On August 12, 2026, a moment long thought lost to rock took place: Ritchie Blackmore returned to Deep Purple after 33 years away and decades of fights with his great adversary, the vocalist Ian Gillan. The reunion was brief—just six and a half minutes, the length of the performance of Smoke On the Water, featuring rock’s most famous guitar riff, written by Blackmore. It took place during Deep Purple’s 2026 tour stop in New York. “Historic reunion,” Rolling Stone headlined.
The 81-year-old guitarist set aside his grudges and prompted the get-together. “I called… well, I didn’t call him directly; I sent my AI carrier pigeon to Ian Gillan, who currently lives in Portugal. I said, ‘What would you think about me coming onstage just for the encore? Just one of the songs. I don’t want to be a bother.’ He loved the idea; he ran it by the rest of the band and they gave the go-ahead.” Musically it was not a memorable Smoke On the Water: Blackmore, wearing a voluminous wig, showed slowed hands and played an erratic solo; and Gillan, also 81, has long struggled to reach the high, piercing notes that defined his style. Time has taken its toll on both of them. Understandably so.
But the point was seeing them together—smiling, trading jokes and, finally, in the final stage of their lives, closing a wound the size of a volcano. “Ritchie is in poor health: gout, back problems, osteoarthritis, migraines… He’s canceled all his concerts because he can barely play,” says José Galván, a Deep Purple specialist who has published two books on the band’s members, with a third in progress. Galván believes the guitarist’s surprise move stems from “a final wish—to leave this world in peace by settling his differences with his former bandmate.”
Deep Purple, which performs in Barcelona on Monday and in Madrid on Tuesday (without Blackmore, evidently) to present their 2026 album Splat!, has had a successful yet turbulent career, especially in the singer and guitarist positions. Ritchie Blackmore founded the band in 1968, but it was not until 1969, with Ian Gillan’s arrival, that the group took off with albums such as In Rock (1970), Fireball (1971) and Machine Head (1972), which included their unsurpassable classics Speed King, Child In Time (Gillan’s voice is immense), Highway Star (featuring one of heavy rock’s greatest solos by Blackmore), Space Truckin’, Lazy and the aforementioned Smoke On the Water. The guitarist wrote the music and the vocalist wrote the lyrics. Bassist Roger Glover backed them both, with contributions from keyboardist Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice. The five formed the most iconic lineup among Deep Purple’s many incarnations.
By 1972, with relations between Blackmore and Gillan already fractured, the guitarist decided to use one of his poisonous tactics against the singer. He recounts it without shame in the documentary The Ritchie Blackmore Story (2015): “I had seen Paul Rodgers [vocalist of Free and Bad Company] sing, closer to the blues, and I loved it. Ian said to me: ‘Tell me what you want me to do; if you want me to sing like that I will.’ But I answered: ‘Ian, you can’t sing like that; that’s blues.’ I think after that he faded. It was as if he had been rejected, and we went downhill.”
A succession of departures and returns began. Gillan’s first stint ended in 1973, and Ritchie hired David Coverdale, who had a meaty soul-and-blues voice in the Paul Rodgers vein—exactly what he wanted. But in 1975 Blackmore himself left the band and formed Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio, another vocal titan. They released superb albums like Rising and Long Live Rock and Roll, but again the feud between guitarist and singer broke up the partnership. Blackmore returned to Deep Purple in 1984, though disputes soon reemerged. Spain experienced them firsthand: at a 1985 concert at the Rayo Vallecano stadium in Madrid, Blackmore refused to perform the encore, none other than Smoke On the Water; Jon Lord had to cover the famous guitar chord sequence on the organ. The relationship between the two leaders deteriorated to the point that Blackmore convinced the other three members to fire Ian Gillan in 1989. The singer returned in 1992 to try to steady a Deep Purple in free fall. The reunion lasted just over a year. In November 1993 Blackmore left Deep Purple for good.
After that they avoided one another and, in interviews, opted for either silence or disparagement. In 2005 this writer interviewed Ian Gillan and asked him about the origin of the problems between him and Blackmore; he only gave evasive answers. Years earlier, in 1998, Jon Lord told EL PAÍS more directly: “The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s not worth trying to play with Ritchie Blackmore. When he returned to the band he insisted on turning it into his own group, a mistake we are still paying for.” Lord is the only member of the golden-era quintet who has died, passing in 2012 at the age of 71.
“To simplify, I would say the problem between Blackmore and Gillan is a matter of egos,” Galván suggests, though descriptions of their personalities help form a broader view. Colin Hart, road manager for Deep Purple and Rainbow between 1975 and 2000, describes Blackmore’s behavior in his autobiography: “As part of his very particular personality, he never tolerated people being happy. If he discovered someone was enjoying themselves, he simply became unbearable. As a consequence, he tried to sow chaos continuously, because only when others were nervous, worried or sad was he happy. Knowing this, managers and tour logistics staff would pretend in his presence to be busy with intractable problems or heated arguments, thus preventing Ritchie from making things difficult. Seeing them suffer made him happy.”
In The Ritchie Blackmore Story the guitarist offers his version of the conflict’s origin: “He [Gillan] was a dominant type, an alpha male, and so was I. He wanted to control, I wanted to control. So we clashed constantly. We couldn’t be in the same room.” In that same film, Queen guitarist Brian May ranks Blackmore among the greatest axe men in rock history: “He’s a fireball. His technique is incredible. Where does it come from? I have no idea. And that was before Jimi Hendrix….”
The question hovering over the band’s history is what might have happened if Gillan and Blackmore had stayed together—like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the Rolling Stones—despite their differences. The author finds a positive side to the split: “We got Whitesnake’s career [David Coverdale’s band], Rainbow and Gillan’s solo work. Also, during Steve Morse’s time as guitarist [1994–2022] they recorded brilliant albums.”
In the meantime, Blackmore adopted robes, wide sleeves and layered troubadour-style fabrics and devoted himself to playing the mandolin, the hurdy-gurdy and the acoustic guitar in Blackmore’s Night (with occasional Rainbow revivals), with his wife, Candice Night, a duo he calls “medieval folk.” His mother-in-law acted as his manager. It’s assumed that the confrontational tactics that fueled the angry guitarist in Deep Purple gave way here to a more peaceful coexistence.
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