Ritchie Blackmore is on the cover of Guitar Player magazine issue #704 (February 2021), with an article inside starting with a ’73 vintage photo spread on pages 38-39. He is also featured in the reader’s poll of the 40 greatest hard rock guitarists. The publisher does not appear to be selling individual issues, just subscriptions, so a trip to one of them newsstands (remember those?) might be in order.

Thanks to Gary H. for the info.

A short documentary from Dutch TV on the story behind this iconic Deep Purple tune, with interviews from Roger Glover and Ian Gillan. Continue Reading »

Edel/earMUSIC will release Don Airey’s band Live in Hamburg in February this year. This show is from March 14, 2017, and took place at the Fabrik club in Hamburg.

The setlist contains a healthy mix of tracks from the bands Don’s been involved with over the years as well as some originals.

CD1

1. Nuclear attack (originally by Gary Moore)
2. Pictures of home (originally by Deep Purple)
3. Shooting star
4. I surrender (originally by Russ Ballard)
5. Still got the blues (originally by Gary Moore)
6. Desperado (originally by Colosseum II)
7. The way I feel inside
8. Lost boys
9. Is this love (originally by Whitesnake)

CD2

1. Child in time (originally by Deep Purple)
2. Difficult to cure (originally by Rainbow)
3. All night long (originally by Rainbow)
4. Lost in Hollywood (originally by Rainbow)
5. Hush (originally by Joe South)
6. Since you’ve been gone (originally by Russ Ballard)
7. Black night (originally by Deep Purple)

Release date, according to at least one online retailer, is penciled in as February 26, 2021.

Don Airey band are:

• Carl Sentance – vocals
• Laurence Cottle – bass
• Simon McBride – guitar
• Jon Finnigan – drums
• Don Airey – keyboards

Thanks to Yvonne for the info.

Don Airey will be a guest musician on the upcoming album of his Rainbow ex-bandmate Graham Bonnet. Que the singer:

Similar to the first two albums, it will reflect different eras of my career, but with a contemporary twist. Also, we have some heavy hitting guests including Don Airey and others yet to be announced. I’m very excited to be playing on an album with Don again. Aside from being my longtime friend and former bandmate, he is one of the most incredible musicians I have ever had the pleasure to play with, he’s a “real” keyboard player… a classically trained pianist. I’m also delighted to be playing with the original members of the Graham Bonnet Band: Beth-Ami Heavenstone who has been my constant partner (on and off stage) since meeting back in 2012, guitarist Conrado Pesinato, who’s innate musical style elicits some of my best songwriting, and the iconic Mark Zonder (Fates Warning, Warlord) on drums.

The album is due some time in the summer 2021. More guest names are hinted in the announcement.

Thanks to BraveWords for the info.

An interview with Ian Paice will appear on the Rob Sas Rock Show tomorrow, January 5, 2021. The show is on the air between 1-3pm Central // 7-9pm GMT via Pure Rock Radio. It should also (eventually) appear in the show archives. Paicey’s previous appearance on the show was quite delightful, so we’re all looking forward to it.

In the meantime, we can entertain ourselves by listening to Don’s interview on the same show from 3 months back (that would be some time in September-October 2020, in the wake of Whoosh release).

In other Paicey related news, he has reached out to the two young drummers he had featured on his DrumTribe youtube channel — Sina and Yoyoka:

MESSAGE TO SINA AND YOYOKA

Hello Ladies,
I hope you are both safe and well.
While we are in this “lockdown” situation and not able to play our music in the normal way,I thought you might like to have a bit of drumming fun.
Obviously we can,t meet personally at this time,(apart from the Covid situation we are in different parts of the world!).
I was thinking of creating something between the 3 of us . Nothing serious or demanding,and definitely “not” a drum “battle”.
More like an orchestral percussion section,working with,and for each other.
As we all know, the technology available to us today allows us to do this as if we were in the same room.

I have thought no further than this at the moment,but as we have all had positive responses to our clips on You Tube,it could be fun to do something together.

Let me know if its something you may enjoy doing and I will start working out the details.

Get back to me with a “yes” or “no” through the ipdrumtribe@yahoo email.

Respect,

Ian.

Both girls promptly accepted the invitation. So there’s something else in the pipeline to look forward to.

Thanks to Akemi Ono for the heads up.

Music Radar celebrates Ritchie Blackmore’s legacy with 5 of his songs guitarists need to hear that aren’t Smoke on the Water. And even perhaps each of us would list 5 different ones, it’s not the worst way to entertain yourselves during a holiday lockdown (like it is in this heck of the woods).

