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

in 1945, when Ritchie Blackmore was born.

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

but to explore a number of musical forms including Bach,

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

Ritchie was interested in the guitar from an early age

but his father insisted he took proper lessons.

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

He said to me at the time,

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

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

And I'd often fall off my bike.

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

adulation and speculation.

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

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

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

way, way ahead.

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

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

And this is before Hendrix.

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

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

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

that's how they are supposed to behave.

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

and shine the light on himself.

Which is why I'm happy to be here.

He needs the light right on him,

because unlike many people he actually deserves it.

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

that weighs a real lot, you know.

His precision when he plays was stunning.

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

To me he was like the Caucasian Hendrix.

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

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

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

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

After that I was dazed,

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

He is measured, he is thoughtful.

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

It's not all about...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That seemed to go back to when I was five.

I've seen pictures of me at five,

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

And I'm going, "No",

and I felt resentment to the cameraman.

Why do you need...

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

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

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

There's something in there psychologically.

Why was I so uptight at the age of five?

But before he was in his teens,

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

I was such a poor pupil

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I always wanted the teachers to say that.

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

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

And later with Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis

until the gigs dried up in 1968.

I was working in a dry cleaners,

I had about sixteen telegrams from Chris Curtis,

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

And he really liked my playing,

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

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

Okay, who's playing first guitar?

"I am", Chris Curtis.

Okay, good.

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

He said, "I'm playing drums."

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it was mutual.

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

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

And so we just needed a singer.

They took on Rod Evans as vocalist.

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

All they needed now was a name.

Jon put in Orpheus.

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

Just 'cause of the song Deep Purple,

my grandmother used to play it on the piano.

And they seemed to like that.

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

Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple.

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

and launched the career of Ritchie Blackmore.

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

Which was the in thing to do at the time.

Proverbial cottage, we were practising.

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

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

We did it in two days. The whole thing.

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

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

when Ritchie Blackmore's guitar performances

were different to anything else.

They weren't a copy of Hendrix.

Even though you could hear little bits of notations

that maybe led towards Hendrix.

They weren't a copy of anybody else.

They were influenced by, yet taking its own direction.

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

Some tracks also had a distinctly pop feel.

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

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

Back in England, Ritchie heard Robert Plant singing.

There was a place called Mothers in Birmingham,

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

He had the range, the voice and the look.

That's when I decided we have to get someone

who can belt it out and project.

That when we got Ian Gillan.

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

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

So we have someone who looks like Jim Morrison

and who can scream like Arthur Brown and Edgar Winter.

That scream was his identity.

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

And out went Evans and Simper.

Ritchie was now lead guitar

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

It became, I suppose,

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

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

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

Ritchie Blackmore was something incredible.

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

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

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

But they can't be Ritchie Blackmore.

He plays right on the money

and leaves enough space to allow the music to breathe

and the listener to become enveloped in

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

I went through a period of shredding

and thinking that everything revolved around speed.

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

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

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

Am I not great?

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

which will cover a lot more ground.

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

this is about drawing people into your dark mysterious web.

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

his co-founder Jon Lord had other ambitions.

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

and it was a big challenging venture.

The band Nice had previously recorded with orchestras

and had classical aspirations.

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

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

a way that would work effectively.

And they tried it out at the Royal Albert Hall.

And it was a big success, a big challenge.

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

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

He's sort of itching to break out somewhere.

He has this edge to him,

which is indefinable and not quite tameable.

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

The two after that

were lacking in direction.

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

'cause we were on the road all the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We had Zeppelin starting Black Sabbath.

Everybody was hitting with hard rock.

Gave me an idea to play the hard rock stuff.

I was going through kind of a angry, uptight,

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

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

The wishy-washy orchestra versus hard rock debate

was resolved when the band wrote and recorded Black Night.

And it went to number two in the UK charts.

We were in the studio doing Deep Purple in Rock

and the management came in.

Amazing, you know, these people that go,

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

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

And I started playing.

I just started playing.

Okay, let's have a verse.

Put a verse in there.

And we did that very quickly.

Very quickly.

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

or number two, number one.

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

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

And that is based on...

Ricky Nelson put out a tune called Summertime in 1958.

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

"...and the living is easy."

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

Right? Adds that.

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

"Hey Joe..."

As soon as I heard Hendrix play that intro,

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

The band were on a roll.

And in 1970, their fourth album Deep Purple in Rock

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

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

because the previous three,

lthoughL "We don't know where we're going.

"We're dilly-dallying, we're going all over the place."

Ballads, a bit of blues, folk, it was like mishmash.

People like to get a record and put it on,

and go, "I can leave that on and it's party time."

The Deep Purple in Rock, of course, was the definitive album,

I think, for Deep Purple.

It was the era of Black Sabbath, of course, and Led Zeppelin.

Soto see Deep Purple really focusing,

get down to it on their rock album

that really convinced the vast mass of their fans.

And really for the first time Deep Purple became among the top three British bands.

I think what really inspired me more than anything else was the In Rock album.

But it was the fire and it was the passion that really spoke.

That was the bit I wanted to bottle and keep.

When you hear Speed King,

you're looking at, really, proto thrash, proto metal.

This was so influential in what came later in metal terms,

and was really Blackmore delivering a dynamic riff

on which Gillan held his vocals and which Lord played off with keyboard.

And Child in Time is just phenomenal, it's a remarkable piece of epic music.

It's a story. It's almost biblical in the way it reaches out and envelops you.

This was a classical piece of music.

This was a performance by a band on an orchestral level.

With the pressure on to follow up the success of Deep Purple in Rock,

Ritchie and the band once again

locked themselves away from the world to write.

We rented this old dilapidated house down in Devon.

And everybody had their bedroom.

And mine was full of flies, and it was a dreadful place,

but it had a good vibe to it or two.

We were into doing lots of séances at the time.

And I always felt that to do a séance, the best thing was to have a cross.

