
01:05:27,614 --> 01:05:31,520
I was always already disgusted with Ian,
we weren't getting along.

925
01:05:31,613 --> 01:05:34,788
So to me, I was like,
"We gotta get another singer."

926
01:05:34,878 --> 01:05:36,029
"I mean, this is just a joke."

927
01:05:37,054 --> 01:05:41,637
By 1987 Ritchie had played with scores
of musicians and dozens of bands.

928
01:05:41,693 --> 01:05:45,054
A self-confessed wind-up merchant
who thrived on conflict.

929
01:05:45,181 --> 01:05:48,040
The uneasy rider
was about to meet his match.

930
01:05:48,093 --> 01:05:50,494
Appropriately enough,
on the football field.

931
01:05:51,293 --> 01:05:54,337
I used to have my roadie call up
radio stations too.

932
01:05:54,429 --> 01:05:58,336
Deep purple would like to do
a game of soccer against you,

933
01:05:58,461 --> 01:06:00,513
if you feel like playing a charity.

934
01:06:00,573 --> 01:06:03,300
It's kind of my fairy tale Cinderella story

935
01:06:03,421 --> 01:06:07,077
because I was working for this
radio station on Long Island.

936
01:06:07,133 --> 01:06:08,257
I was interning there.

937
01:06:08,349 --> 01:06:11,142
And apparently somebody from Deep Purple
had called up.

938
01:06:11,773 --> 01:06:13,312
So the DJs came out and they played,

939
01:06:13,373 --> 01:06:15,588
and Purple showed up,
it was Ritchie and Roger.

940
01:06:15,677 --> 01:06:18,241
He signed an autograph for me
and he looked up at me and said,

941
01:06:18,333 --> 01:06:21,159
in that very classy English accent
that I'm sure you are familiar with,

942
01:06:21,629 --> 01:06:24,194
"You are very beautiful girl."
And I went, "That's nice."

943
01:06:24,253 --> 01:06:25,759
And that would have been
my Ritchie Blackmore story

944
01:06:25,853 --> 01:06:27,075
that he said I was beautiful.

945
01:06:27,133 --> 01:06:28,704
And that was enough at that point.

946
01:06:28,797 --> 01:06:30,565
And I said, "Thank you",
and I walked off the field.

947
01:06:30,653 --> 01:06:33,697
And he sent his roadies through the crowd
to find out who I was

948
01:06:33,789 --> 01:06:35,688
and to ask me to meet him at a pub later.

949
01:06:36,029 --> 01:06:40,961
Candice Night was a musical New Yorker,
who had been modelling from age 12.

950
01:06:41,053 --> 01:06:42,591
She had her own radio rock show,

951
01:06:42,652 --> 01:06:47,518
and had studied communications
at New York Institute of Technology.

952
01:06:47,612 --> 01:06:51,617
And Ritchie had the most brilliant, proper

953
01:06:51,708 --> 01:06:54,567
upper-class English way
of breaking the ice.

954
01:06:54,653 --> 01:06:57,479
- He was taking off his soccer cleats.
- Oh, right.

955
01:06:57,533 --> 01:07:00,227
And his dirty, mud-filled,
sweaty soccer socks

956
01:07:00,317 --> 01:07:03,459
and he balled one up
and threw it right in my face.

957
01:07:04,956 --> 01:07:06,495
That's the way to get a girl.

958
01:07:06,589 --> 01:07:08,356
And I didn't worry about my nails
after that any more

959
01:07:08,413 --> 01:07:10,148
'cause I thought this is ridiculous,
and we just...

960
01:07:10,236 --> 01:07:11,774
After that, there was really nothing...

961
01:07:11,868 --> 01:07:13,919
That totally relaxed

962
01:07:14,013 --> 01:07:16,544
- the whole entire environment.
- It was a magical smell.

963
01:07:17,116 --> 01:07:20,226
He said to me that
when I walked into the room,

964
01:07:20,316 --> 01:07:22,433
meeting him at that pub that afternoon.

965
01:07:22,492 --> 01:07:27,238
He said, "I felt like, when you walked in
that an old friend had walked into the room."

