I used to spend my school holidays fell walking every day with a friend from our village called Lawrence Heslop. Lawrence would tell you that I was always talking about Ritchie Blackmore then, that I was captivated to the point of obsession with the man's playing and persona.
Blackmore was a founding member of Deep Purple, the rock band that everyone either loves or hates, but which everyone is always embarrassed to own up to liking! In many ways they brought a new dynamic to rock music, the subtlety and dexterity of an orchestra with the sheer power of a jumbo jet. Over all the years that I've been playing rock music I've always been impressed by the number of guitarists and others who venerate the band and its crazed leader Ritchie Blackmore. The man in black, for that was the colour he always wore, was the driving force of Deep Purple, the one who invariably came up with the basic idea from which all the songs sprang. Blackmore had one rule for writing and recording rock music, "It must be dramatic." The titanic opening riff to Smoke on the Water says it all.
Drama is his life. His tempestuous music, so well defined by the amazing solo in Highway Star, has been matched by a tempestuous professional life filled with dark deeds and strained relationships. The man is driven, unsettled, probably deeply unhappy. He is never satisfied with his music and strives ever onward for the perfection he hears in his head. The hapless musicians he works with find their lives drawn into this mad quest and are often on the receiving end of his ill humour and frustration. He is a very difficult man to work with but there is no doubt that his ambition inspired great things in the lives of many of his fellow musicians. Almost all his singers have gone on to better things, Ian Gillan, Ronnie James Dio and David Coverdale but they probably all hate him with a passion.
Blackmore has twice left Deep Purple, once in the seventies to form the highly successful Rainbow and again in the nineties to do the same thing. Each time he has left a hole at the heart of the band that is testament to the fact that Deep Purple is Ritchie Blackmore. But time has moved on and tastes these days do not allow for Blackmore's elaborate and frenzied style. English guitar playing is out of fashion and American flash rules the airwaves.
I would recommend the following albums:
Deep Purple:
Machine Head
Made in Japan
Burn
The Battle Rages On
Rainbow:
A best of compilation