Interview with Ritchie & Candice in the Montreal Gazette - 11/08/03

Deep Purple guitarist mixes Renaissance into his rock: Fans turn up in
medieval garb for concerts by Ritchie Blackmore and Candice Night
Montreal Gazette
Saturday, November 8, 2003
Page: D3
Section: Pop Culture
Byline: BERNARD PERUSSE
Source: The Gazette

Right off the bat, Ritchie Blackmore gets credit for guts.

The guitarist wrote Smoke On the Water 30 years ago when he was in Deep
Purple, bequeathing one of heavy metal's deathless riffs to a generation of
headbangers. Most musicians with his kind of heavy-rock credentials would
have taken the easy way out and toured lucratively on that sound alone, well
into their retirement years.

Instead, the amplified axe is being eased into retirement. Flashy solos
rarely pop up in the music of Blackmore's Night, which Blackmore fronts with
lead vocalist and girlfriend Candice Night. If anything, you're more likely
to hear cornamuses and pennywhistles in the group's fourth and latest disc,
Ghost of a Rose. The album is a perfect introduction to the outfit's highly
melodic, Renaissance-flavoured songs - and most of the guitar work is
unplugged, leaving Blackmore without a net.

He picked up on the metaphor. "I just had to get used to falling off the
tightrope and hitting my head," he said. "And it is definitely a musical
tightrope: when you take up this music, unless you're a purist playing the
original form, people tend to scoff at it, saying, 'Well, it's not real
Renaissance music.' But it's not rock 'n' roll, so sometimes we fall down
that crack in the middle. Radio stations, when they even think about us,
don't quite know what to do with us, because we're not formula 'rock'."

Now there's an understatement: it has been decades since this kind of
ultra-British folky eclecticism has found a niche in record sales. For
precedents, you're back in the 1960s with the Incredible String Band,
Fairport Convention and Pentangle.

Given the group's sound, it's amusing that Night is from Long Island, but
her lyrical and musical contributions dovetail perfectly with Blackmore's
pastoral vision. "American children were brought up with fairy tales based
in the Renaissance time period," she said. "It's the stories, the magic, the
fairy tales, the castle up on the hill, the maiden waving the handkerchief
from the window and waiting for the knight in shining armour to come back,
the bonfires on the hills and the shooting stars overhead. It's really an
amazing, magical, mysterious, romantic, passionate, intense and
nature-filled time period."

Blackmore said he got hooked on Renaissance music in 1973 when he heard
David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. "I'd be playing rock 'n'
roll on stage, but in my relaxing time I'd be listening to Renaissance
music," he said. "And a lot of the time, we would holiday in German castles.
In (the mid-'80s), I bumped into an authentic band playing Renaissance music
in their castle. That was kind of the final straw."

Within a few years of that musical awakening, Night and Blackmore had become
a couple. In the middle of a 1995 recording session - when Blackmore was
fronting the hard-rock outfit Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow and Night was
adding vocals - they started to collaborate on acoustic material. "We'd play
new songs at our parties for friends," Night said. "When they started
requesting the songs that we had written together more than any of the old
standards, we thought other people might like to hear them, too."

Rainbow was still together when Shadow of the Moon, the first Blackmore's
Night album, appeared in 1997 - but a different musical vision had taken
hold. "The most important thing for me is not impressing the guitarists,"
Blackmore said. "It's carrying a melody."

Montreal has yet to enjoy a visit from Blackmore's Night, but if the
occasion ever comes, costume-rental businesses will have a field day: the
group's followers are known for following the lead of the musicians and
dressing up in medieval garb for the shows. By Blackmore's count, about 500
or 600 fans show up in full period regalia. "We used to promise people
front-row seats if they wore a costume," he said. "Eventually, there were so
many that we now have many rows for them."

Blackmore and Night say they don't leave the history behind when the show is
over. Even on their own time, they are rumoured to - gasp! - survive without
a cell phone. "It's very difficult to shut off every form of communication
and just be, just breathe," Night said. "People forget to do that and then
they can't figure out why they're so stressed all the time. They're stressed
because they don't revel in silence."

"When I first started playing this music, it felt like going back to an
older, simpler time. There's a lot of comfort in the past and I tend to long
for that," Blackmore said. "We're really like medieval hippies."

"Exactly," Night said. "Rock 'n' roll gypsy medieval hippies."

"Candy says I used to be evil - now I'm medieval," Blackmore said.

bperusse@thegazette.canwest.com

HERE'S THE ENTRY FROM MY 2003 TOP 10 LIST:

7. Blackmore's Night: Ghost of a Rose (SPV). Former metal god Ritchie
Blackmore and partner Candice Night turned the volume way, way down and
brought us Renaissance-flavoured folk with memorable melodies and
instrumental virtuosity.