“Wanted to play very very loudly”: The 1969 album Ritchie Blackmore couldn’t stand working on
In the 1960s, the high art of history and the low art of popular culture were forever being fused together in the blistering wordplay of writers like Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, but also through the blending of sweeping orchestral strings and more modern sounding music production techniques.
There was no shortage of great arrangers working at the time, least of all Lee Hazelwood, who perfected the blending of string sections with contemporary rock music. Then there was Burt Bacharach, who, to put it simply, is one of the great composers of any kind of music, from any time in history.
Madman Phil Spector revolutionised the ‘Wall of Sound’ production style, and The Beatles revolutionised the world, with a little help from their friend George Martin, laying complex string tracks over songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, A Day in the Life’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Penny Lane’.
But not everybody was enamoured with the blending of orchestral elements with rock and roll music, and not even everybody who was involved in the phenomenon themselves. Admittedly, some groups did take it too far, as evidenced by the frankly bizarre amount of baroque influence exerted over the British invasion bands in the second half of the ’60s.
Deep Purple were melding psychedelia and progressive rock on their 1968 debut Shades of Deep Purple, but by the time they came to make their second album later that same year, The Book of Taliesyn, keyboard player Jon Lord wanted to bring another element into the mix as well: classical.
To bring his idea to life, Lord came up with string arrangements to alternately underscore and illustrate the more contemporary rock elements of the songs, with ‘Anthem’ particularly notable for its incorporation of strings. In fact, Lord even defined Deep Purple as a “symphonic rock band” and pushed for the group to bring their sound to the stage, which resulted in the 1969 live album, Concerto for Group and Orchestra.
Recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, Deep Purple were accompanied on stage by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Malcolm Arnold. However, not everybody in the band was pleased about the direction that the group were taking. Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who joined the group at the same time as Jon Lord, has been incredibly outspoken over the years about his disdain for the classical aspects of Deep Purple’s early output, telling various interviewers at various times over the years that “I couldn’t understand why we kept playing with orchestras. It started to get up my nose”.
“The first thing was a novelty, a band playing with an orchestra. I didn’t think it was particularly good, but we pulled it off. Then Jon wrote another one, and they wanted us to do it again. I went, ‘No, no. I’m not getting involved again. I’m in a rock ’n’ roll band’,” he elaborated, and later reiterated, “I was very very moody and just wanted to play very very loudly and jump around a lot. I couldn’t believe we were playing with orchestras. We kept getting lumbered playing with them”.
Blackmore was more interested in what groups like Led Zeppelin were doing than in the kind of direction that Lord wanted to take the group in, and laid his cards on the table, telling them that they needed to at least make one try at a rock and roll LP with the promise to play with orchestras forever if it didn’t work out. The album they made next was 1970s Deep Purple in Rock, which became their best-selling release. “Luckily, it took off”, Blackmore said, “so I didn’t have to play with orchestras any more”.
