RITCHIE BLACKMORE & RONNIE JAMES DIO "On Stage Radio Special 1976" RB: I recorded the first Rainbow LP and I got back my old enthusiasm. How did you got an band together and also stopping your mum for saying you did the wrong thing? RB: I didn't tell my mother, I know she still thinks I'm in the same band which she didn't know what band that was anyway. In fact, I think she still thinks I'm working in London Airport where I used to work. No, she's great and anything I do by her is OK. I started the Rainbow thing with meeting up with Ronnie and Ronnie have been on tour supporting Deep Purple with his band called Elf on about six occasions and I noticed that... I thought, well he looks the type of guy that can't sing. So I immediately got hold of him and sure enough he couldn't sing. RB: Initially it was my idea to have a rainbow because I did a thing called the California Jam which had kinda fake rainbow behind us and that gave me an idea. I thought that looked quite nice. Then I forgot about it. And then we formed this band and with the name I naturally thought about well a rainbow would look nice above our heads with the lightning scafflod on the rainbow. Then we thought we should have a LP. So we made the LP and it started going from there really. And I thought well, I was really excited making the LP. There were no of these egos flying around. I'm not playing this and I'm not playing that. It was let's all play everything Ritchie says (loud laughter). But which incidentally is my favorite song, "Greensleeves". We didn't want to call it "Greensleeves" otherwise people would think it was the old "Greensleeves" which was written by Henry the VIII. It's be often put down as an anonymous, but it has been traced back that he wrote it. He was a very accompliced musician. RJD: I didn't have a title, we didn't even have a title, we had no title at all. It happened to be one of those kind of songs that had to tell a story my being a lyricist and in that particular case the melodywriter of the songs, we finished it off and I tell a particular story about a medieval concept of a lady who was taken away by the black knight and so on and so fort. We had no title and at the very end of it we said: fantastic song but what do we call it. Oh God, I don't know and Ritchie said "can we put 'Greensleeves' in it somewhere". And I said that's already been done, someone already wrote that song once and he said "What about '16th Century Greensleeves'". Great idea, so at one point in the song, I don't know how many people know this, but you hear way in the distance, only one time a little line being shouted by me saying 16th Century Greensleeves and so from that we took the title. RJD: "Starstruck" is about a real girl, named Muriel, who has followed Ritchie around for four, five years. She's a real fan of Ritchie's, she turned up in his garden in England, she's turned up in L.A. I think, hiding behind trees and all over the place so therefore writing it about this girl who's starstruck and Ritchie's being the object of her starstruckicity. RB: Ah yes, Muriel is one of those people, as Ronnie was saying, in fact I don't know what Ronnie was saying as I wasn't listening. She tend to turn up everywhere. I was having my breakfast, one afternoon, about six o'clock and I looked out into the garden and the bushes moved. And out popped Muriel's head. It was Muriel and I couldn't believe it, so I set the dogs on her. RB: "Mistreated", yes that's another song we do tonight. It's one of my favorites. I was inspired by B.B King to do that one. Not that I like B.B King, that's proberly why it was a bad song. No, I like the song, and it wasn't typical what Deep Purple did. It was very guitar orientated and there's actually no room for the organ. I thought it wasn't a song that represented Deep Purple. If we did "Woman From Tokyo" or anything like that that's just copying a Deep Purple song but "Mistreated" wasn't a Deep Purple song in my opinion. The lyrics were written by eh... David, but I mean there's not much to the vocal on it but we do in Purple. It was just a guitar riff I had in my head. RB: It was a case of... the band was so much into the soul side of things. They all were becoming very cool, collective and very composed, kind of everything has to be just right. It was becoming... there was no chances being taken and the music was becoming very boring to me. That was why I got out of it because it all was too tidy, neat and nice. And it was a nice little LP. I don't like making nice little LPs. Whether they sell or not is regardless to me. I like outlawish kind of LPs. RB: We have two sides to this band, we have a clowning side and a very agressive atletic side and we have a musical side, a laid back just plain, havin' a good time. It depends on the audiences just what we want to put across. Tonight we want to put across more of a musical less experimental a little bit, and that's what we did tonight. Some nights we do obviously an encore, we'll be very agressive and be more about kind of a hardrock band but tonight we wanna to laid back a lot and that's what we do a lot in Japan because they want to listen. If we find an audience wants to listen them we give them the material nice to listen to. It's no good thumping out and God knows what if the audience come to listen. Some audiences come to watch and you can always feel that within the first minute or ten seconds by seeing the audience. That's why tonight there were no breaking of guitars. It was just a very plain set but I enjoyed it because it was different to most of the sets we've been doing in Europe. Europe was kinda hectic. I don't like to be predictable. I like to go from one extreme to another. The next time we proberly play in Sydney, it'll be complete opposite.