Ritchie Blackmore’s reunion with Deep Purple on August 12 was a shock to anyone who’s followed the band, and with good reason. The tension between Blackmore and singer Ian Gillan was a major factor behind the breakup of Deep Purple’s Mark II lineup.
As Blackmore explained, he and Gillan were both strong-willed musicians unwilling to relinquish their vision for the group.
“He was, as they say, an alpha guy. So was I,” Blackmore recalled in the 2015 documentary, The Ritchie Blackmore Story. “He wanted to control, I wanted to control. So we butted heads because of that.
“We still respected each other, but we never got on. We just couldn’t be in the same room. That was the problem,” he explained. “We weren’t speaking, and it was just not going anywhere. I wasn’t speaking to him; he wasn’t speaking to me. We weren’t being creative.”
The animosity crippled the band. Blackmore had worked hard to get the right mix of musicians in the original Deep Purple lineup. After releasing three albums in two years, the group evolved into its Mark II lineup, featuring Blackmore and Gillan alongside bassist Roger Glover and original members keyboardist Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice.
This Mark II lineup yielded the band’s biggest successes, with hits like “Highway Star” and “Smoke on the Water” and albums including In Rock, Fireball and Machine Head. Blackmore had become one of the era’s reigning electric guitar heroes, as famous for shredding on a Fender Stratocaster as he was for literally flaying one onstage.
But behind the band’s success, the relationship between Blackmore and Gillan began to sour. The pair knew that one of them had to go or the band would meet a less-than-amicable end. Ultimately, it was Gillan who fell on his sword. Blackmore says the singer agreed to leave 18 months in advance.
The writing of the lineup’s last record, Who Do We Think We Are, took place during this tumultuous period.
“In the last year of the band’s life, I don’t think Ritchie or Ian Gillan spoke one word to each other,” Glover once told the BBC. “They became two poles, because the more one would do it, the more the other would do it. And the more one got away with it, the more the other one was determined he was going to get away with it.”
The growing tension and silence between the two musicians, coupled with a string of band-wide illnesses and fatigue, plagued the album’s creation. Like its predecessor, the album was recorded using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. Blackmore pushed for a return to their bluesy roots, having felt Machine Head was too commercial-sounding for his liking.
The record was a success, even with the dwindling harmony behind the scenes. It broke the top five in the U.K. charts and peaked at number 15 in the U.S.
Although the band had to shake up its personnel to survive, Lord was left to ponder what might have been.
“It was the biggest shame in rock and roll,” he said (via Ultimate Classic Rock). “God knows what we would have become over the next three or four years.”
More than 50 years later, though, the hostility that once defined the relationship between Blackmore and Gillan appeared to be a thing of the past. The two were all smiles after Blackmore’s August 12 performance, with Gillan warmly welcoming his former bandmate back to the stage.
“It was an absolute pleasure to have back on stage the founder member, the great legend, the immortal Ritchie Blackmore,” Gillan told the crowd.
