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In pursuit of renaissance revelry
Goldmine magazine reviews the “25th anniversary” reissue of Blackmore’s Night Fires at Midnight:
Mostly though, the original album stands on its own, a sweeping survey of sounds seemingly drawn from a traditional tapestry. A sprightly take on “The Times They Are A-Changin’” fits comfortably alongside the folk-like frolic of “Village on the Sand” and “Home Again,” the moving and majestic “Crowning of the King,” the regal revelry of “Praetorious,” and the stately serenade “Fayre Thee Well.” It’s easy to see how the group was inspired by the places they had played before managing to incorporate those venerable surroundings into their own personal panorama.
Read more in Goldmine.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Where is my Robin Hood outfit?
https://youtu.be/kIXiESqT_jY
My copy is already on its way so I’m entitled to poke fun of it!
September 25th, 2024 at 22:28You certainly have contributed to their coffers Uwe. I do wonder which section of the castle you would now own, such is the financial support that you have so dedicatedly supported. The dungeon or the turret. Hmmmmmmmmm. Maybe it will be Uwe who needs rescuing by a fair maid & her knights in shining armour. With fire breathing dragons ensuring they fail at every turn in getting Uwe out to freedom. Until a wizard turns up of course & casts a spell thwarting off the evil dragons & Uwe gets to ride away (with his maid) on a white horse into the sunset. Sounds like a song coming on, now let me see………Cheers.
September 26th, 2024 at 08:24A little memory of me tricked by a guitarist, and he has been selling fog for almost 60 years to hundreds of millions who listened to him or still listen to him (like me):) hahaha
One of my favorite all concerts is BN in Zagreb 2009 and one of the longest concerts (when you have to bring dinner and breakfast with you) I came to the hall half an hour before the official start of the concert, but the concert was an hour late, and when it started it lasted almost three hours. And it was the first time I encountered that music live. I wouldn’t even go to a concert if RB didn’t play the guitar. But the main star, I would say the main partner of the great RB, is his wife. By the way, that concert was the first they performed as spouses. Candice is a real balm for the ears and eyes (especially for men), a very cheerful person who I don’t understand at all what she is doing with a man with a square frown. But love obviously doesn’t ask In fact, she was the most pleasant surprise for me. throughout the evening she interacted with the audience and introduced a kind of “marriage” humor, presenting Ritchie and herself as some kind of comical couple from the neighborhood. The concert hall was full of rock devotees, famous cultural and political workers, and beggars, princes and princesses, knights, servants, priests and fairies. The team dressed in historical costumes and it was a real experience. An incredibly inspiring performance and an enthusiastic (Candice and ) audience softened up a bit the sullen Ritchie, who stretched the concert to an incredible 3 hours and was also a hard rock part! Hey guys, is that possible?? Rainbow was represented with “Difficult to Cure” and Ariel DP with “Soldier of Fortune”, Black Night with the initial audience (the most faithful I can convey is: woOooooOOOO WoO WoO WoO). Woman From Tokyo, And of course SOTW (I was a meter or two meters from Ritchie..closer than the cameraman at California Jam) Bard David of Larchmon was a particularly good keyboardist. They played covers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bee Gees. It was a concert to remember. The groom Ritchie even smiled. Here and there some strays would reach out from the audience (mostly a man’s shout: “Ritchie!”, but the one called mostly remained cold. Although, one fan made a shrewd attempt at Croatian: “Ritchie, say something! We who were standing around him greeted this with a barrage of laughter, but Ritchie just then, who the hell came close to the microphone, muttered the first and last sentence: “I don’t know what I’m playing.” Wonderful memories…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7argNMNvmM
September 26th, 2024 at 09:59I’ve had a similar experience where Ritchie was drunk (and not just a little) and played and played a rock set in the middle of a BN gig for an hour or more. Depending on your view it was either a highlight or a “situation” going off the rails, Ritchie inter alia playing inebriated bass and Sir Robert of Normandie aka Bob Noveaux aka Bob Curiano singing various rock classics with his tuneful voice and even being forced to play lead guitar (which he can). Even sunny Candice became a little impatient and gasped for air. But even a drunk Ritchie can entertain, I loved it.