It was in the early days when I kind of believed in that,

and that was kind of a... As a form of protection.

Of course I didn't have a cross on me.

And I went up to Jon Lord's wife and said,

"Do you have cross I could borrow?" She said, "I'm Jewish."

That didn't go down too well.

So I went, "Roger! Roger will have a cross."

And I went to his bedroom outside, he'd gone to sleep.

"Roger?" "What?"

"Do you have a cross?" "Yeah."

"I need the cross, we're doing a seance."

"No, leave me alone."

So, I got this axe,

so I went crash crash at the door

and made a hole, and I'm axing the door down.

I pulled it and I got through the hole and went over to him.

"I want your cross." "Go on, get off, get off."

Roger is a very gentle man.

Violence doesn't often occur to him as a means to anything.

It was very un-Roger like,

what followed, Roger chasing Ritchie around the house with said axe.

You know, I said, "Roger, wow."

So that was a lot of fun.

In 1971 they released a new single, Strange Kind of Woman

and a follow-up to their landmark Deep Purple in Rock, the album Fireball.

It was great because,

all of a sudden, starving for a few years before that,

and we were suddenly in vogue

and everybody had Deep Purple in Rock until we replaced it with Fireball.

Fireball was put together too quickly,

for my liking, we didn't have the ideas.

Fireball to me was artificial, contrived.

Despite Ritchie's misgivings,

Fireball reached number one on the UK charts,

and the band set to work on what would be their third album,

Machine Head.

Machine Head, I have great memories of, we did that in the Swiss Alps,

and that was fantastic.

And we did it in three weeks and the ideas were just flowing.

I had written a few things in my time off, so I had those,

like Highway Star.

I had written the solo basically at home, worked it out,

which I had never done before.

It was always on the fly, you know, just jamming.

But, so we had a lot of constructive ideas.

Roger Glover had written Maybe I'm a Leo, which I thought was a great tune.

They were due to record in the casino,

which was then the main concert venue in Montreux.

But the evening before they were due to start,

a fire ignited during a Frank Zappa concert, burning it to the ground.

Festival organiser Claude Nobs came to their rescue.

Claude with enormous selflessness said,

"Don't worry, I'll help you to find somewhere else to record."

Where? Anyway.

So, there was this amazing Victorian glass-walled pavilion

in some gardens, some lovely lakeside gardens.

And with enormous disregard for anyone who might live within 10 or 12 miles of it,

we set up in there, you know.

And it was a very ill-chosen place,

but it was a stopgap.

The recording session was back on track.

Ritchie was astonishingly prolific with guitar riffs.

Profligate almost, you know?

They would just tumble out of him.

And that was heaven, absolute heaven for a band,

because here was a guitarist who just would never tread, it seemed, the same road twice.

And it was the fire that had destroyed their original recording venue

that was to inspire the song that contains one of rock's greatest riffs.

When we got back to the hotel, there was a...

We looked out of the window, I think we all had stiff brandies or something.

We looked out of the window and you could actually see the smoke

from the casino coming across the lake.

This big, billowing cloud coming across the lake,

hence the title Smoke on the Water, the boys came up with that.

The first time I heard Smoke on the Water, of course, from Machine Head,

it was one of those riffs that hit you right away.

It's a bit like Sunshine of Your Love by Cream,

or Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin.

It was just... I don't know where guitarists find these riffs from, actually.

When we did Smoke on the Water,

it was just Ian and myself, Paice and myself.

I said, "What rhythm haven't we played?" and he went...

He laid that down, so I just went...

That's where we were and the next minute,

the police were knocking at the door 'cause we were making so much racket.

And we knew it was the police,

so we said, "Let's go for a take before they throw us out of here."

Every guitar player dreams of doing with its creators.

Every kid who ever picked up a guitar can do...

Funny thing is, they all do it different.

That's the nice thing, and I found that I had it in my head how to play it,

and it was completely different to the way Ritchie plays it.

Somebody said that music

is many different colours and one of those colours is silence, simplicity.

The quiet parts, the easy parts, the parts you can immediately grasp on to

and wonder why you didn't write it yourself.

That's genius. That's a genius riff. Wish I'd wrote it.

The second record that I ever bought in my life was Machine Head.

What an album. Oh, my God!

To have a record like that and to have a guitar player like Ritchie

in your radar and your field, it was just the greatest.

You just think, "What would my life have been like without that?"

It's the way Ritchie plays the riff. It's not the way that

two generations of kids have played it in the guitar shop and driven people mad,

to the point where in some shops in London

it says, "if you are trying out a guitar please don't play Smoke on the Water."

The first guitar, that guitar, right over there.

You see the Strat with the maple body,

that was my first real guitar.

And I got it because of the poster on my wall in my bedroom of Ritchie playing.

It was that guitar.

And that's what I wanted. I wanted the Ritchie Blackmore Strat.

Ritchie's solo on Machine Head's Highway Star

was also set to become a Deep Purple statement.

Highway Star is... That's crazy. That's just a crazy song for a guitar player.

It makes everyone who thinks they are a guitar player need to pick up their guitar

and see, "Well, if I'm that good, can I do that?"

Highway Star solo was one of the first things I could get my head around.

Even when I was like 16 or 17,

it wasn't the standard notes you'd use. It wasn't just the blues scale.

It was classically... There was classical stuff coming in there and with this aggression.

Ritchie was really looking to expand on his solos

and wanted a particular sequence,

which is actually almost a classical sequence.

It's probably the defining moment

for Ritchie's soloing, Highway Star to me. It's the most recognisable solo.

I like solos where you know them,

solos where it's just a... Nothing.

So I think Highway Star was just stunning for that effect.

I always thought American players always go right to the edge of the cliff and fall off

and wave as they are going down.

But the British players seem to take that one half a step back from the cliff

and so it's together right till the end of the song,

but it's still extremely thrilling.

