Classic Rock
Ritchie Blackmore has explained how he came to walk onstage with Deep Purple on 12 August at the Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York, where he played “Smoke on the Water” with the band for the first time since 1993. He does so in the first of thirteen instalments of an interview with Phil Aston of Now Spinning magazine.
“I sat up in bed and thought, ‘What about if I got up on stage, as they’re in the area?’” says the 81-year-old guitarist. “They’re playing a great place called the Jones Beach Theater. And it’s outside, and the view is over the water. Magnificent place. And I’ve always wanted to play there.”
The email went out from his wife, Candice Night. “How do you feel about me just asking Ian Gillan if it’s all right to play in Smoke On The Water, then just disappearing?” he asked her. Gillan said yes and the whole band was up for it. Blackmore only ever wanted one song, and he picked that one because it is bigger in the United States than in Europe. “And so we kind of advertised it in a little way. Not much, just enough. And funnily enough, the ticket sales went up, which was nice.”
Of the night itself he says everybody was “incredibly nice” and that his “three or four minutes” of the song “seemed to go down like I just invented the cure for cancer”. “It was like playing with old friends… It’d been, like, 35 years since I’d actually played with the band, and nobody had changed.” It had been thirty-three: the last time was in 1993.
Gillan, in the new issue of Classic Rock, says it came as no surprise: “I’ve been in touch with Ritchie for quite a long time now, and we’re on very good terms. All the nonsense from the past is now water under the bridge.” Blackmore played one song, and no other has been announced.
Text by Enric Vilaplana