For just under a quarter of a century, Deep Purple/Rainbow guitarist Ritchie Blackmore has been part of the music scene with his wife Candice Night in medieval garb. By devoting himself to live hard rock in recent years with a newly formed Rainbow lineup, the musical pressure on Blackmore's Night has been lessened. This also seems to have had an effect on their new album "Nature's Light". Candice Night at least seems very deeply relaxed - and definitely takes a look beyond the horizon of medieval pop ..
eclipsed: When you approach a new album, is there a route to take beforehand?
Deep Purple is a band for guitarists. With Deep Purple you can and must become a hero as a guitarist. Ritchie Blackmore created the template and filled it with life like no other rock guitarist. Huge footsteps a Tommy Bolin couldn't grow into because of the drugs. And a role that Joe Satriani, despite all his brilliance on the guitar, did not want to accept. Even on Steve Morse, after two and a half decades in the band, the mighty shadow of Blackmore still falls.
Ian Gillan likes to call the guitarists who work for Deep Purple "mandolin players". This trivialization has a method, because only in this way can the frontman bear the fact that Purple's eyes and ears are always on the guitarist. A good Purple song is always judged by how memorable the guitar riff is and how virtuoso the solo is.
Ritchie Blackmore will be seventy-three on the fourteenth of April. He is then on tour with Rainbow: five concerts in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Berlin and Prague. The British master guitarist has regained his enjoyment of rock music. And this basic satisfaction can also be seen in the interview. Blackmore has always been attached to the image of the capricious contemporary. In the five interviews I have conducted with him since 1985, however, he was always friendly, courteous and willing to provide information. At the same time, he is pleasantly self-critical, but often tends towards irony and humorous provocation, which is repeatedly taken at face value by quite a few press representatives. Blackmore doesn't segregate rehearsed promotional phrases. On the contrary, it sometimes seems as if it is looking for the right formulation to be able to express what it wants to say more precisely.
Ritchie Blackmore (72) is secretly delighted that after two decades he still gets off on his medieval pop band project Blackmore's Night. After all, nobody had expected that the Deep Purple and Rainbow guitarist would turn his back on hard, loud rock music and only return to it part-time in the autumn of his career (more about this in the second part of the interview in the next issue).
eclipsed: How much Blackmore is in Blackmore's Night?
Ritchie Blackmore: You're talking to a married man who's realizing a musical project with his girlfriend then and now wife and mother of his two children [Autumn Sky, *2010, and Rory,*2012]. Are you expecting anything other than a diplomatic answer?
eclipsed: In other words: How satisfied are you with your role at Blackmore's Night?
17.6.2016 Loreley: "I have a feeling we´re not in Kansas anymore. We must be over the Rainbow."
All the mud and rain became instantly irrelevant as Ritchie Blackmore with his Rainbow on the Loreley, re-formed for three concerts, after this sequence from "The Wizard of Oz" starts with "Highway Star". Previously, Thin Lizzy and Manfred Mann´s Earth Band had rung in the new edition of the "Monsters Of Rock". Blackmore, who hadn't played a rock concert for 19 years, was the "Master of Cermony", and led the 15,000 visitors sovereign through a 13-song classic set with tracks he wrote for Rainbow and Deep Purple. The Chilean singer Ronnie Romero became the "best Ronnie since Ronnie (Dio)" and the version of "Stargazer" was breathtaking.
MARK KNOPFLER - Ideally
five years after the end of Dire Straits, her boss threw himself headlong into a solo career. This has continued to this day. And Mark Knopfler will also do a devil thing to change this ideal state for him after his now released eighth recording. A world tour with the Dire Straits? "Much too stressful!"
30 Years GUNS N' ROSES - Greatness and Madness
When married couples form a band together, this often seems strange to outsiders. And you're instinctively suspicious of saying, "It's only good!" This is Ritchie Blackmore's brief assessment of "musical family businesses", while Candice Night says in more detail: "So we can always be together, and if Ritchie has an idea, he can come to me and try it out with me right away"
When Richard Hugh Blackmore was born on 14 April 1945 in Weston-super-Mare in the English county of Somerset, he did not even allow himself to be sworn into a bourgeois life. At the age of eleven - the family now lives in Heston near London - he is given his first guitar and wants to become a musician. He takes lessons from studio guitarist Big Jim Sullivan. His career as a musician began in 1963. The most important experience: the show lessons of Screaming Lord Sutch. He heard Ian Paice for the first time during a stay at a star club. The drummer impressed him so much that he later brought him into the band instead of Deep Purple founder Chris Curtis. This is how Blackmore's Hire and fire mentality became apparent early on.