966
01:07:27,292 --> 01:07:28,711
"Like it felt like home."

967
01:07:28,796 --> 01:07:31,262
Ritchie now had an ally
who put him at ease.

968
01:07:31,356 --> 01:07:35,840
Soon their shared interest in medieval life
and music was to take centre stage.

969
01:07:35,932 --> 01:07:38,813
But first, a replacement had to be found
for Gillan.

970
01:07:38,908 --> 01:07:42,465
Ritchie approached his Rainbow vocalist,
Joe Lynn Turner.

971
01:07:42,620 --> 01:07:45,217
At first, Joe hesitated, I think.

972
01:07:45,308 --> 01:07:48,101
You know, Paice is going well
and he was in Rainbow.

973
01:07:48,220 --> 01:07:50,140
So I was like, "Yeah, well..."

974
01:07:50,236 --> 01:07:51,557
Got any other ideas?

975
01:07:52,379 --> 01:07:55,620
And Jon's like, "Yeah, sounds great."

976
01:07:55,740 --> 01:07:57,955
So we tried him out, it worked,
and then he was in.

977
01:07:58,651 --> 01:08:01,925
He started playing Hey Joe,
I grabbed the mike, started singing it.

978
01:08:02,012 --> 01:08:04,412
Never even said, "Hello" to Jon or Ian
at that point.

979
01:08:04,507 --> 01:08:06,591
Finished the song and then there were
some handshakes.

980
01:08:06,652 --> 01:08:10,012
And Jon started to play this keyboard bit,

981
01:08:10,108 --> 01:08:12,989
which later became on the Purple album
The Cut Runs Deep.

982
01:08:13,051 --> 01:08:15,551
And I started singing the exact lyric

983
01:08:15,612 --> 01:08:18,885
as Ritchie always called it,
I had a magic bag of lyrics.

984
01:08:18,971 --> 01:08:22,561
And I would just pull out a lyric
that suited this and sing a melody,

985
01:08:22,651 --> 01:08:26,492
and it was the exact lyric... There it was.
There's the song.

986
01:08:26,587 --> 01:08:29,381
So Jon and Ian were convinced
that I should be the guy.

987
01:08:50,107 --> 01:08:53,053
But it was to be Joe Lynn's only album
with Deep Purple.

988
01:08:53,147 --> 01:08:55,101
He left the band in 1992.

989
01:08:55,771 --> 01:08:58,499
There was a lot of frustration going on,

990
01:08:58,619 --> 01:09:00,353
lot of unhappiness.

991
01:09:00,507 --> 01:09:05,439
The guys, I believe it was Ian and Jon,
and I say this with all love and respect

992
01:09:05,531 --> 01:09:07,932
felt they needed Ian
Gillan back in the band.

993
01:09:08,027 --> 01:09:12,097
And Ritchie was staunch about me staying
in the band and there was a...

994
01:09:12,187 --> 01:09:17,861
And there just wasn't any way that I could
deal with the emotions that were happening.

995
01:09:17,947 --> 01:09:22,017
So, I think I quit and got fired
at the same time.

996
01:09:22,107 --> 01:09:23,940
Whatever, doesn't really matter.

997
01:09:24,027 --> 01:09:28,261
But, it was nerve-racking and just turmoil

998
01:09:28,347 --> 01:09:30,812
and very stressful.

999
01:09:31,899 --> 01:09:35,042
Meanwhile, Ritchie and Candice
had moved in together.

1000
01:09:35,131 --> 01:09:37,630
- By '91 I had moved in with you.
- Yeah.

1001
01:09:37,690 --> 01:09:40,353
She moved in but I didn't know who she was.

1002
01:09:41,178 --> 01:09:44,059
I just knew that there was a great female
in the house.

1003
01:09:44,154 --> 01:09:45,060
I'm not gonna knock it.

1004
01:09:45,179 --> 01:09:47,394
- I don't know who she is.
- I locked my door every night, I bolted it.

1005
01:09:47,450 --> 01:09:49,534
<i>I was on tour as his girlfriend, yes.</i>

1006
01:09:49,658 --> 01:09:52,353
But at our parties at the house...

