Deep Purple’s Simon McBride names Ritchie Blackmore guitar part that ‘haunts’ him

Simon McBride has named the one Ritchie Blackmore guitar lick that ‘haunts’ him every night at Deep Purple concerts.

45-year-old Belfast guitarist Simon McBride permanently replaced Steve Morse in Deep Purple in September 2022, and he’s already performed more than 100 concerts with the legendary British rock band.

“Most of it is actually not too bad,” McBride responded. “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.”

He continued: “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 s—, don’t screw it up!”

Featuring the singles ‘Lazy Sod’, ‘Portable Door’ and ‘Pictures of You’, Deep Purple’s new studio album ‘=1’ is released this Friday (19th July).