And funny thing about that song is that,

having played it, you can get carried away with the emotion of the song,

the intensity of it,

of what you're doing, and it ruins it in a way.

And that's part of Ritchie's charm for me is his restraint at the right moments,

and it creates a lot of drama in his parts.

It was a game changer,

I thought Machine Head was a game changer myself.

Machine Head reached number seven and went double platinum in the USA

and gold at number one in the UK.

But Ritchie's desire to control events was now leading to clashes

with vocalist Ian Gillan.

He was, as they say, an alpha guy. So was I.

He wanted to control, I wanted to control, so we butted heads because of that.

We still respected each other, but we never got on.

And we just couldn't be in the same room.

That was the problem.

I wasn't speaking to him, he wasn't speaking to me.

We weren't being creative.

The band then toured Japan

which produced their hugely successful 1972 live album, Made in Japan.

Things were coming to a head with Ian Gillan.

I think it started with coming back on the Japanese flight.

Paul Rodgers, you know, to me was just mind-blowing, his voice.

I wanted Ian to be able to do that,

and I couldn't relate to Ian's screaming and yelling

and the Elvis Presley impersonation.

He said, "So, how do you want me to sing? I'll sing any way you want me to sing".

And I went, "lan, you can't sing that way, that's a blues thing", you know?

I think after that, that turned him off.

He was rejected, so we went downhill from there.

The aptly titled Who Do We Think We Are

was to be the final album before Ian Gillan and Roger Glover left the band.

I think Ritchie Blackmore spent a lot of his career looking for the perfect line-up.

And when he found it, he still wasn't happy with it.

We started looking for other people,

we found Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale.

I'd left art college,

and I was working in a boutique in Redcar in the north of England.

And I read in the Melody Maker that...

it was a picture of Jon at his organ, very Monty Python,

saying, "Deep Purple still haven't found a singer and are considering unknowns."

Which was basically a little ding moment.

Paice played me this tape, he said,

"What do you think of this singer?" And it was David Coverdale.

And Jon would go, "What's wrong with him?"

And I'd go, "You can't have him after Gillan."

Gillan was this God with the women,

and we've got to have someone that can

fire up the female interest there.

And they said, "No, we disagree."

The girls in the office think he is cute.

I'm going, "Cute? Okay."

Then we did Mistreated, which is a bluesy thing, and we had that voice,

Paul Rodgers kind of overturned to it.

And Burn itself, the song worked,

I felt we had some good songs there.

And, of course, Glenn was very effervescent.

He had a great funky way of playing the bass.

He was a very rhythmic bass player.

'Cause before that we had more of a...

Glenn was more...

There would be this rhythmic...

He was very good with his rhythmic syncopation.

You know, it bears noting that, for me, Ritchie Blackmore,

unlike many guitar players,

never lost his edge, if it were.

Burn is every bit as important as Space Truckin'

and some of the later stuff.

You can actually hear a guitar player at the top of his game.

Ritchie is convinced that the clock in his bar is haunted

and chimes whenever it is happy.

Very haPPY-

- It doesn't do it at a set time or anything? -No.

- It does it just... -No, only when it's happy.

It will stay off for months.

It's haunted, it was given to me by a friend.

Ritchie's lifelong interest in haunting and practical jokes

was something else newcomer Coverdale had to get used to.

Some of them were very close to the knuckle.

We were at Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire, Forest of Dean.

A guy called Tony Ashton was coming down from London for the weekend, for the hang.

So Ritchie and I had the crew empty the guest bedroom

of all the furniture and took up the carpets, took up the floor boards,

and put a huge speaker, I mean, a really big Marshall speaker

underneath the bed.

Put the boards back in, put the carpets back over,

everything just looking normal.

Fed the wires down to another room down the way,

and sat up and waited for Tony Ashton to come back from the pub.

And as we hear the steps coming down the corridor

and Tony's door close.

So we give him time to bathroom and whatever and get into bed.

And then we turn the speaker, the microphone on, and I went up,

started scratching against a board, which you can imagine, this is under a bed,

and saying, "Let me out."

Well...

We heard the most unearthly scream and...

Which, you know, and panicking footsteps running down the corridor.

It certainly wasn't a guy's voice.

Tony was still at the pub,

this was a guest of the family who owned the castle,

who'd actuallyjust come back from Bristol after seeing The Exorcist movie.

So, and was last seen heading into the deep, dark forest.

He has no boundaries when it comes to his pranks, his japes.

This is Ontario, 40 miles east of Los Angeles.

The only sound you'll hear today are the railway track to the south

and the highway to the north.

But the 40,000 plus people who gathered here for the 1974 Cal Jam festival

were about to witness Ritchie at his most theatrical.

Cal Jam, it was pretty romantic when it happened, I'll tell you, it was.

I remember a beautiful southern California day.

I'd come from driving a little transit van's local gigs

into flying in a customised, private 707, 727.

The star ship, which is how we flew into that environment.

It was breath-taking to me.

There must have been 350,000 people there.

I think 100,000 burned the fence down.

Then it was probably 350,000.

When we look at the visual images from above,

you cannot imagine what it's like to walk onto a stage and you can't see...

You can see the skyline, but in the skyline there is people.

It really was stunning.

There was a whole host, the Emerson, Lake & Palmer

and Black Sabbath, Earth, Wind & Fire, Seals and Crofts,

Black Oak Arkansas and Rare Earth. I think that was the bill.

And we were offered the headline slot.

John Coletta, the management, called me up six months before that festival

and said, "They want you to do California Jam."

I said, "No, thanks. I'm not interested in any more festivals."

They are a nightmare, they always will be,

there is always complete catastrophe backstage.

Nothing ever goes right, you're always on late or early.

The billing is all wrong, it's just awful.

I said, "You know what, I might do it,

"but we have to write down all these conditions,

"because I'm tired of doing festivals."

We're gonna go on at dusk, which is 9:00, around there.

