[hand] [face]
The Original Deep Purple Web Pages
The Highway Star


The man who reinvented the guitar

Eddie Van Halen passed away on Tuesday, October 6, from complications due to cancer. Ritchie Blackmore paid tribute to the fellow guitar wizard: Eddie Van Halen was a brilliant guitarist who started a technique of guitar playing which was emulated by a whole generation of guitarists. He was one of the nicest musicians I ever […]

Read more »

Discovering a pleasant fellow

Trouser Press was a music magazine published in New York during the late 70s to early 80s. Their entire magazine archive is now available online, and issue 30 from July 1978 has a very interesting interview with Ritchie Blackmore. Where, for once, he is serious for the most part, and provides his thoughts at the […]

Read more »

The Trill Is Gone

Here’s something that you don’t hear every day — cover of a blues standard performed by William Shatner and Ritchie Blackmore.

Read more »

In the Shadow of the Wizard

A new book on the Rainbow by Jerry Bloom is going to be published by Wymer later this year. In The Shadow Of The Wizard is a full colour, 224 page A4 hardback coffee table style book that comprehensively documents Rainbow’s first formative period. The recording of the first album, whilst Blackmore was still a […]

Read more »

Fact check optional

Ritchie Blackmore had his own ‘Mr.Grover, Mr.Gillian’ moment yesterday when a German newspaper decided to publish a birthday note for somebody famous. So they’ve probably consulted a celebrity gossip calendar and pulled up a stock photo of a guitar player from Deep Purple to accompany the blurb that came down the wire.

Read more »

Live from Minstrel Hall, vol. 2

Ritchie Blackmore and Candice Night did another live performance from their home on April 9. Enjoy!

Read more »

Live from Minstrel Hall

Ritchie Blackmore and Candice Night posted a track of Diamond and Rust with reworked lyrics, recorded at their home in Long Island.

Read more »

Don Airey in Sweden Rock Magazine

Don Airey is interviewed in the latest issue (01/2020) of Sweden Rock Magazine. On Jon’s gear: As soon as I joined [Deep Purple] officially, I started using my own gear. In the beginning I toured with the band because Jon was ill. I used Jon’s equipment then and realised it wasn’t in good shape. Everything […]

Read more »

The loudest jazz band in the world

There are several old-ish features on Louder (online successor to the Classic Rock Magazine), done by Geoff Barton and published over the past few years. February 2015 saw a series of profiles on individual band members that were published in anticipation of the R’n’R Hall of Fame induction. Unlike the HoF people, Geoff knows his […]

Read more »

Sly hirings and swift firings

The ever prolific Martin Popoff has published another Rainbow book — Sensitive to Light: The Rainbow Story. He promises this to be a “major overhaul” of his out-of-print 2005 title English Castle Magic: 50% longer, at 120,000 words and 318 pages in 6″ x 9″ format two colour sections of photos (no pictures in the […]

Read more »

||||Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
© 1993-2025 The Highway Star and contributors
Posts, Calendar and Comments RSS feeds for The Highway Star