1007
01:09:52,411 --> 01:09:55,870
When we have parties at our house,
everybody has to contribute something,

1008
01:09:55,930 --> 01:09:58,462
so if Ritchie is going to bring out
the acoustic guitar and play for people,

1009
01:09:58,554 --> 01:10:00,587
he wants everybody to give
a little bit of themselves.

1010
01:10:00,634 --> 01:10:03,777
So he doesn't care if it's a speech
about the Alamo, right?

1011
01:10:03,866 --> 01:10:08,100
Or tap dance or a song
or something, anything.

1012
01:10:08,187 --> 01:10:12,737
So, when I was at the parties with Ritchie,

1013
01:10:12,826 --> 01:10:14,725
he and I would be doing songs together.

1014
01:10:14,810 --> 01:10:16,959
That's how he first got
me singing with him.

1015
01:10:17,658 --> 01:10:20,539
The first song they wrote together
was a wedding anniversary present

1016
01:10:20,634 --> 01:10:22,467
for Candice's parents.

1017
01:10:23,386 --> 01:10:27,292
This is something that Rainbow
would never have done,

1018
01:10:27,418 --> 01:10:29,338
play a waltz.

1019
01:10:29,786 --> 01:10:31,226
A waltz, go.

1020
01:10:50,745 --> 01:10:51,705
Just follow me.

1021
01:10:51,770 --> 01:10:53,155
With what we didn't see...

1022
01:10:56,890 --> 01:10:58,592
That was very subtle.

1023
01:11:12,346 --> 01:11:14,178
- First song we wrote?
- Be Mine Tonight.

1024
01:11:14,329 --> 01:11:16,031
That's what makes me laugh
when people say,

1025
01:11:16,090 --> 01:11:17,989
"She must have made him do
Renaissance music"

1026
01:11:18,073 --> 01:11:20,190
because you don't make him do anything.

1027
01:11:20,249 --> 01:11:22,595
You never make Ritchie Blackmore
do anything.

1028
01:11:22,649 --> 01:11:27,614
Everything that he... His choice
of direction is solely up to him,

1029
01:11:27,737 --> 01:11:30,978
and I feel like I'm really on a journey
that he has led the way and taken...

1030
01:11:31,098 --> 01:11:33,924
He is the captain of this journey.

1031
01:11:34,009 --> 01:11:35,547
I'll be the co-captain, that's fine.

1032
01:11:36,537 --> 01:11:39,363
Ritchie would make one more album
with Deep Purple.

1033
01:11:39,449 --> 01:11:40,737
With Joe Lynn Turner gone,

1034
01:11:40,825 --> 01:11:44,481
the band put down backing tracks
and looked for a singer.

1035
01:11:44,569 --> 01:11:48,257
The band thinks that we should get Gillan
back, and the record label,

1036
01:11:48,345 --> 01:11:52,862
they sent the tapes of Ian singing,
like, three songs that we had done.

1037
01:11:52,953 --> 01:11:55,452
Three backing tracks
he had put his voice over.

1038
01:11:55,608 --> 01:11:58,336
And I'm like...

1039
01:11:58,457 --> 01:12:01,054
"This is absolutely dreadful."

1040
01:12:01,145 --> 01:12:05,379
"This is rotten to the core,
this is just rubbish."

1041
01:12:05,497 --> 01:12:07,134
That's how bad it was to me.

1042
01:12:07,225 --> 01:12:08,862
It was deadly.

1043
01:12:09,464 --> 01:12:14,876
And then he said, "How much would you take
to work with that?"

1044
01:12:15,768 --> 01:12:18,169
I said, "Well, it really
doesn't come into it."

1045
01:12:19,768 --> 01:12:21,820
The album was made with Gillan on vocals.

1046
01:12:21,913 --> 01:12:26,015
Then the record company wanted the band
to go on tour to promote it.

1047
01:12:26,105 --> 01:12:28,898
It was also the 25th
anniversary of Mark ll.

1048
01:12:29,016 --> 01:12:32,475
Ritchie demanded a vast fee
thinking it would be refused,

1049
01:12:32,568 --> 01:12:34,587
but his strategy backfired.

