Simon McBride joined Deep Purple in 2022, off the back of an established career as a blues solo artist and as a touring member of Don Airey’s solo band.
So, by replacing the outgoing Steve Morse and becoming the band’s fourth permanent guitarist, he busied himself with understanding the band’s guitar parts intimately.
While he had little issue with the bulk of it – indeed, Morse said he “nailed” the gig – there was one tricky little Ritchie Blackmore lick that had him stumped for a while.
“Most of it is actually not too bad,” he told Ultimate Guitar. “There's one little lick which annoyed me for a long, long time, it's in Lazy. I don't play the same solo he plays; Lazy is one of those songs where I feel I can just improvise a bit more and have fun with it.
“But there's this one lick he does in it, and I said, ‘I have to play that.’ And it's a bitch of a lick,” he expands.
“It's not ultrafast. It's just that there's a lot of chromatic stuff in it and slides in a very tight space, within three or four frets, and that's it. So that, to me, is the hardest thing about playing Purple.”
Blackmore wasn’t necessarily known as a particularly speedy or technical player, and McBride acknowledges that. But he’s been quick to praise his melodic sensibilities.
“Even Highway Star, the fast part in that, it's fast, but it's not John Petrucci from Dream Theater or something ridiculously fast, but it fits the song.
"Everything else that he played was more just melodies. Ritchie played for the song most of the time. But yeah, that lick in Lazy – that still haunts me every night when I come up to it. I'm like, ‘Oh shit, don't screw it up!’”
Guesting on Guitar Player's No Guitar is Safe podcast in 2022, McBride, who host Jude Gold called “a cold-blooded killer on guitar,” countered those who felt Morse wasn’t the right man for Deep Purple.
He believes Morse was the perfect replacement for Blackmore “because he was different. So sometimes when I play his stuff, it's not something I'd normally play, but it's cool to do. As a guitarist, you're always looking for new challenges. He's from the era of giants with Paul Gilbert and Satriani. You've gotta love him.”
Speaking to Guitar World that same year, he spoke about his leftfield approach to learning some of Morse’s parts, particularly the unison lead lines he’d share with keyboardist Don Airey.
“To learn things, I don’t necessarily pick up the guitar for the first two weeks; I’ll just sit and listen to the songs over and over until I’m sick of listening to them. When I actually sit down with the guitar, I like to be able to nearly play it already just from familiarity, knowing the chords and what positions they’re being played in.”
He continued, “I don’t think there’s too much that will be challenging for me. It’s mainly just remembering all the parts as a whole. It’s not like just learning a normal set with standard issue songs, which are verse/chorus/verse/chorus/solo and done. They have all these alternate endings and, as you said, those mad sections with unison lines.”
Deep Purple recently gave a very literal performance of Smoke on the Water – a song McBride says many guitarists are playing wrong. They played the song on the wakers of Lake Geneva in Montreux, where the song has its origins, with smoke billowing out from behind them.
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