Eric Clapton

As the late 1960s began, most guitarists were either in one of two camps: Eric Clapton fans and Jimi Hendrix fans. Although Hendrix was clearly the better player by most standards, Clapton held his own as one of the best guitarists the world had ever seen when he left The Yardbirds for the supergroup Cream. Whereas most people considered Clapton to be a musical God, Blackmore wasn’t quite ready to deify him when he first heard his playing.

Blackmore did have a healthy respect for the blues, but he only saw Clapton copying the best in his field, telling Creem, “When Cream came along, I thought, ‘Well, it’s all happening again.’ Although I was never knocked out with Eric Clapton’s playing, it was competent, and he was copping a lot of the English blues guitarist”.

Then again, it might just come down to how the Deep Purple guitarist looked at his craft. Blackmore saw himself more as a jack of all trades whenever he strapped on his guitar, but if you look at the rap sheet that Clapton has racked up over the years, blues and tasteful playing is something that’s in his bones at this point.

Punk rock

There’s a good chance that every famous rock band that made it in the early 1970s had a few words to say about punk rock. The genre always goes through different changes in style, but considering that the biggest groups in the world felt larger than life, it made sense for the next major shift to centre around bringing the music back to the clubs. The musicianship wasn’t a priority, though, and while most saw a new movement, all Blackmore saw was just a bunch of kids playing the bare minimum to qualify as musicians.

While it’s not necessarily hard to get the basics of a Ramones or Sex Pistols song under one’s fingers, Blackmore thought that most punk acts were absolute garbage, saying in The Ritchie Blackmore Story, “The editor of Melody Maker, the big paper in England, was saying how wonderful the music was. Ian [Anderson] was stunned, like, ‘Are you joking? This is awful. Dreadful stuff.’ And, of course, I tended to agree.”

The times were changing for rock and roll, but people like Blackmore didn’t come this far just to throw out his musicianship. He could find his place among classical musicians any day, and it was going to be a cold day in hell before someone like John Lydon even thought about getting in front of an orchestra to perform.

Fleetwood Mac

When talking about Fleetwood Mac, you usually need to specify what era you’re discussing. There’s the version with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham that everyone knows, but they were a completely different group once upon a time, with Peter Green leading the charge as a blues-soaked late 1960s outfit. That might have been right up Blackmore’s alley, but hearing the Rumours was never his brand of rock and roll.

When discussing his own vision for Fleetwood Mac with The Guardian, he felt that the amount of pop songs never sat well with him, saying, “I have reservations about what they’re doing. But the rest of America doesn’t seem to have reservations. It’s gone into this mellow thing and I’m not keen on that. I like intense music that comes across as drama.”

Even though Fleetwood Mac could make more downtempo material, it’s not like Blackmore’s repertoire was devoid of any slow songs, either. Then again, there was always going to be a dramatic difference between what Stevie Nicks did on a song like ‘Rhiannon’ and how Blackmore tackled the melodrama behind tracks like ‘When A Blind Man Cries’.

The Rolling Stones

The number-one thing that every artist is looking for in the industry is originality. It’s one thing to be able to play a million notes per second, but being able to actually say something that a million other people haven’t said is incredibly difficult once there’s a good hook behind everything. Deep Purple certainly carved out their own niche when they got started, but Blackmore thought that The Rolling Stones were nothing but a bunch of copycats when they struck out on their own.

During The Stones’ golden era in the 1970s, Blackmore thought that they hardly had any originality between them, telling Trouser Press, “The Stones? I considered them idiots. It was just a nick from Chuck Berry riffs. Chuck Berry was OK. Sometimes I’m outspoken, but I don’t have any time for the Stones. I can see why they’re respected and their rhythms are very good, very steady on record. I respect them, but I don’t like them.”

It’s not like Blackmore doesn’t have a fair point, with both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards pulling extensively from blues tradition and even copying what The Beatles had done in their prime. But when you look at their classic run of records, they held their ground until they became blues legends, eventually listening to those Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson records until they absorbed everything on records like Sticky Fingers. Blues as a tradition might not be the most original thing in the world, but it’s far from the idiotic caricature that Blackmore took them for.

Deep Purple

Blackmore has never exactly been known for playing nice with others. The guitarist always had a bit of an ego on him, even in the early days of Deep Purple, and that wasn’t about to change once they started having hits like ‘Smoke on the Water’ or ‘Woman from Tokyo’. Although Blackmore got his way when he motioned to fire Ian Gillan and Roger Glover in the late 1970s, he didn’t really like where Purple was headed when David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes joined, either.

After all, Jon Lord had already switched from his organ to a Fender Rhodes keyboard on Stormbringer, so it wasn’t like they were getting back to their roots. This was a hard rock version of soul that Coverdale was trying to do now, and despite playing on it, Blackmore was ready for a change of scenery the minute that he left with Rainbow.

According to Jimmy Bain, he couldn’t even be bothered to look at his old band, telling Metal Evolution, “I made the bad move of showing up with a Stormbringer T-shirt, and he threw it out the window. He didn’t care for that period of Purple at all.” All band separations can be tough, but it takes a special kind of animosity for someone to behave like a jaded ex who just got their heart broken for the first time.