1050
01:12:35,609 --> 01:12:40,257
I went, "You know what? I'll take X
amount", which was over the top.

1051
01:12:40,825 --> 01:12:44,830
Just to get them off my back
so I could look for another singer.

1052
01:12:44,888 --> 01:12:47,867
<i>And they came back with BMG,</i>

1053
01:12:47,928 --> 01:12:50,907
"Okay, they'll pay you that
if you work with Gillan."

1054
01:12:50,968 --> 01:12:54,329
And I went, "Now I'm caught."

1055
01:13:19,127 --> 01:13:22,488
Of course I got halfway through the tour and
I was like, "I can't take this any more."

1056
01:13:22,648 --> 01:13:28,573
I'm selling my soul here, this is awful.
This is dreadful, certainly, you know.

1057
01:13:30,488 --> 01:13:35,234
Ian and I had a showdown with spaghetti,
and it was in Cleveland.

1058
01:13:36,055 --> 01:13:39,416
Jim picked up my food from catering,

1059
01:13:39,543 --> 01:13:42,457
and Ian had gone, "Who is that for?"

1060
01:13:42,552 --> 01:13:44,189
And Jim goes, "It's Ritchie's food."

1061
01:13:44,247 --> 01:13:49,212
He says, "Let me add some ketchup to it."
And, of course, he put ketchup all over it.

1062
01:13:49,303 --> 01:13:53,919
And I went up to him and I said,
"Did you do this to my food?"

1063
01:13:54,007 --> 01:13:56,320
And he went, "Yeah."

1064
01:13:56,408 --> 01:13:58,786
And with that, I saw Jon Lord go...

1065
01:14:00,215 --> 01:14:04,732
And they all parted,
it was like a high noon, you know.

1066
01:14:04,823 --> 01:14:06,591
I went, "Really?"

1067
01:14:07,895 --> 01:14:10,110
And then I got it and
went, right in his face.

1068
01:14:13,847 --> 01:14:15,352
Well, battle rages on,

1069
01:14:15,447 --> 01:14:17,466
this was the first time we played
in Czechoslovakia,

1070
01:14:17,527 --> 01:14:21,466
and he asked me to sing the...

1071
01:14:21,527 --> 01:14:24,800
Just like a vocal part just...
Like background...

1072
01:14:24,887 --> 01:14:27,833
Candice was singing off stage
and out of sight,

1073
01:14:27,927 --> 01:14:30,459
which confused some local reviewers.

1074
01:14:30,775 --> 01:14:34,102
There was a Czechoslovakian paper
who had written the review and said that,

1075
01:14:34,167 --> 01:14:38,815
"Jon Lord must have sampled
a female vocal into his keyboards"

1076
01:14:38,903 --> 01:14:41,631
"because they could
clearly hear some girl singing."

1077
01:14:49,591 --> 01:14:54,905
I knew if I went to the manager and I said,
"I want to leave Bruce Payne management."

1078
01:14:55,351 --> 01:14:58,810
That would go no further
and I'd be back at square one.

1079
01:14:58,903 --> 01:15:03,103
So I thought, "I'm gonna have to write a
letter to the band to explain how I feel",

1080
01:15:03,191 --> 01:15:04,696
"and I've got to leave,"

1081
01:15:04,790 --> 01:15:06,973
"and I'll not be going to Japan with them."

1082
01:15:22,422 --> 01:15:25,979
Ritchie played his last concert
with Deep Purple in Helsinki

1083
01:15:26,070 --> 01:15:28,569
on 17th November, 1993.

1084
01:15:30,806 --> 01:15:33,850
So we went back to the hotel,

1085
01:15:33,942 --> 01:15:36,637
and we proceeded to say goodbyes.

1086
01:15:36,726 --> 01:15:39,607
I think I said goodbye to Ian Paice,
that was it.

1087
01:15:39,702 --> 01:15:41,535
Everybody else just ran away.

1088
01:15:42,006 --> 01:15:45,334
Paice came up to me and said,
"Make some good decisions"

1089
01:15:45,430 --> 01:15:48,409
- and left, and Candice was with me.
- That's right.

1090
01:15:48,502 --> 01:15:50,815
And I think Jon was too embarrassed
to say anything.

