Creativity Quote by Ritchie Blackmore

There’s a blunt, almost stubborn clarity in Blackmore’s phrasing: not “a rock band,” not “a band that could do rock,” but “a hard rock band” that would “play rock and roll only.” It’s a line that reads like a boundary being drawn in real time, the kind musicians make when they’re trying to outrun the gravitational pull of the marketplace. Deep Purple’s early years were tangled up in that late-60s expectation that serious players should prove range: a little psychedelia, a little pop, maybe some orchestral flirting to signal ambition. Blackmore is rejecting the whole buffet.

The specific intent is about identity control. By naming Gillan and Glover, he frames the push as a coalition, not a guitar-player coup, but the “and I” still carries the stamp of authorship: this is the camp that wanted the band to harden. The repetition of “wanted” matters, too. It implies resistance from somewhere else - management, label pressure, bandmates with different instincts - and it hints that the hard-rock direction wasn’t inevitable; it was fought for.

“Rock and roll only” is less a literal genre claim than a philosophy: commit to the riff, the volume, the swagger; stop sanding down edges for radio or respectability. In the early-70s arms race of loudness and virtuosity, that kind of purism becomes a competitive tactic. It’s also a retroactive defense of legacy: we weren’t dabbling, we were building a lane. The subtext is a musician insisting that the band’s most iconic sound was a choice, not an accident.