Herr MacGregor, for all my scoffing about BN (let’s be realistic: you can’t take an outfit that dresses like that and celebrates an archaic fairy tale world over a period of 25 years seriously), I remain loyal to the cause that is Ritchie’s legacy. No amount of crap is able to undo the brilliant things he’s done. And I will really miss him once he is no longer there.
So yeah, I will see BN on their next tour of Germany again – and cringe quietly and only to myself. No one will recognize me.
September 26th, 2024 at 14:19I wonder what y’all will make of this young lady & her covers?. I quite like them!
Self Portrait:
https://youtu.be/qVYmiIM0nz4?si=wX319_gSBxDIKtXI
Street Of Dreams:
https://youtu.be/XtoDerCus3o?si=-ei8sLIVFzK3qZd4
September 27th, 2024 at 02:50She’s ok, John, but not more. On Self Portrait her delivery is nasal and on Street of Dreams there are quite a few bum notes for a studio take. Her voice still needs to develop some body too.
Candice has that in her version of the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxSD2Z7EWy8
But I’m no great fan of Street of Dreams as a number, the melodies it is filled to the brim with all sound incredibly mannered, stilted and contrived to me, a song from the drawing board under the “let’s write something tuneful with all our might”. I know that Ritchie is proud of the song, but it never did nothing for me. I miss a natural flow, SoD is over-crammed with hooks.
September 27th, 2024 at 10:22Some lovely comments and memories herein… Still a highlight of mine, circa 2001 live in York… I was there – Ritchie was spellbinding that evening, his stage presence and fluid playing at it’s best, and when the Strat emerged, something magic was in the air.
I note there’s been much debate recently (herein) about Ritchie, his playing as well as his musical chops… Perhaps he’s not as precise and/or technically proficient as Morse or McBride, or as flamboyant as an on it Bolin… but his high and lows make the highs all the sweeter, his tone, his presence, his mood – always a part of his guitar makeup… good, bad, sad, angry it all feeds into the performance for good or ill, it’s organic, not clinical, not precise not the same note perfect rendition every night… If I wanted to hear AI perform the DP back cat I could, but I don’t… it leaves me cold… too many notes, not enough feel.
Give me a drunken Blackmore fannying about on bass any day of the week…
Ritchie is king, in spite of himself, he’s a legend and when he’s no longer here let the re-appraisal begin… and it will. People will realise he was our Mozart.
September 27th, 2024 at 10:28Ritchie got ripped off at least once 😀 (and he probably “borrowed” it from someone else)
Ritchie
September 27th, 2024 at 13:14https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg_JAYYUyEA
Adrian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhBnW7bZHEE
😂🤣😎
I’d be hard-pressed to name JUST ONE guy of the current Iron Maiden line-up who is NOT a die-hard Purple fan – Steve Harris possibly the least, but all the others?
September 27th, 2024 at 14:40I received mine today and am now getting into black tights (with nothing underneath) and a codpiece (pictures on request) – I do like my listening experience with Blackmore’s Night to be as immersive as possible. I’ve also inflicted a small wound on myself and infected it, because weren’t we all better off in late Medieval Times/beginning Renaissance without any antibiotics around? Hit that castle scene with your bout of gangrene!
September 27th, 2024 at 17:06@ 10 – We are all waiting with baited breath Uwe. However can you PLEASE give all of us here a little spoiler ALERT! So we cannot get caught out thinking the images may be a music link or something else. Much appreciated. Cheers.
September 27th, 2024 at 22:30@10
September 28th, 2024 at 09:58Being a very skilled homeopath I can help out with any wounds, self inflicted or otherwise ☺️
I wonder if Uwe will use any leeches on that wound? There also should be plenty of herbs in the Black Forest, not to mention frogs legs & other delicacies to throw into your cauldron. Cheers.
September 28th, 2024 at 22:00@13
September 29th, 2024 at 11:39Leeches! I can’t recommend that! At all!