1091
01:15:50,934 --> 01:15:52,430
- Jon went right up to his room.
- Yeah.

1092
01:15:54,870 --> 01:15:56,256
It was such a relief.

1093
01:15:57,974 --> 01:16:01,531
Ritchie reformed Rainbow,
now with Dougie White on vocals

1094
01:16:01,654 --> 01:16:04,960
and made one final album with them too,
Stranger in Us All.

1095
01:16:21,333 --> 01:16:24,247
I think Rainbow probably gave him
a little bit more freedom in that regard,

1096
01:16:24,342 --> 01:16:28,412
and then the album I did certainly did
give him more freedom.

1097
01:16:28,853 --> 01:16:31,068
This freedom also enabled Ritchie
and Candice

1098
01:16:31,125 --> 01:16:33,111
to develop their writing partnership,

1099
01:16:33,205 --> 01:16:36,827
and the album included one of
the first songs they wrote together, Ariel.

1100
01:16:54,645 --> 01:16:58,104
The Blackmore side thing kind of happened
when we were doing the last Rainbow record.

1101
01:16:58,613 --> 01:17:01,835
We would kind of get together as a son of
a jam night thing at the end of the evening

1102
01:17:01,909 --> 01:17:04,670
when we were recording at
Long View Farm in Massachusetts.

1103
01:17:04,725 --> 01:17:08,566
And we would just kind of sit around
the fire and they were just gonna jam,

1104
01:17:08,693 --> 01:17:12,828
and they would do stuff, Renaissance stuff
like Greensleeves, that sort of thing.

1105
01:17:13,141 --> 01:17:14,941
When I was 10,

1106
01:17:15,028 --> 01:17:19,295
there was this kid singing Greensleeves,
and I was really taken by that mode.

1107
01:17:22,325 --> 01:17:26,263
Just, it was very reminiscent
of another time,

1108
01:17:26,325 --> 01:17:27,765
almost spiritual, I thought.

1109
01:17:41,845 --> 01:17:46,297
And it just seemed to
go straight to my soul.

1110
01:17:46,389 --> 01:17:47,415
And I have always been that way.

1111
01:17:47,509 --> 01:17:50,138
If I hear medieval music,
I'll immediately come alive.

1112
01:17:53,428 --> 01:17:55,774
Ritchie and Candice
formed Blackmore's Night

1113
01:17:55,860 --> 01:17:59,581
and made their first album
Shadow of the Moon in 1997.

1114
01:18:00,628 --> 01:18:05,790
His escape from the stress and pressures
of that rock and roll world

1115
01:18:05,844 --> 01:18:09,205
wound up being just to sit
and just open up on acoustic.

1116
01:18:09,332 --> 01:18:12,726
And just really look into the fire place
and just go someplace else.

1117
01:18:12,852 --> 01:18:16,638
And that's where I think the beginning of
our project happened, really.

1118
01:18:32,980 --> 01:18:35,926
He often says that if you listen to
Smoke on the Water,

1119
01:18:36,020 --> 01:18:39,709
you'll hear medieval fourths and fifths,
the modal scales of that era.

1120
01:18:39,763 --> 01:18:42,622
So that was going back to 1971,
so that was in him there as well,

1121
01:18:42,708 --> 01:18:45,654
and then of course, fast-forward to Rainbow
and you've got

1122
01:18:45,748 --> 01:18:48,574
everything from Temple of The King,
16th Century Greensleeves.

1123
01:18:48,692 --> 01:18:52,052
So it's a lot of medieval flare
in a lot of those songs.

1124
01:19:12,723 --> 01:19:16,510
And we are still scratching the surface,
it's like,

1125
01:19:16,563 --> 01:19:19,739
I still feel there's so far to go with it.

1126
01:19:19,827 --> 01:19:22,871
Whereas with the others I felt
we were at the end.

1127
01:19:23,187 --> 01:19:25,304
One of the best compliments I had was,

1128
01:19:25,363 --> 01:19:29,269
"I hate medieval and Renaissance music,
but I love your music."

1129
01:19:29,587 --> 01:19:34,781
And I went, "That's a big compliment,
much more than you think."