And I said, "We'll be the first band with lights, 'cause that's important."

It's a subliminal thing, people see lights,

and they go, "I really like this band compared to the rest of them."

It's only 'cause they've got lights going on,

and it's a psychological thing that I've noticed, so I insisted on that.

And they said, "Absolutely no problem."

In the event, the organisers demanded the band go on when it was still light.

But Ritchie stuck to his guns.

People were yelling and screaming and threatening this and threatening that,

and I just get the door bolted, and I'd have a few drinks playing the guitar.

I was not gonna go on.

Finally when it was dark, Ritchie, the musician, went on stage.

You look fucking great from here. Really good.

And they were terrific on stage, they were absolutely terrific.

Ritchie is a spectacularly visual guitarist, he was.

He ran around, put his back to the audience, threw his guitar around,

and of course, he did a bit of a Townshend sometimes,

and smashed the guitar at the end.

Of all the guys in Deep Purple, it was Ritchie who was the most quixotic

and mischievous.

And the quixotic and mischievous Ritchie was also on stage that night.

He's had enough, you know, he's playing away and you can hear,

he said he could hear this guy going, "Limey, get back in there, so I can..."

You know, and all this kind of stuff,

and he killed the camera, it was brilliant showmanship.

Probably among the definitive moments of his kind of sense of spectacle

and wanting to kind of turn it up to another notch or whatever.

And Ritchie had plans for notching things up even further.

So, I went to my roadie and said,

"What I'm gonna do is blow up the amplifiers."

I said, "What I want you to do is cover the amplifiers in petrol.

"I'll go across one side of the stage. You douse my Marshalls,

"dummy Marshalls, with petrol."

Ronnie Quinton, his beloved guitar tech, who is no longer with us,

loaded way too much gun powder into Ritchie's stuff,

so when that... it blew Paice's glasses off. I thought I was gonna die.

Exploded and, like, blew a hole in the stage,

Paice's glasses got blown off, he was like... He can't see anything.

It made some cameraman temporarily deaf.

But, it looked great.

Everybody was up and happy. Deep Purple just killed, I mean, they killed.

Because this was still a bit of a transition into heavy metal, still kinda new.

They really came through, let me tell you. They were good.

I was a total novice outside of the remarkable

schooling of working men's clubs and it's just a walk in the park, you know,

after you've played Wingate Constitutional Club.

Yeah, he did a great job, he pulled it off.

And we had a helicopter,

we were bundled into the helicopter and flown out.

The police were coming to arrest us, for blowing up the stage,

being dangerous to all the people, what have you.

You know, it worked, and the idea was to upstage ELP, which I think we did.

That was probably one of the peak moments certainly in economic terms

and in terms of record breaking.

That was one of the highlights of Deep Purple's career,

because they played to this vast audience.

I think it is in the Guinness Book of Records,

some hundreds of thousands of people at this event.

I think it got better musically for them.

They continued, thank God, to progress musically.

But, I don't know that their popularity ever got bigger than Cal Jam ll.

Cal Jam had radically ramped up Ritchie's profile in America,

but he was growing increasingly unhappy with the funky direction the band was taking.

My first LP Burn was great.

We had Mistreated, Burn, and it was all working.

Now, the second record we made, Stormbringer was good.

But Jon, I think Ian, and even Dave,

and, of course, Glenn, were getting into this funk stuff.

And I'm like, "That's not me."

It's gonna be rock, blues. I don't wanna be involved in that.

Me, Jon and David wrote Holy Man together.

And it was, "You can't do it right with the one you love".

It was group compositions, Hold On.

Jon came up with that great Fender Rhodes thing.

And with his Deep Purple colleagues

unwilling to take the music in the direction he wanted,

Ritchie now found someone who was, a singer named Ronnie James Dio.

That's when I did,

I think, 16th Century Greensleeves with Ronnie.

He actually recorded an album with Ronnie and the guys is in Elf.

And we didn't know about this.

And that turned out even better,

and I went, "We've gotta form a band 'cause this is just flowing."

There is none of this... No committee meetings.

And no briefcases involved

and trying to get hold of people that were never around.

Because Purple became a big business, the monster.

So, that's when I left 'em and formed Rainbow.

Ritchie's new band was named after

the famous rock and roll Rainbow Bar and Grill

on Sunset Boulevard in west Hollywood.

He was his own boss at last.

It was very exciting. We had Ronnie Dio.

He could come around and write a tune like that.

I'd give him an idea, he'd put the top line to it, everything was fresh.

He had that ridiculous voice.

After the first album,

Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow became simply Rainbow.

We held auditions to put Rainbow together.

And the 13th drummer was Cozy Powell.

And he was the only one that could play a shuffle.

I was looking for some fire and then Cozy came in and he did it.

He and Ritchie got on very well together.

They both shared a love, apart from rock and roll, of pranking.

Practical jokes, so...

And, of course, Cozy is quite a strong personality as well so,

they respected each other and they liked each other,

and that was really the basis of the success of Rainbow,

I think, was this very powerful guitar player, incredibly strong drummer

and enormously talented singer.

I think Cozy was a perfect foil for Ritchie,

and I know even Cozy found it hard at times.

Cozy used to tell me, "it isn't easy, you know?"

But I think Cozy had such a respect for Ritchie

and likewise the other way around.

So, yeah, I think it was great combination.

As a fan, it seemed like it was one more step into what was heavy metal.

Certainly with Dio singing,

it was a remarkable step forward in that genre.

I mean, a lot of people today, they listen to those records

and they think that's where it really started.

It's almost as if he is playing more on those records,

there is like more of Ritchie on those records.

It was a band in his own image, which Deep Purple would never...

Deep Purple were partly his image and partly his creativity,

but it belonged to everybody else.

Rainbow was him.

Rainbow was definitely his moment of stepping into the spotlight

and saying, "This is me, this is where I want to go."

