RITCHIE BLACKMORE announce not to perform in music industry again due to….

In a new interview with Greg Prato of Ultimate Guitar, DEEP PURPLE guitarist Simon McBride was asked to name the most difficult part to play that was originally written and recorded by founding PURPLE guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. He responded: “Most of it is actually not too bad. There’s one little lick which annoyed me for a long, long time; it’s in ‘Lazy’. I don’t play the same solo he plays in ‘Lazy’, but ‘Lazy’ is one of those songs where I feel I can just improvise a bit more and just have a bit more fun with it. But there’s this one lick he does in it, and I said, ‘I have to play that.’ And it’s a bitch of a lick. It’s not ultrafast. It’s just there’s a lot of chromatic stuff in it and slides in a very tight space, within three or four frets, and that’s it. So that, to me, is the hardest thing about playing PURPLE. Everything else, Ritchie was never really a full technician. So, nothing was really difficult to play technique-wise. Ritchie was more of a creative player. Even ‘Highway Star’, the fast part in that, it’s fast, but it’s not John Petrucci from DREAM THEATER or something ridiculously fast. It’s fast, but it fits the song. But everything else that he played was more just melodies. Ritchie played for the song most of the time. But yeah, that lick in ‘Lazy’ — that still haunts me every night when I come up to it. I’m like, ‘Oh shit, don’t screw it up!”

DEEP PURPLE‘s new album, “=1”, is due on July 19 via earMUSIC. The LP marks DEEP PURPLE‘s first material with McBride.