1130
01:19:49,971 --> 01:19:55,547
With our show, it's more the audience is
part of us, we are there to entertain them.

1131
01:19:55,602 --> 01:19:58,330
We are not there to show off
and wiggle our hips.

1132
01:19:59,123 --> 01:20:01,655
Since that first album in 1997,

1133
01:20:01,747 --> 01:20:04,409
Ritchie and Candice
have made another nine together.

1134
01:20:13,203 --> 01:20:15,221
When Ritchie plunged into medieval music,

1135
01:20:15,283 --> 01:20:19,549
it wasn't so much as a surprise
as a natural course of events.

1136
01:20:39,443 --> 01:20:43,513
I also feel that urge because somehow
when you've done all the big heavy stuff,

1137
01:20:43,602 --> 01:20:46,232
it's always attractive but you want to
explore the other side.

1138
01:20:46,610 --> 01:20:52,318
The minstrels, the peasant,
kind of walking from town to town,

1139
01:20:52,402 --> 01:20:56,472
just telling the news from the last town,
bit of gossip,

1140
01:20:56,562 --> 01:20:59,127
plays a few tunes, that's what I relate to.

1141
01:20:59,890 --> 01:21:04,025
That doesn't mean that some of the songs
don't still include modern rock influences.

1142
01:21:18,865 --> 01:21:20,633
It's like me, I love what I do.

1143
01:21:20,722 --> 01:21:23,995
I truly love what I do, and I can hear
that Ritchie loves what he does,

1144
01:21:24,082 --> 01:21:25,336
and I salute him for it.

1145
01:21:40,690 --> 01:21:46,331
True musicians, people who don't
have a choice, you know,

1146
01:21:46,417 --> 01:21:49,527
they just love music
and that's the path they follow.

1147
01:21:50,065 --> 01:21:53,525
If he wants to switch into something else,

1148
01:21:53,649 --> 01:21:56,955
that's because his inner musical
inspiration pulls him there,

1149
01:21:57,041 --> 01:22:01,276
and true musicians are
almost slaves to that.

1150
01:22:01,969 --> 01:22:04,020
The music may be historically inspired,

1151
01:22:04,082 --> 01:22:09,112
but Ritchie's electric guitar virtuosity is still
very much a part of their medieval journey.

1152
01:22:29,361 --> 01:22:32,634
He sees himself, I think,
as the quiet musketeer.

1153
01:22:32,721 --> 01:22:35,929
His rather romantic sort of
heroic dashing figure.

1154
01:22:36,017 --> 01:22:37,971
I never feel like we are
done, we're just like...

1155
01:22:38,065 --> 01:22:39,254
We are still learning so much about

1156
01:22:39,345 --> 01:22:41,494
the instruments and the songs
and ourselves, really'

1157
01:22:57,489 --> 01:22:59,289
It takes me back to another life.

1158
01:22:59,409 --> 01:23:03,828
It might be a past life, reincarnation.

1159
01:23:03,920 --> 01:23:07,859
I just love to be in the 1500's,
without getting the plague,

1160
01:23:07,920 --> 01:23:10,964
and having central heating
and a satellite dish.

1161
01:23:11,056 --> 01:23:15,224
Whereas if I hear rock and roll,
I've heard it all before, Christ.

1162
01:23:15,280 --> 01:23:19,448
It all ended about 30 years ago,
everybody now is so generic.

1163
01:23:20,496 --> 01:23:23,824
How long can you keep flogging something?

1164
01:23:24,688 --> 01:23:27,831
It's nearly 50 years since
the young school boy from Heston

1165
01:23:27,920 --> 01:23:30,386
decided to show his teachers
they were wrong about him,

1166
01:23:30,481 --> 01:23:32,630
by achieving true excellence on the guitar.

1167
01:23:32,720 --> 01:23:35,066
And to make good on the faith
his parents had shown in him

1168
01:23:35,120 --> 01:23:37,750
by putting the music first.

1169
01:23:37,840 --> 01:23:39,281
Of all the great guitar players,

1170
01:23:39,408 --> 01:23:41,973
he was the one that people
knew least about, I think,

1171
01:23:42,064 --> 01:23:43,417
and that was partly his own doing.