Cozy suddenly turned up, turned around, Cozy Powell, and said,

"You know who my favourite band is?"

It's "ABBA" and we went...

"ABBA!"

"How could you?" as in like...

And he is like, "Yeah, I know, but that's my favourite band."

Then I said, "And mine."

Then, I think the bass player there went, "And mine."

And we suddenly all went, "Let's play some ABBA."

But, unsurprisingly, no ABBA tracks made it on to the band's second album,

Rainbow Rising.

Rainbow Rising was done in Munich in the studio Arabella House, I think.

That was clone quickly and clone very well,

and we had a good time playing it.

By the time we got to Long Live Rock 'N' Roll,

things were getting...

Ronnie was more into his girlfriend Wendy,

and things were starting to slow down for ideas.

I don't think Rainbow ever equalled the success of Deep Purple,

not in the public's perception or in the critics' minds, should we say.

Despite the fact that it did produce some great music.

It was very... And it was a great live band.

It was very entertaining,

and gave Ritchie Blackmore opportunities to play with other people.

As far as the personnel changes go,

you would need an abacus and a Cray Computer

to figure that one out.

But, that family tree is tall, wide and complicated.

But through it all, there is Ritchie Blackmore.

And a Ritchie Blackmore who was still unpredictable and more than a little scary.

I have seen Ritchie lose it with someone, I better not say who it is.

But it was very explosive.

Yeah, he doesn't suffer people to be fools.

And I know Ritchie can be quite physical.

Ritchie got physical in Vienna in 1977.

We were playing in Austria to about 5,000-7,000 people.

A good show and this little girl comes up to the front stage,

she had come up and handed up a note,

like, "I'm a big fan of the band" or something like that, I don't know.

And I'm just watching her

and the next minute she gets hit by this guy with a truncheon and this bouncer,

and, of course, I thought, "He is not gonna get away with that."

So I kicked him.

And I have strong legs, so of course I broke his jaw

and he went down, blood, and lwent...

The resourceful stage crew hid Ritchie in a large flight case

and pushed him towards the exit.

Every exit had police helmets and dogs.

And they were about to push me up into the truck, into the lorry.

And they insisted, opened it up, and, of course,

I just came out like a Jack in the box, "Hi, everybody."

And then they locked me up for four days, which was pretty miserable.

'Cause the first night, they would just like, throw me on the floor.

And they wanted to beat the shit out of me because I just hit one of their guys.

The consulate was of no use whatsoever,

they just came and said, "You have done a really bad thing.

"You might be here forever."

That's a wakeup call.

You know, I had a bad temper. My temper is not so bad any more

'cause I always think about that.

As well as his unscheduled jail visit,

Ritchie now had to contend with a changing music market

and an unchanging Ronnie.

Ronnie Dio and Ritchie Blackmore had a chemistry,

but then, as Blackmore got further into the Rainbow career,

he saw himself as wanting to become a little bit more commercial.

And Dio very much wanted to stay into the myths and the dragons feel

that he would put forward in the lyrics, metaphorical,

rather than physical, than actual.

So that the two of them went their separate ways, as we know.

But that isn't the whole story, as Ritchie now reveals.

Wendy, apparently, had told him transatlantically,

she said, called him up and said, "Ronnie,

"Ritchie is on the front page of Circus magazine in America

"and you two aren't.

"There should have been the three of us."

That's what did it.

And he said to me, "Cozy and I are not gonna... We are not your sidekicks,

"and we are not standing for it."

I don't want to work with someone who is that trivial, that ridiculous.

I said, "I can't work with this guy any more, just get him out of my life."

And I remembered Graham Bonnet from the Marbles,

and I said to Roger Glover, I said, "What about trying to find him?

"I wonder what he is doing these days."

So I had to learn a Rainbow song because I knew nothing.

I didn't know who Rainbow was, I had no clue.

So I had to go out and buy albums and listen to the music.

And I thought, "I don't think this is really me."

I'm more into like R&B and pop kind of stuff.

That guy had an amazing voice.

Could sing an F-sharp above Top C and that was going some.

I remember going over there one afternoon,

and I heard this Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

or something in the background, and it was off of my album.

I said to Roger, "Why is he playing that?" He says, "He just loves your voice."

Ritchie also loved the idea of being more commercial.

We needed some radio play.

We got a little bit too underground.

Since You've Been Gone, we got rid of that, and we...

'Cause it's a number one, all of a sudden we were a big band.

We were riding high at that time, 1980 was our biggest moment, I think.

We were quite big in England.

I love Since You've Been Gone.

It's uncompromising and it has the perfect element of pop, which is you can sing it

and it's in your head all day, and it's passionate.

It has a real tug on your emotions.

But Ritchie's in it, and Ritchie is powering the whole thing.

The under solo is just brilliant.

They did the immortal version of it.

Powered by their more commercial sound,

Rainbow headlined the first ever Monsters of Rock festival at Donington.

The critics hated us.

For whatever reason, we were not a fashionable,

on the front page of Rolling Stones type of band.

We were... They just hated us.

But the more they hated us,

the more the people kind of went, "We love them."

The fans may have loved Rainbow,

but Ritchie was now having a problem with Graham Bonnet's hair.

Ritchie was 100% behind me being in the band,

but 100% against my haircut.

There was a hair situation.

We were known to have Denim people following us,

and most people were kind of growing their hair long in those days.

I went to get my hair cut in Sheffield really short.

I mean, like, spiky and the whole thing.

And I went on stage and Ritchie hadn't seen me all day,

and there he was playing his guitar, and the first song comes up

and he turns to me and he goes...

You know, his mouth dropped.

He was singing to the audience and doing his bit,

and I saw the back of the shaved neck, you know that.

You know, very cut hair and I went,

"I'm just gonna put my guitar across his head."

But then I might...

I'll be back in prison again, you know.

I really was, like, so tempted just to take it off and go whack.

Graham Bonnet and his hair lived to sing another day.

