Phil Collen: “Ritchie Blackmore was the reason that I play guitar”
For all the fairweather musicians in the world of hair metal, Phil Collen of Def Leppard has been known as a real guitarist’s guitarist. While many of the casual fans of Leppard know him for pumping out the riffs and his newfound allergy to wearing a shirt whenever he goes onstage, Collen has been known to study the intricacies of what guitar was supposed to be, loving the sounds of everyone from hard rock greats to jazz players. If it weren’t for Ritchie Blackmore, Collen would have probably never picked up a six-string in the first place.
As far as Blackmore was concerned, playing just rock was never going to be quite enough. Rock and roll had still been a new art form throughout the 1970s, and if he wanted to progress, he would need to pull from some older styles of music, incorporating everything from jazz to classical music to whatever demon crawled into him to fit his sound.
While most of the band had a distinct sound going throughout their career, Blackmore remained the epitome of pushing himself forward. Once he found out that his musical dreams weren’t going to cut it in Deep Purple, some of his best work came out when working with Rainbow, going from the Renaissance angle with Ronnie James Dio at the front to becoming a hard rock superstar again with Joe Lynn Turner singing on tracks like ‘Stone Cold’.
By the time Rainbow started, Collen was already showing his own technical finesse as a guitar player. Working in the glam rock outfit Girl, Collen got his real chance to shine when he had to sub in for an ailing Pete Willis on Def Leppard’s Pyromania, with the rest of the band giving their old guitarist the boot once they heard what Collen could do.
Even though there are hints of players like Al Di Meola and Jeff Beck laced throughout Collen’s playing, his DNA was altered when he saw Blackmore in action, telling Metal Evolution, “Ritchie Blackmore was the reason that I play guitar. My cousin took me to see Deep Purple, and I was just like, ‘Oh my god!’. He was smashing his guitar, and you know, his playing was just off the charts”.
If there were any guitarist who deserves to act like a disgruntled mess onstage, Blackmore would be one of those elite few. While he did have his minor grievances onstage, his way of dealing with them by throwing his guitar around his body is still some of the most spectacular stage moves any guitarist has ever done, including playing the guitar behind his ass.
That didn’t stop every other guitarist from taking every wrong lesson from Blackmore, though. Throughout most of the later periods of hair metal, a lot of guitarists figured out really quickly that you didn’t need to be a technical master as long as you were able to act like an absolute idiot in teased hair and a guitar instead.
For Collen, it was never just about what Blackmore could do onstage. It was about getting the most sound out of this little wooden thing with strings, and Collen has continued to carry the torch for what the overall eclectic guitar player should aspire to be.
