“That was my cue to do a ten-minute keyboard solo”: Deep Purple’s Don Airey recalls the time Ritchie Blackmore fell over onstage while soloing
With any band that partakes in intensive touring, they’re bound to have the odd on-stage mishap or two. It’s surprisingly not uncommon for musicians to literally take a tumble onstage – with heavyweights like Gene Simmons, Bruce Dickinson, and Avenged Sevenfold’s Synyster Gates not immune.
And when exactly that happened to Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, keyboardist Don Airey took it as an opportunity to dabble in a solo of his own while his bandmate recovered from the fall.
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The incident took place during Rainbow’s 1980 show at Sophia Gardens, Cardiff on their Down to Earth tour. Blackmore had a routine of leaning back against his guitar stack while soloing, but while it was usually supported by some roadies on the other side, they were absent on this occasion…
“Ritchie kind of gave me a wave as he was falling backwards and pointed,” Airey recalls in a new interview with Louder. “That was my cue to do a ten-minute keyboard solo!”
While we couldn’t locate any footage of the incident online, stages are relatively hazardous environments, with anything from wiring to a wet surface caused by rain potentially responsible for an onstage fall.
Elsewhere in the interview, Airey talks about his new solo album, Pushed to the Edge, which packs a cornucopia of riffs and solos into its 56-minute, 11-track runtime.
He explains how he insisted on the old-school approach of recording a full band together, but while having the “bass amp in one room and the guitar stack in another room”.
“It really worked,” he says. “It was a bit cramped, but I think that added to the atmosphere.”
On his favourite track on the album, Airey says that goes to the sixth song Out of Focus. “[That was] inspired by Focus, who are one of my all-time favourite bands,” he says. “Thijs van Leer, what a wonderful musician and organ player. He has been an inspiration to me for years. That’s my little tribute to him, really. There’s an organ solo where I play a bit of Bach, because Thijs was always playing Bach – [1972 Focus song] Sylvia, for example.”
Earlier this year, Don Airey explained why, in his opinion, guitarists are “very insecure people”. “They don’t really know how they do what they do,” he said.
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