But he had no luck persuading drummer Cozy Powell to stay on board.

Powell didn't like the overtly commercial work the band was now doing.

And he was gone.

And it was a very sad day, and he left the band and later I did.

That was my last show too, but I didn't know this at that time.

Graham Bonnet was a great singer

and Down to Earth was a thoroughly undervalued Rainbow album.

But again, the problem was that Blackmore saw Bonnet

not quite as having what it took in terms of personality,

to allow Blackmore to be himself.

Song writing wasn't good, the way we wanted it to.

It was very slow.

Nothing was happening, we had one song and that was the song Russ Ballard wrote.

I Surrender, the song was called.

And that's all we had.

And so we... It was...

I left because Ritchie didn't come to rehearsal sometimes.

Graham left the band in 1980.

Like a month or so later, I thought, "What have I done?"

I have left something that was great.

It would be nice to see him again 'cause I like him very much.

He was a good friend, and he taught me a lot about the music I was suddenly pushed into,

which I knew nothing about, and he was a great teacher.

Ritchie's friend Barry Ambrosio suggested Joe Lynn Turner

as a replacement for Graham Bonnet.

He said, "Listen to this record."

I said "Look, Barry, I've heard so many singers, I can't hear any more.

"I've got to get out of here."

He said, "Just listen to this," and he played one track as I was leaving.

And I went,

"Actually, that sounds interesting, who is this guy?"

And he said, "Guy from New Jersey."

I didn't know that he came to see me.

I later found out when I got a phone call,

living in Manhattan, lower Manhattan in the west village,

one-room studio, I think you call it.

And mattress on the floor,

money running out.

And got a phone call from Barry Ambrosio,

and he put Ritchie on the phone,

and of course I... Complete disbelief.

And he said, "No, it's really me." And I said, "Well, all right."

And they told... They put their road manager on

and told me the train to take and to go out to the studio.

I was playing in New Jersey, and I went to see him.

And I really liked his voice, very resonant and warm.

He came in with a couple of beers and said, "You got the job if you want it."

And I said, "Want it? I need it."

And kept me there in the studio and we just kept being creative,

and Glover and I started to write more lyrics,

and we finished the album Difficult to Cure, like, in a couple of weeks, I think,

since my entrance.

Ritchie recorded three Rainbow albums with Joe Lynn Turner.

I think I wrote, with Joe,

one of my favourite tunes which is Street of Dreams.

That, to me, was the ultimate Rainbow song. I love that song.

Come on the jukebox, I go, "I'm proud of that."

'Cause it was exactly where I wanted to go.

When we heard it, we knew we had something.

There was just chills up and down our... We felt it.

We said, "Man, this is deep, this is something."

And the fact that I could kind of write something that was poppy

was something new for me.

And I liked that groove.

I just don't want to play, crash, crash, crash for the sake of it.

I've got to hear a melody.

Melody was always at the bottom of, for me musically, where I was going.

While Ritchie had been developing Rainbow,

his Deep Purple fans still wanted to see the classic Mark ll line-up back together again.

1983, I think, the management called me up and said, "Purple wants to re-form."

I said, "Well, I have to think about it."

Rainbow was just now taking off really big in America.

And we were really getting somewhere, we were doing big shows.

I don't know if I want... It's so easy to just go back to Purple, you know.

I was like...

And Gillan was really up for it.

And I'm like, "Okay, let's try it."

I put up no fuss, no fight, no nothing like that, so I really felt good about it.

And also at that point in time,

I had a solo album for Elektra Records,

and things were going well for me.

And Ritchie and I promised to get back together again anyway.

So, I had no compunction about it. I felt good about it.

Of course there was money entered into it.

And the management is going, "it's worth X amount..."

I'm like, "Might be an interesting idea. Okay, I'll try it."

Cut a long story short.

So we did it.

You know, we had a good time, Perfect Strangers is a good record.

And we all had a good time doing it.

It was very comfortable being with them.

Perfect Strangers was a brilliant comeback album by Purple.

It was a phenomenal performance

because it got Mark ll back together.

They did it in the mid-80's fashion.

They weren't living in the past.

They weren't living in 1971, 72,

they were actually being part of the modern hard rock world.

I think the relationship at the time between Gillan and Blackmore,

which is always pointed out as being the problem, was quite amicable.

The amicable band toured in support of the album.

They were trying to say

that Bruce Springsteen was doing the biggest business.

Biggest business was us and Grateful Dead, then Bruce Springsteen.

I don't know what people see in Bruce Springsteen whatsoever.

I have never got that.

The ticket sales showed that the old magic was still there,

but so were the old rivalries with Gillan.

I put it down to he wanted to kind of maybe steer the band,

and I was steering the band.

So I think it was that more than anything.

Of course it worked, I thought, Perfect Strangers worked.

Everybody was on form, we played, it worked.

But, we should have stopped right there.

And then we did... House of Blue Light, to me, was disastrous.

And the relationship with Ian was soon back in the disaster zone too.

He had lost his voice completely.

And we are going, "What are we gonna do?"

I was always already disgusted with Ian, we weren't getting along.

Soto me, I was like, "We gotta get another singer.

"I mean, this is just a joke."

By 1987 Ritchie had played with scores of musicians and dozens of bands.

A self-confessed wind-up merchant who thrived on conflict.

The uneasy rider was about to meet his match.

Appropriately enough, on the football field.

I used to have my roadie call up radio stations too.

Deep purple would like to do a game of soccer against you,

if you feel like playing a charity.

It's kind of my fairy tale Cinderella story

because I was working for this radio station on Long Island.

I was interning there.

And apparently somebody from Deep Purple had called up.

So the DJs came out and they played,

and Purple showed up, it was Ritchie and Roger.

He signed an autograph for me and he looked up at me and said,

in that very classy English accent that I'm sure you are familiar with,

"You are very beautiful girl." And I went, "That's nice."

