By the time the New Wave of British Heavy Metal emerged in the late 1970s, Bruce Dickinson was still starting his career, gaining some recognition as the frontman of Samson. It was in 1982, with the release of The Number of the Beast, his first album with Iron Maiden, that he truly entered rock history. However, for a heavy metal band playing the style they did, a lot had already happened in rock and roll, and bands formed a decade earlier were important influences.
Throughout his career, Bruce Dickinson has spoken about many influential British groups, including Deep Purple, and shared his opinions on their guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore.
What is Bruce Dickinson’s opinion on Ritchie Blackmore
Bruce Dickinson is a huge fan of Ritchie Blackmore and likes practically everything the musician ever did. The band that influenced Bruce Dickinson the most when he was growing up was Deep Purple and besides considering Ian Gillan, one of his biggest heroes, the musician also revealed once that Blackmore is his favorite guitar player. “Steve Harris asked me (to join Maiden). I already knew Steve before I joined Samson. The first time I saw Iron Maiden rehearsing, I was immediately impressed by their music and mostly by Dave Murray. To me, he was a real ‘Guitar-Hero’ and his playing reminded me of Ritchie Blackmore’s, who’s my favourite guitar player. From then on, I was waiting for somebody to leave so I could replace him, ’cause I was crazy about that band,” Bruce Dickinson told Enfer magazine in 1983.
Not long after Bruce Dickinson became the frontman of Samson, when he was still known as Bruce Bruce, the band opened for former Deep Purple members, since the band was inactive during those years. In 1979 Samson was Ian Gillan’s opening act and in 1980, they had the chance to be Rainbow‘s special guest.
As Dickinson told MTV‘s Gastão Moreira in the 1990s, he had the chance to meet Blackmore and get one of his broken guitars. “I think my ex-wife still got it. (…) I’ve got one of Ritchie’s guitars that he smashed one night, signed (by him). (To get that guitar) for me was like a lifetime opportunity.”
Bruce Dickinson was sad after Blackmore left Deep Purple but he liked Rainbow
Curiously, Bruce told Double J in 2018, that Blackmore considered his name when looking for a new vocalist for Rainbow. Although he told the guitarist’s roadie on the phone he was interested in the job he never heard anything back. He recalled that story after choosing “Stargazer” as one of the songs which influenced him the most.
“I was a huge Ritchie Blackmore fan, so when he left Deep Purple and started Rainbow, the whole world was in turmoil. (So) I was 16 or 17 years old and it was the talk of all the record stores. I used to hang around with people who built motorbikes. I was around this row of garages and this guy was putting together something called a Triton – I think it was a Norton frame with a Triumph engine, a home-made bike. He was just putting it together was a spanner.”
“There was a transistor radio in the corner, it was a Saturday afternoon. Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s Rock Show was on, and I heard this thing coming out of the speakers. I was like, ‘Oh my god. What is that noise? Wow. Wow wow wow wow wow.’ Then the guy said, ‘Do you want to ride on the motorbike?’ So we went for a tear up the road, he was doing about 100 miles per hour and I was on the back. He took his hands off the handlebars and tapped me on the knees. Rainbow’s ‘Stargazer’ was the backdrop to it.”
He continued:
“Richie Blackmore allegedly was considering me as a singer in Rainbow. I got a phone call in the middle of the night, when I was in a band called Samson. It was Richie’s guitar roadie. He asked, ‘Are you interested in a job singing for Rainbow?’ I went, ‘Of course I am!’ And that was it, that was the last I ever heard of it. I asked later, ‘Was that for real? Was that a wind-up?’ They said ‘It was under discussion, but there was something to do with your trousers. He objected to the trousers you wore,'” Bruce Dickinson said.
A couple of years later, in 1988, he had the chance to record with Blackmore in the Rock Aid Armenia project, which re-recorded Purple’s classic “Smoke on the Water” with a supergroup. The two were part of the recording alongside names like Brian May, David Gilmour, Tony Iommi and Paul Rodgers.
In the following decades Dickinson performed Deep Purple songs live with the members of the band multiple times. He also toured with an orchestra paying tribute to the late keyboardist Jon Lord and his most famous compositions.
Dickinson is a huge fan of everything Ritchie Blackmore did during his career, including the other less praised eras of Deep Purple and Rainbow. He already said he loves, for example, Rainbow’s album “Down to Earth” (1979), which had Graham Bonnet on vocals.
Bruce Dickinson also likes Blackmore’s Night
Ritchie Blackmore formed back in 1997, alongside his wife Candice Night the Neo-Medieval Folk Rock band Blackmore’s Night. Despite a brief Rainbow tour in the 2010s, the artist has been focused on that group for the past decades.
Already in 1998, Dickinson praised Blackmore’s Night debut album “Shadow of The Moon”, released in the previous year. “One of my favourite albums is Ritchie Blackmore’s (Blackmore’s Night debut), this acoustic medieval album that he did. I just happen to love that record.”
“I got turned on to it by a bunch of people who were all metal fans who loved the record. They made tapes of it for me. I know this German bloke who loves the record too and he said all his friends were like ‘Arrgh, Blackmoore, what a traitor! What a traitor he’s doing stuff with lutes and flutes and stuff and like.'”
“And what’s so sad is that when he did that album he did what he has been playing and wanting to play for twenty years. You can hear it in all the early Rainbow stuff…”
“You can hear it in “Temple of the king”… It’s exactly the same, but they’ve never heard that. They’ve spent their whole life listening to the records and never heard beyond,” Bruce Dickinson told Mattias Reinholdsson.
Curiously, that record had another famous artist that Dickinson is a big fan of, the Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson. The Progressive Rock musician played the flue in the track “Play Minstrel Play”. Blackmore is also a big fan of Tull.