A gentle treatment like my own is to prefer 😊
I’ll let my four Northern Territory monitor lizards go to work at it! While their saliva has a high bacterial load, I’m pretty much immune to it by now due to their many little bites during feeding frenzies. They are not always very good at telling my fingers apart from baby mice.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mkJshDr8E2Q
September 29th, 2024 at 13:13@15
September 29th, 2024 at 18:51Lizards? For real…?
And you’re giving them baby mice 🥺
Oh – I just read about recipe of bacon made out of banana peels, maybe I ought to give that a decent try so the little piglets are surviving 😃
K
Snails. For open wounds use snails, especially the European red slug, quite frequent in our gardens this rainy spring, summer and fall.
https://www.nabu.de/imperia/md/nabu/images/regional/niedersachsen/projektschnecken/140908-nabu-arion-lusitanicus-spanische-wegschnecke-walter-wimmer.jpeg
Highly unpopular with hobby gardeners, their slime is an anesthetic and heals, most predators who try to devour them immediately spit them out as their mouth goes numb, disorienting them. So no, my monitors won’t touch them, but the Aussie blue tongue skink does, (s)he’s a snail specialist.
Where were we? Ah yes, the new BN release with Ritchie thinking “If this Northern upstart from Saltburn-by-the-Sea can repackage everything, so can me and my missus!”.
Fires At Midnight (FAM) was BN’s third album, it was where Candice’s initial girlie voice began to gain timbre. It is also one of the BN albums with only a minimum of cheese (but there is still excruciating stuff like Home Again and All Because Of You on it) and featured more electric guitar from Ritchie and less glossy, overtly commercial effects. It is probably fair to say that for this reason it is a favorite among many DP and Rainbow fans (I personally prefer the follow-up Ghost Of A Rose).
Listening to the new remix/remaster, the difference to the original release is not as immediately apparent as on the anniversary release of the debut, but the new FAM version is more somber and sparser than what was released 2001. If you wanted to be nasty – which I never am – you could say FAM 2024 sounds like very good demos to FAM 2001. But if you are in need of a dose of Ritchie close up, feel invited to purchase, FAM 2024 sounds more intimate. Ritchie was back then still (and by then already, if that makes sense) quite nimble on acoustic guitar too, there is lots of guitar to enjoy.
The liner notes in form of another one of those notorious interviews by Eheleute Blackmore do not reveal much about the motives for rereleasing a remix now, my Landsmann Eike Freese did the remix and remaster in Hamburg.
We do learn however that Ritchie’s two favorite American songwriters are Billy Joel and Robert Allen Zimmermann. Which ties in nicely with the fact that Billy Joel is always inquisitively interrogating David Rosenthal and Chuck Burgi about their time with Rainbow and whether Ritchie was “heavy” on them – I hope you have not forgotten how I already told you a while ago that the two have been part of BJ’s live band for decades. I won’t tell you again.
Other than that Candice offers helpfully, after Ritchie has described Guy Fawkes as his sartorial role model and how he met his fate by being hung, drawn and quartered (a popular English practice of the times) for his explosive feelings about English Parliament: “It’s a happy story!”😎 So now we know, you little darn tea-bags-in-harbor-chucking insurrectionist tax dodger!
There are two bonus tracks with Candice’s current voice overdubbed: Written In The Stars and Fires At Midnight (the song). She’s more than 20 years older and a mom of two now, not Barbara Streisand yet, but slowly getting there timbre-wise. Nice, Candice does have a pleasant, natural voice. Not a rock chick, but still. I think I would like to hear her do a Carole King tribute album one day.
“Sake of the Song” is also included, not a part of the original album, but recorded at the same time, it is one of those infuriatingly merry BN jigs they insist on doing to have people in peasant garb jump around at their gigs. Pass!
So there you have, Uwe’s fair and largely sarcasm-free review of Ritchie’s most recent pension fund feeder.
PS: Lest we forget, Sir Robert of Normandie’s lyrical bass playing on Fires at Midnight (the song) is beautiful. I miss him in the current BN line-up. His style is reminiscent of John Gustafson’s which doesn’t make him the best choice as a Rainbow bassist, but he fit well with BN.
