“Just a joke”: The Deep Purple masterpiece Ritchie Blackmore thought Ian Gillian ruined
As one of the main forces to have emerged at the dawn of the hard rock movement, it’s a shame that Deep Purple often get overlooked when compared to their contemporaries in modern times. However, at the time, they were certainly not a band to be messed with, and were as formidable as anyone else.
The thing is, the group’s output was often overshadowed by their instability as a group, and the quality of their music was marred by the fact that disputes and lineup changes were seemingly around every corner. The band’s different incarnations, or ‘Marks’, as they refer to them, were held together by a handful of members who stayed faithful to the group, and one of the main creative forces acting as a binding agent for the band was guitarist Ritchie Blackmore.
All of the band’s finest records feature Blackmore, and when they were without him, they lacked a certain venom that he always brought to performances. That being said, that doesn’t mean that other members’ contributions, such as Ian Gillan’s vocals or Jon Lord’s organ playing, weren’t as valuable as what Blackmore offered, and they were just as integral to many of their records for how distinctive they made the band sound.
However, you would be pretty miffed if one of your greatest achievements was ruined by one of your bandmates putting in a less-than-acceptable performance, and while every member received writing credits on most of their material in the early years of the band, Blackmore wasn’t best pleased about a masterpiece being sullied by the ineptitude of a colleague. Given this, it becomes less of a surprise that the lineup of the band operated like a carousel, as the amount of mud-slinging that members were doing at one another stretches far beyond just this one instance.
According to Blackmore, it was Gillan who spoiled the perfection of their 1970 hit, ‘Child in Time’, although it wasn’t on the original performance. When Gillan rejoined the band in the ‘90s, his voice wasn’t up to scratch with how it had been 20 years prior, and while Blackmore could’ve understood that vocals can deteriorate with time, he wasn’t lenient with the frontman’s renditions of the song when it came to performing it live.
“Musically everything was great, but the singing thing was just a joke,” Blackmore recalled of his reunion with Gillan in an interview with Record Collector. “It was a pantomime and Ian would take the piss out of the audience. He would just not sing or forget the words, and he loved it. It was like, ‘I can’t do anything wrong’ and I was thinking it wasn’t fair to the audience.”
When Gillan kept removing the song from the setlist because he couldn’t manage to do it justice night after night, Blackmore realised that he wasn’t going to be able to stand for this lack of professionalism. “Nobody can sing it like Ian,” he claimed, before ripping into his bandmate’s declining abilities. “I thought, ‘This is not right, he’s getting out of it every night’. So of course that night I went back on after he told me we’re not doing it and started playing it. Got him! That was me saying I’d had enough.”
