Ritchie Blackmore

Ritchie Blackmore — born in Weston-super-Mare, England, on 14 April 1945 — is Deep Purple's founding guitarist and the author of the most recognisable riff in the history of heavy rock. The four chords of "Smoke on the Water", recorded on Machine Head (1972), are probably the first thing anyone learns on picking up an electric guitar. But reducing Blackmore to that is unfair: his real contribution was bringing into rock a vocabulary that came from European classical music. Minor scales, progressions that sound baroque, phrasing that recalls the violin more than the blues — it was he who opened the path that melodic heavy metal and European power metal would follow in the decades that came. His relationship with Deep Purple was stormy. He left in 1975, at the peak, disagreeing with the soul direction the band was taking, and founded Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio — a brief and decisive partnership that produced some of the founding records of epic metal. He returned to Purple in 1984 for the Mark II reunion, and left for good in 1993. Since 1997 he has devoted himself to Blackmore's Night, a project of Renaissance music and medieval folk with singer Candice Night, playing lute and period instruments. It is an almost complete abandonment of rock, and one of the most improbable career turns of any musician of his generation.