September 29th, 2024 at 20:07They are not – gasps for breath – “lizards”, they are varanus reptiles, Frau Verndal, ich muss schon sehr bitten!!! Been around longer than we have!
https://media1.tenor.com/m/gIzmfcS1-rcAAAAC/komodo-wild-animals.gif
And yes, they are definitely not vegetarian, no banana peels for them! 😉 But while I do feed them live insects, the baby mice 🐁 they get about once a week (bones, fur and entrails are all good for their health) are strictly of the frozen type. I don’t see a point in being needlessly cruel with mammals and spare them the experience of being swallowed alive by a hungry monitor.
YouTube is full of clips of people staging “gladiator fights” in their terrariums where a predator then hunts some poor prey. I think that is mostly in very poor taste, if violence and death throes turn you on, go watch the SAW franchise, but don’t stage stuff like this with animals in captivity.
September 29th, 2024 at 21:33@15 -A mouse, it looked more like a rat the poor thing. @ 14- Uwe was trying to reconnect to the medieval era, hence my leech recommendation. Apparently it used to work, in certain aspects. However as you said Karin in today’s world it is much better to be more civilised. Oh hang on, we are talking about Uwe here are we not, he he he. The barbaric mice handler who enjoys feeding them to his captured lizards. Dr Jekyll anyone? Cheers. The first image is for Uwe’s online appearance being rather different to his other side.The second image is for any coffee junkies that get desperate for their fix.
https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoon?searchID=CS565339
https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoon?searchID=BA500439
September 29th, 2024 at 21:42@ 19- I forget to add the caption from Uwe’s wife & daughter standing there in that Dr Jekyll & Mr Blog cartoon. They look so dismayed at how much time Uwe spends at THS site & they almost look as they have totally given up on him. They are probably not the only ones though, he he he. Cheers.
September 30th, 2024 at 06:48@18
September 30th, 2024 at 06:53Uwe I would recommend you to get a dog! They are beautiful, wonderful, intelligent animals that do seem to love hanging around us human beings 😄
My very own doglet Anton (named after ‘probably the best’ chocolate in the world ☺️) is highly intelligent, also emotional clever! And it’s a great joy in my life to take care of him.
Well sorry I’m not the person to tell other people what to do 😇
K
@19
You’re right, it did look like a white rat (shiver in my bones)
Coffee junkies are also people (yes we are 😄)
September 30th, 2024 at 06:55Have a lovely day
K
Nonsense, it’s a thumb-size semi-adult white mouse, the whole monitor himself is only 70 cm and most of it is tail. I’ve actually kept a white rat as a pet – they’re smart animals, have a real social life and tame better than any other rodent.
I grew up with dogs (German shepherds and poodles, the latter were always in control because they were smarter), the only reason we don’t have a dog is because my wife never gets over losing pets as you eventually do unless you keep a tortoise that outlives you: A couple of years ago I saw an ad in a reptile keeper magazine and they were looking for a new home for a pair Greek tortoises which had come to Germany in the early 40ies when their keeper brought them from Greece where he was stationed as a Wehrmacht soldier!
Dr Jekyll & Mr Blog – that is actually a good observation. I firmly believe that decorum in many social networks would be better if people had to use their real names as handles/monikers. It is why I from a certain point on only used my real and full name. (My mother had so many middle names, she decided that not one of her sons would have a single one! 😂 Her names as printed in her identity card were “Elisabeth Charlotte Christine, Rufname: Liselotte”.)
September 30th, 2024 at 08:55@23
I understand your wife sentiments completely, but it will never keep me from living with dogs 😍
Oh I have had GSD too, (two actually) and I feel the urge to correct you a little bit Uwe, GSD are way, WAAAY, more clever than poodles!
I don’t wanna discuss it, because that is just how it is 😂
Hey I am using my real name!
September 30th, 2024 at 11:20K
Poodles are ill-tempered, but smart! There is a reason why they were preferred circus dogs.
Our GSDs were gentle and straightforward. No match for the always scheming poodles.
September 30th, 2024 at 13:57@25
September 30th, 2024 at 18:28Well I guess dogs can be as different as people are ☺️