It’s quite common for musicians to grow old and suddenly start despising every morsel of new music that comes out, needlessly criticising it for simply not being as good as things used to be back in your day. It’s OK – not everyone has to understand what the next generation is up to, but you can easily grow old gracefully and remain quietly confused about the labyrinthine progression of musical trends that came after your golden years.
However, if you’re anything like Ritchie Blackmore, then you’ve dedicated an entire lifetime to hating on things unnecessarily, and you didn’t even have to grow old to do it.
Now, I understand where Blackmore is coming from. I’ve had plenty of accusations levelled at me in the past for having been born with the disposition of someone in their mid-30s, but for all of my world-weariness that I went through during primary school, I do believe I’ve gradually regressed as I’ve aged. Inevitably, I’ll soon reach a point where all of my writing will degrade into infantile retorts about how such and such is a ‘stinky poo head’ and comparing each of the Teletubbies to their respective member of The Beatles.
Blackmore, on the other hand, hasn’t quite been so fortunate and has simply just been a curmudgeon since the moment he was thrust into the music industry. Even when he was at the top of his game, he was hating on other artists such as The Rolling Stones and Alice Cooper, and there have even been times when one can question whether he even enjoyed being a member of Deep Purple. Rather famously, he detested every moment of working on Stormbringer, which led him to eventually walk out on the rest of the band in a strop.
However, while he did have pleasant things to say about other acts such as Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, such gracious comments weren’t reserved for a contemporary icon of Deep Purple’s, and Blackmore vehemently condemned the work of David Bowie on multiple occasions. Dismissing his work as nothing but a phoney, he lashed out against the glam rock star in interviews, making it explicitly clear what he thought of his detrimental contributions to music.
“It seems as though everything in music today is fake,” Blackmore once claimed. “This glitter stuff, I can’t stand. David Bowie is pathetic. Just pathetic. He’s alright for people who are a bit naive and lost, I imagine, but to me it’s all very false.”
He would later say in a separate interview with Creem that Bowie and Cooper were regarded by the public as “the new messiahs”, and reluctantly found himself having to concede that “I guess that’s the way it is.”
However, because he didn’t like Bowie’s work, that also meant that nobody else in his extended social circle was allowed to like him either, and he took umbrage with Deep Purple Mark III bassist Glenn Hughes being invited to sing backing vocals on Young Americans, instantly vetoing the move. “Ritchie Blackmore was vehemently against it,” Hughes would later divulge to Classic Rock. “He thought it would be bad for Purple’s image. I was a bit pissed off about that.”
It probably wouldn’t have damaged the band’s reputation any more than the constant inner turmoil that Deep Purple were going through at the time, splitting for eight years from 1976 to 1984, but Blackmore was clearly true to his hatred of Bowie. As it happens, Bowie didn’t appear to be much of a fan of his either, and according to Hughes, when Blackmore walked out on Deep Purple, Bowie’s suggestion was that they found a new guitarist who didn’t sound anything like their departing member. The contempt, it appears, was very much mutual.
