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Never comfortable or established

Another Classic Rock magazine rehash: circa 2011 interview with Don Airey reprinted by Louder Sound: You’ve appeared on more than 250 albums between 1976 and 2011. Which are the ones of which you are most proud? Funnily enough, Roger Glover and I were talking about what an incredible time it was making Down To Earth […]

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Nine years worth of breaking my back

Rainbow In Concert 1976 — Live in Düsseldorf is slated to be released on vinyl as a 3LP. The show was just re-released as part of The Temple of The King 1975 – 1976 box set, but apparently it has never been previously available on vinyl. HMV has an orange vinyl special, while other retailers […]

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Rose bushes that need tending to

Don Airey spoke recently to TotalRock, generously dispensing wisdom he has in abundance. Enjoy!

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That’s the route she chose

Apparently a new single Diablo from the upcoming new album Splat! was released on June 5, 2026, without much fanfare. But probably because of the general enshittification of the web, it’s not available everywhere. So we’re posting two different copies in the hope that you can access at least one of them.

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Seventh Star remaster

Universal is releasing the 40th anniversary remaster of Black Sabbath’s Seventh Star. According to an online retailer, it will arrive on July 9, 2026 on CD and vinyl, and will contain just one bonus track: a single mix of No Stranger To Love. Track list: In For The Kill (2026 Remaster) No Stranger To Love […]

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The Gillan/Iommi awards

The music school in Armenia that Ian Gillan and Tony Iommi helped to reopen after the devastating 1988 earthquake now has a couple of awards named after them. The initiative aims to recognize the school’s best vocalists and qanun players each year. Ian Gillan and Tony Iommi warmly welcomed the idea, while IDBank undertook the […]

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The tour that fell apart like Jenga

Reb Beach gave several interviews over the last few months, in which he reminisces about his days in Whitesnake and their ill-fated last tour. In February 2026 he spoke to Blabbermouth: It was the worst ending that it could have been. It couldn’t have been any worse than it was. It’s just how the cookie […]

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It’s a simple song

Classic Rock magazine rehashes the story we’ve heard a million times by now — how Smoke came to being. This includes an undated quote from Blackmore (that was at some point subjected to a rather poor OCR, and had to be corrected by us): I was jamming with Ian Paice at a soundcheck, because we […]

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Literally a family thing

Guitar World has a story how Steve Morse’s faulty pedal lead to his 40 years long collaboration with Ernie Ball: “The gear stripped out, and there was no way to fix it. So I went looking for a volume pedal, and the Ernie Ball booth was nearby. I saw they had this really cool pedal […]

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Variety of rhythms and syncopations

Bass Player magazine has an online feature on the Elf/RBR bassist Craig Gruber. There are no quotes from the man himself (he passed in 2015), but some input from the last Rainbow bass player Bob Curiano (a.k.a. Bob Nouveau and Sir Robert of Normandie). And it turns pretty technical pretty quickly. [Snake Charmer] begins with […]

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Weep for that future

Our recent foray into the trainspotting territory prompted another trip down the memory lane. Better Call Saul is a prequel/offshoot of the hit TV drama series Breaking Bad, and it has run between 2015 and 2020. Somebody in the writers’ pen of the show was obviously a fan.

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Skip­ping stones

There is a new interview with Gillan and Paice in the Uncut magazine, and the two Ians are adamant to continue making music into the foreseeable future. The online version is dated June 1, 2026, so which issue it appears in the printed version — your guess is as good as ours, and probably better. […]

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Fighting it out with swords

After a couple of teasers, Ultimate Classic Rock has posted, apparently in full, the interview they’ve recently done with Ritchie Blackmore. Release of the Rainbow 75/76 box set was the occasion, so the bulk of the conversation was actually devoted to that time period.

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The supergroup that destroyed itself

Since nobody bothered to make a documentary about Captain Beyond, it was left to our robotic overlords to create one. It is done on the cheap, with no music licensed to use, still — the facts are there, so here it is.

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All my life it seems just a crazy dream

Wikimetal celebrates 50th anniversary of Rainbow Rising with a short compendium of 6 interesting facts about the album. Which are in no way a surprise to anybody who’s been paying attention. Rainbow Mk1 was short lived and gutted way before work started on the second album. The artwork for the album has become iconic. Munich […]

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Apparently not a vampire

Ultimate Classic Rock publishes the next part of The interview they recently did with Ritchie Blackmore. They call it the first part, so apparently the Christopher Cross story that appeared a few days ago, was part zero. Ritchie talks about hi recent heals problems, prospects for touring (spoiler: very little), and also motivation for leaving […]

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With a flying V and long hair

In a new interview to the Ultimate Classic Rock, Ritchie Blackmore confirms the story that in 1970 Christopher Cross has played a gig with Deep Purple in his place. This episode became a minor controversy in the Purple lore as over the years Cross himself claimed it, with further corroboration by Eric Johnson, who opened […]

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To the four corners of the earth

Ian Gillan spoke to the Leona Graham Podcast. This sounds like it was done some time in 2025, but posted only now, in May 2026. They talked about Ian’s collaboration with Urock, his age of discovery, the hardest song he had to sing, and other things.

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Blow you out of your socks

More Tony Carey! This time he talks to the Classic Album Review poscast. These interviews are apparently being done on the occasion of his Planet P Project albums being reissued on vinyl by (who else!) Edel, but a good half of the conversation revolved around his stint with Rainbow.

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Here’s a song, tells the story…

During a May 2, 2026, 2. Budesliga football match between Dynamo Dresden and 1. FC Kaiserslautern fans started a chant that suspiciously sounds like The Riff. The game is posted to youtube, but we’re told that it is not available in many countries, so here’s an audio snippet

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