Best of 2020: The explosive genius of the Deep Purple and Rainbow guitarist is spread far and wide across a stellar catalogue. Five best tracks? Surely it’s mission impossible…

Where do you start with Richard Hugh Blackmore, a man so preternaturally gifted with the electric guitar that one suspects he was not so much born but summoned onto our earthly plane?

There’s a whiff of the Arthurian about the erstwhile Deep Purple and Rainbow guitarist; the enormodome his Camelot, the Fender Stratocaster his Excalibur.

Nonetheless, the Ritchie Blackmore legend was built on earthly pleasures – rock ’n’ roll, Marshall stacks, treble boosters, riffs… Y’know, the good stuff, and it assumes the form of one of rock’s most formidable discographies from one of its most combustible protagonists.

Maybe we should start with Smoke On The Water, a song Deep Purple wrote as they watched their studio burn down in Switzerland. It’s a classic in the Deep Purple fashion, with a righteously groovy 70’s rock verse supporting the Blackmore’s stark monolith intro/chorus riff. But most of us already know that one.

That’s the first thing you learn on guitar, right? And if you work in a guitar store, there are very few treatments to disentangle that genius riff from the post-traumatic association with a long Saturday afternoon on the shop floor.

To that end, we have not included Smoke In The Water here. That’s the first disclaimer. Second is to note that with Deep Purple and Rainbow, Blackmore recorded dozens of tracks that should be listened to, studied, celebrated, and played loud of a Friday night, and we can’t get to them all. Five is the rule… mostly.

Continue reading in Music Radar.

Thanks to BraveWords for the info.

Don Airey has contributed his keyboard skills to a new single by Swedish musician Stefan Berggren. It is called Wild Flowers and is a preview for Stefan’s yet unnamed upcoming solo album. His previous album Stranger in a Strangeland, released in 2016, featured contributions from Bernie Marsden, Stephen Bentley-Klein, and Neil Murray, among others.

Another of Don’s guest appearances came out earlier this year — a Tunisian band called Myrath has released a live album Live In Carthage via earMusic in April 2020. The album featured bonus track called Believer which was a studio remake of one of their more popular songs with Don on keyboards.

And just not to make a separate post about it, Paicey is featured on the cover of the December 2020 issue of Czech magazine Muzikus, with an interview inside.

Thanks to Yvonne for the info.

Paicey reacts to a Burn cover of an 11-year old Japanese drummer Yoyoka Soma. Continue Reading »

Another article originally published in New Musical Express on July 8, 1972. This one is by Tony Norman and based around an interview with Jon Lord that must have been taken, according to the description, during the day on July 1. The question discussed appears to be the rumours of the imminent split of the band, which Jon vehemently denies, but admits that the last few months have indeed been difficult, starting with the fire at a certain Swiss casino. Bad luck continued to plague the band after that.

About the fateful North American tour earlier in the year:

But when we had to cancel the second American tour because of Ritchie’s illness, I think everyone was down. Really down. We just looked at each other and said: ‘What do you do? Shall we carry on, or what? That was probably the worst time we’ve had.

We were in Flint, Michigan at the time, in some horrible Holiday Inn. There was a howling blizzard outside and the phone call came through from New York, where Ritchie had been to the hospital the day before. They said the tests were positive. Ritchie had hepatitis. He had to go home immediately.

It really cut us up. We were sad for Ritchie and it just seemed like we were never going to shake the bad luck. We were less than halfway through the tour. We did try to carry on and do some crucial dates with Al Kooper, who’s a friend of ours. We rehearsed together and it could have been okay. Next day he rang up and said he didn’t feel too good. Two days later he was in hospital with food poisoning.

Next we got a guy called Randy California to play with us. We really wanted to do a show in Quebec, you see. In the end the concert was good, but the rehearsals were crazy.

To make us feel better the record company had hired us a couple of limos to go to and from the rehearsal hall. Coming back the first evening, the limousine we were in caught fire. So the other car picked us up. It got four blocks, then burst a tyre.

It was all building up to the point where we said, ‘I just want to go home and be a chartered accountant? We just wanted to forget it all! But I think we weathered that one.

Read more in Geir Myklebust’s blog.

This has nothing to do with Purple whatsoever (apart from the fact that one of them also plays bass), but may or may not put a smile on your face. It did on mine. Cheers! Continue Reading »