And that would have been my Ritchie Blackmore story

that he said I was beautiful.

And that was enough at that point.

And I said, "Thank you", and I walked off the field.

And he sent his roadies through the crowd to find out who I was

and to ask me to meet him at a pub later.

Candice Night was a musical New Yorker, who had been modelling from age 12.

She had her own radio rock show,

and had studied communications at New York Institute of Technology.

And Ritchie had the most brilliant, proper

upper-class English way of breaking the ice.

- He was taking off his soccer cleats. -Oh, right.

And his dirty, mud-filled, sweaty soccer socks

and he balled one up and threw it right in my face.

That's the way to get a girl.

And I didn't worry about my nails after that any more

'cause I thought this is ridiculous, and we just...

After that, there was really nothing...

That totally relaxed

-the whole entire environment. -it was a magical smell.

He said to me that when I walked into the room,

meeting him at that pub that afternoon.

He said, "I felt like, when you walked in that an old friend had walked into the room.

"Like it felt like home."

Ritchie now had an ally who put him at ease.

Soon their shared interest in medieval life and music was to take centre stage.

But first, a replacement had to be found for Gillan.

Ritchie approached his Rainbow vocalist, Joe Lynn Turner.

At first, Joe hesitated, I think.

You know, Paice is going well and he was in Rainbow.

So I was like, "Yeah, well..."

Got any other ideas?

And Jon's like, "Yeah, sounds great."

So we tried him out, it worked, and then he was in.

He started playing Hey Joe, I grabbed the mike, started singing it.

Never even said, "Hello" to Jon or Ian at that point.

Finished the song and then there were some handshakes.

And Jon started to play this keyboard bit,

which later became on the Purple album The Cut Runs Deep.

And I started singing the exact lyric

as Ritchie always called it, I had a magic bag of lyrics.

And I would just pull out a lyric that suited this and sing a melody,

and it was the exact lyric... There it was. There's the song.

So Jon and Ian were convinced that I should be the guy.

But it was to be Joe Lynn's only album with Deep Purple.

He left the band in 1992.

There was a lot of frustration going on,

lot of unhappiness.

The guys, I believe it was Ian and Jon, and I say this with all love and respect,

felt they needed Ian Gillan back in the band.

And Ritchie was staunch about me staying in the band and there was a...

And there just wasn't any way that I could deal with the emotions that were happening.

So, I think I quit and got fired at the same time.

Whatever, doesn't really matter.

But, it was nerve-racking and just turmoil

and very stressful.

Meanwhile, Ritchie and Candice had moved in together.

- By '91 I had moved in with you. -Yeah.

She moved in but I didn't know who she was.

I just knew that there was a great female in the house.

I'm not gonna knock it.

- I don't know who she is. -I locked my door every night, I bolted it.

I was on tour as his girlfriend, yes.

But at our parties at the house...

When we have parties at our house, everybody has to contribute something,

so if Ritchie is going to bring out the acoustic guitar and play for people,

he wants everybody to give a little bit of themselves.

So he doesn't care if it's a speech about the Alamo, right?

Or tap dance or a song or something, anything.

So, when I was at the parties with Ritchie,

he and I would be doing songs together.

That's how he first got me singing with him.

The first song they wrote together was a wedding anniversary present

for Candice's parents.

This is something that Rainbow would never have done,

play a waltz.

A waltz, go.

Just follow me.

With what we didn't see...

That was very subtle.

- First song we wrote? -Be Mine Tonight.

That's what makes me laugh when people say,

"She must have made him do Renaissance music"

because you don't make him do anything.

You never make Ritchie Blackmore do anything.

Everything that he... His choice of direction is solely up to him,

and I feel like I'm really on a journey that he has led the way and taken...

He is the captain of this journey.

I'll be the co-captain, that's fine.

Ritchie would make one more album with Deep Purple.

With Joe Lynn Turner gone,

the band put down backing tracks and looked for a singer.

The band thinks that we should get Gillan back, and the record label,

they sent the tapes of Ian singing, like, three songs that we had done.

Three backing tracks he had put his voice over.

And I'm like...

"This is absolutely dreadful.

"This is rotten to the core, this is just rubbish."

That's how bad it was to me.

It was deadly.

And then he said, "How much would you take to work with that?"

I said, "Well, it really doesn't come into it."

The album was made with Gillan on vocals.

Then the record company wanted the band to go on tour to promote it.

It was also the 25th anniversary of Mark ll.

Ritchie demanded a vast fee thinking it would be refused,

but his strategy backfired.

I went, "You know what? I'll take X amount", which was over the top.

Just to get them off my back so I could look for another singer.

And they came back with BMG,

"Okay, they'll pay you that if you work with Gillan."

And I went, "Now I'm caught."

Of course I got halfway through the tour and I was like, "I can't take this any more."

I'm selling my soul here, this is awful. This is dreadful, certainly, you know.

Ian and I had a showdown with spaghetti, and it was in Cleveland.

Jim picked up my food from catering,

and Ian had gone, "Who is that for?"

And Jim goes, "it's Ritchie's food."

He says, "Let me add some ketchup to it." And, of course, he put ketchup all over it.

And I went up to him and I said, "Did you do this to my food?"

And he went, "Yeah."

And with that, I saw Jon Lord go...

And they all parted, it was like a high noon, you know.

I Went, "Really?"

And then I got it and went, right in his face.

Well, battle rages on,

this was the first time we played in Czechoslovakia,

and he asked me to sing the...

Just like a vocal partjust... Like background...

Candice was singing off stage and out of sight,

which confused some local reviewers.

There was a Czechoslovakian paper who had written the review and said that,

"Jon Lord must have sampled a female vocal into his keyboards

"because they could clearly hear some girl singing."

I knew if I went to the manager and I said, "I want to leave Bruce Payne management."

That would go no further and I'd be back at square one.

