Ritchie Blackmore was born in Weston-Super-Mare, in the Southwest of England, on 14 April 1945. When he was 2 years old his parents moved to a place near London.
Even as a schoolboy he was interested in music. After having seen Tommy Steele on television Ritchie borrowed a guitar. He liked this musical instrument so much that he decided to learn how to play it. When he was 11 years old he took lessons in classical guitar music for one year. His first guitar was a Framus acoustics guitar.
He founded the 21’s Coffee Bar Junior Skiffle Group with a couple of friends. At the age of 15 he left school and worked at Heathrow Airport for two years. Then he finally decided to make music professionally.
In 1966 he moved to Hamburg, got married and played in different bands such as “Outlaws”, “Heinz and the wild boys”, “Glenda Collins”, “Houston Well” and so on around England and in Hamburg.
At the end of 1967/beginning of 1968 “Roundabout” was created that was renamed into the legendary “Deep Purple” during their tour around Scandinavia in the spring of 1968. Many successful concerts were following, tours and albums which became an important part in musical history, e.g. “Deep Purple in Rock”, “Machine head” and “Made in Japan”. In 1975 Ritchie left “Deep Purple” because of personal problems and founded “Rainbow”, an equally successful band (“Rising”, “Difficult to cure”).
“Rainbow’s” cast often changed and in 1984 they had their last concert in Japan. In the same year “Deep Purple” was refounded and immediately achieved top ranking in the charts with their album “Perfect stranger” such as “The house of blue light” in 1987.
In 1992 however the success came to an end. Ritchie fell back on something that had proved successful and founded “Rainbow” again. This time Candice was already part of the band as a background singer. In 1995 the album “Stranger in us all” was released and Ritchie was elected world-best guitar player by various magazines.
After a tour around the world in 1996 Ritchie indulged in his passion and started to play and publish Renaissance music together with Candice.
The beginning of

“Blackmore’s Night”