1172
01:23:43,504 --> 01:23:47,258
His confidence was overwhelming.

1173
01:23:47,344 --> 01:23:48,697
<i>It was frightening.</i>

1174
01:23:48,784 --> 01:23:50,289
Inspiring and frightening.

1175
01:23:50,608 --> 01:23:55,922
I think Ritchie will be remembered as
somebody wild and untamed

1176
01:23:56,016 --> 01:23:57,042
to the end of his days.

1177
01:23:57,168 --> 01:23:59,568
And I think that's a
magnificent thing to be.

1178
01:23:59,696 --> 01:24:02,320
I can buy a Strat, you
can buy a Strat, right?

1179
01:24:02,345 --> 01:24:04,914
We can get a Marshall,
he can get a Marshall.

1180
01:24:04,976 --> 01:24:07,703
But, none of us ever wind up
sounding like Ritchie.

1181
01:24:08,048 --> 01:24:12,664
A high degree of being completely
in the moment, impulsive,

1182
01:24:12,720 --> 01:24:16,409
and just being kind of true to himself

1183
01:24:16,527 --> 01:24:20,947
and true to what his perception of
that moment was in a live situation.

1184
01:24:21,040 --> 01:24:23,440
He is not an extrovert,
he is very much an introvert.

1185
01:24:23,568 --> 01:24:26,873
And when you have somebody like that,
they create brilliantly,

1186
01:24:26,960 --> 01:24:31,030
but there is also a lot of depth that
they are always constantly dealing with.

1187
01:24:31,216 --> 01:24:35,450
There is nothing better than just sitting
with the guitar and emoting.

1188
01:24:35,567 --> 01:24:37,302
I can be in Hawaii,

1189
01:24:37,359 --> 01:24:40,371
and everybody is on water skis and things.

1190
01:24:40,463 --> 01:24:43,190
I'm watching the dolphins,
but I'm in my room just looking out,

1191
01:24:43,280 --> 01:24:46,553
looking at the horizons, gotta be playing.

1192
01:24:46,639 --> 01:24:50,447
And that's my friend that
I'm kind of emoting with.

1193
01:24:50,959 --> 01:24:54,287
My gut feeling is that Ritchie is probably
at his best when he

1194
01:24:54,383 --> 01:25:00,243
tends to actually live
out the rather quiet,

1195
01:25:00,335 --> 01:25:06,063
withdrawn, artistic and thoughtful person
that I think really

1196
01:25:06,159 --> 01:25:07,927
is what he is ultimately about.

1197
01:25:08,015 --> 01:25:09,968
When people get things all in perspective,

1198
01:25:10,063 --> 01:25:14,744
Ritchie will be right there as one of the
cornerstones of what rock and roll is today.

1199
01:25:14,799 --> 01:25:17,680
There's a long list of rock guitar players

1200
01:25:17,775 --> 01:25:19,924
that wouldn't exist
without Ritchie Blackmore.

1201
01:25:20,335 --> 01:25:25,135
There are people who enter this band thing
for lots of different reasons,

1202
01:25:25,199 --> 01:25:28,309
for money, for fame and for the chicks.

1203
01:25:28,399 --> 01:25:32,633
It seems to me Ritchie Blackmore
entered into this for the music.

1204
01:25:33,455 --> 01:25:38,223
And for the two people who encouraged him
to take guitar lessons in the first place,

1205
01:25:38,318 --> 01:25:41,297
his mother and especially his father.

1206
01:25:41,902 --> 01:25:45,427
He came to the Albert Hall
when we did the orchestra thing,

1207
01:25:45,519 --> 01:25:48,824
Deep Purple and the
orchestra, he loved that.

1208
01:25:48,878 --> 01:25:53,363
I think then he suddenly realised,
"I think my son's doing something, yeah."

1209
01:25:53,455 --> 01:25:56,815
5,000 people and there's an orchestra.

1210
01:25:58,319 --> 01:26:01,014
If that childhood photograph
was taken today,

1211
01:26:01,102 --> 01:26:03,285
they'd probably all be smiling.