So I thought, "I'm gonna have to write a letter to the band to explain how I feel,

"and I've got to leave,

"and I'll not be going to Japan with them."

Ritchie played his last concert with Deep Purple in Helsinki

on 17th November, 1993.

So we went back to the hotel,

and we proceeded to say goodbyes.

I think I said goodbye to Ian Paice, that was it.

Everybody else just ran away.

Paice came up to me and said, "Make some good decisions"

-and left, and Candice was with me. -That's right.

And I think Jon was too embarrassed to say anything.

- Jon went right up to his room. -Yeah.

It was such a relief.

Ritchie reformed Rainbow, now with Doogie White on vocals

and made one final album with them too, Stranger in Us All.

I think Rainbow probably gave him a little bit more freedom in that regard,

and then the album I did certainly did give him more freedom.

This freedom also enabled Ritchie and Candice

to develop their writing partnership,

and the album included one of the first songs they wrote together, Ariel.

The Blackmore side thing kind of happened when we were doing the last Rainbow record.

We would kind of get together as a sort of a jam night thing at the end of the evening

when we were recording at Long View Farm in Massachusetts.

And we would just kind of sit around the fire and they were just gonna jam,

and they would do stuff, Renaissance stuff like Greensleeves, that sort of thing.

When I was 10,

there was this kid singing Greensleeves, and I was really taken by that mode.

Just, it was very reminiscent of another time,

almost spiritual, I thought.

And it just seemed to go straight to my soul.

And I have always been that way.

If I hear medieval music, I'll immediately come alive.

Ritchie and Candice formed Blackmore's Night

and made their first album Shadow of the Moon in 1997.

His escape from the stress and pressures of that rock and roll world

wound up being just to sit and just open up on acoustic.

And just really look into the fire place and just go someplace else.

And that's where I think the beginning of our project happened, really.

He often says that if you listen to Smoke on the Water,

you'll hear medieval fourths and fifths, the modal scales of that era.

So that was going back to 1971, so that was in him there as well,

and then of course, fast-forward to Rainbow and you've got

everything from Temple of The King, 16th Century Greensleeves.

So it's a lot of medieval flare in a lot of those songs.

And we are still scratching the surface, it's like,

I still feel there's so far to go with it.

Whereas with the others I felt we were at the end.

One of the best compliments I had was,

"I hate medieval and Renaissance music, but I love your music."

And I went, "That's a big compliment, much more than you think."

With our show, it's more the audience is part of us, we are there to entertain them.

We are not there to show off and wiggle our hips.

Since that first album in 1997,

Ritchie and Candice have made another nine together.

When Ritchie plunged into medieval music,

it wasn't so much as a surprise as a natural course of events.

I also feel that urge because somehow when you've clone all the big heavy stuff,

it's always attractive but you want to explore the other side.

The minstrels, the peasant, kind of walking from town to town,

just telling the news from the last town, bit of gossip,

plays a few tunes, that's what I relate to.

That doesn't mean that some of the songs don't still include modern rock influences.

It's like me, I love what I do.

I truly love what I do, and I can hear that Ritchie loves what he does,

and I salute him for it.

True musicians, people who don't have a choice, you know,

they just love music and that's the path they follow.

If he wants to switch into something else,

that's because his inner musical inspiration pulls him there,

and true musicians are almost slaves to that.

The music may be historically inspired,

but Ritchie's electric guitar virtuosity is still very much a part of their medieval journey.

He sees himself, I think, as the quiet musketeer.

His rather romantic sort of heroic dashing figure.

I never feel like we are done, we're just like...

We are still learning so much about

the instruments and the songs and ourselves, really.

It takes me back to another life.

It might be a past life, reincarnation.

I just love to be in the 1500's, without getting the plague,

and having central heating and a satellite dish.

Whereas if I hear rock and roll, I've heard it all before, Christ.

It all ended about 30 years ago, everybody now is so generic.

How long can you keep flogging something?

It's nearly 50 years since the young school boy from Heston

decided to show his teachers they were wrong about him,

by achieving true excellence on the guitar.

And to make good on the faith his parents had shown in him

by putting the music first.

Of all the great guitar players,

he was the one that people knew least about, I think,

and that was partly his own doing.

His confidence was overwhelming.

It was frightening.

Inspiring and frightening.

I think Ritchie will be remembered as somebody wild and untamed

to the end of his days.

And I think that's a magnificent thing to be.

I can buy a Strat, you can buy a Strat, right? We can get a Marshall, he can get a Marshall.

But, none of us ever wind up sounding like Ritchie.

A high degree of being completely in the moment, impulsive,

and just being kind of true to himself

and true to what his perception of that moment was in a live situation.

He is not an extrovert, he is very much an introvert.

And when you have somebody like that, they create brilliantly,

but there is also a lot of depth that they are always constantly dealing with.

There is nothing better than just sitting with the guitar and emoting.

I can be in Hawaii,

and everybody is on water skis and things.

I'm watching the dolphins, but I'm in my room just looking out,

looking at the horizons, gotta be playing.

And that's my friend that I'm kind of emoting with.

My gut feeling is that Ritchie is probably at his best when he

tends to actually live out the rather quiet,

withdrawn, artistic and thoughtful person that I think really

is what he is ultimately about.

When people get things all in perspective,

Ritchie will be right there as one of the cornerstones of what rock and roll is today.

There's a long list of rock guitar players

that wouldn't exist without Ritchie Blackmore.

There are people who enter this band thing for lots of different reasons,

for money, for fame and for the chicks.

It seems to me Ritchie Blackmore entered into this for the music.

And for the two people who encouraged him to take guitar lessons in the first place,

his mother and especially his father.

He came to the Albert Hall when we did the orchestra thing,

Deep Purple and the orchestra, he loved that.

I think then he suddenly realised, "I think my son's doing something, yeah."

5,000 people and there's an orchestra.

If that childhood photograph was taken today,

they'd probably all be smiling.