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by Jeb Wright
Candice Night first met
Ritchie Blackmore at a charity soccer game. No one could have
predicted that as she walked away from that game with his
autograph that eighteen years later she would be fronting a band
with him and be his life partner.
In this interview Candice
recalls how Blackmore's Night was formed and how they have grown
to be the top act in the world of Renaissance music. The band
has captured their act live on the new DVD Paris Moon
and also recently released a Holiday CD titled Winter
Carols.
Candice also discussed
in-depth the mystery man Blackmore and how changing musical
genres has sparked creativity and happiness in his life. Aside
from music, Night also relates ghost stories from haunted
castles and talks about séances.
This is a candid interview
with a Candice Night, a refreshing breath of fresh air whose
internal light is shining brightly, illuminating the path they
have chosen to follow.
Jeb: The new DVD, Paris Moon,
is a little different than the last one that was recorded at a
castle.
Candice: This one shows how we
do our show indoors. We bring our three dimensional medieval
village with us as the backdrop and we have the lighting and the
projection behind us. The only time you can really get the
projection to work is if you’re indoors. The theater setting is
really controlled so you can see the projection screen really
well and that is something we couldn’t get across on the other
DVD.
Jeb: What was the venue?
Candice: It is a very famous
venue in Paris called The Olympia. We had never played as
Blackmore’s Night in France. It was a great way to start our
relationship with French audience.
Jeb: Did you plan to do a DVD
from the beginning?
Candice: When we were doing
Castles & Dreams, our record company had seen all the live
footage we had done. Usually, when we are onstage, especially
when you are at a castle, the audience is really receptive. A
lot of the music is Teutonic music that comes from the Germanic
region. We take these melodies and we add new arrangements,
lyrics and instrumentations and we bring them back. The
audience has a familiarity with them as it has a lot of their
traditional melodies.
We end up having a great time
playing at these castles and often play a very long time. We
change the set list every night so you never know what we are
going to play. When we made Castles & Dreams, we played
for about three and a half hours. Our record company called us
in a panic and told us that they only had room for two DVDs and
that one of them is already filled with the bonus footage. They
had to cut back the songs to make them fit on one DVD. They
told us that is how it had to be because they didn’t have
packaging for a 3-DVD release. We had to lose a lot of the
songs that we loved playing.
For our ten-year anniversary we
released Paris Moon and we were able to put the rest of
the songs that didn’t make the DVD on it. If you watch both
DVDs back-to-back then you will see a full Blackmore’s Night
concert. It is hard to get us off the stage when we are having
such a good time.
Jeb: Bands can fake it and go
through the motions but it is hard to fake when you are really
into it.
Candice: It is kind of sad when
you see documentaries on bands that you have gone and seen and
gotten caught up in the songs and then find out that they all
travel separately and they only see each other on stage and they
can’t wait to get off stage. It totally shatters your image of
what it is supposed to be.
It is nice for me on a musical
level and a personal level to see Ritchie pull creatively from
positive experiences instead of from friction, which he has had
for many, many years. Ritchie pulled some great songs from the
friction but Deep Purple was one of those bands who traveled
separately. Everyone wound up in different cars because they
couldn’t stand each other and they would just clock in and clock
out. It is a shame to see that happen to such a great band.
Jeb: You make an interesting
point on being able to be creative from a positive space instead
of a negative one.
Candice: It is interesting for
me to watch different emotions go through the creative process
and come out a song. Ritchie can pull from a negative place and
get everything out by shredding away on the electric guitar – he
is genius when he does that. He also pulls from positive places
and he enjoys himself. New instruments challenge him too. It
can be the hurdy gurdy or the mandola – there are so many
instruments that he can challenge himself with. It is
interesting for him.
Once Ritchie had a taste of the
creative freedom to play anything he wanted to play – not just
rock – he was able to break out of that box. He can play rock
when he wants to but he can also play folk or instrumental or
tavern music where everyone swings their beer mug to it. Once
you have a taste of that freedom then I think it is very
difficult to go back into that box and be nailed in; it becomes
very confining.
Jeb: Was it hard to break out
of the old mold or was he so pent up that it just came out?
Candice: It was really an
escape for what Ritchie had been doing for about forty years.
Most of what we were writing for Rainbow album, Stranger in
Us All, was written in an old farmhouse in Massachusetts. I
had known Ritchie since 1989 and the only reason I was there, at
that point in time, is that the singer, Doogie White, was having
a tough time coming up with lyrics. He came all the way over
from Scotland and they stuck him in a farmhouse with six feet of
snow on the ground that was miles away from anything. I think
he went a little stir crazy.
One day, I left from New York
to visit them. I took the ferry to Connecticut and was going to
drive the rest of the way. Ritchie called me up and said, “I am
going to play a backing track for you and I want to see if you
can come up with any words.” I had been a closet poet for
years. I hid my journals in my closet. He told me that if it
didn’t work then not to worry about it as they were going to
hire a professional lyricist. He played me the track and during
the hour and fifteen minutes I was on the ferry, I came up with
fourteen verses. It very inspirational looking out at the water
and it was so serene; seagulls were flying overhead and it was
great. I am able to open up and get through my creative process
by pulling from nature.
I got to the other side and I
drove up there and handed my verses to producer Pat Regan and he
went through and circled four verses and then pieced something
else together for the chorus and we had the song “Wolf to the
Moon”; we had a song immediately. I thought that was really
cool.
When the rest of the guys were
doing backing tracks, Ritchie and I were sitting watching the
snow coming down by this raging stone fireplace that was just
beautiful. He had the acoustic guitar and he was just playing
and I was singing. Most of the songs from Shadow of the Moon
came out of us just sitting and playing like that. At that time
Ritchie thought he was going to continue as Rainbow. We never
thought we would do anything as a band or put out an album. It
was only when we started playing some of the songs that we wrote
to our friends at our parties that we realized it was something
we could do. They were telling us that if we put out a CD then
they would buy it. We thought that if they liked it then some
other people might like it too. We talked to a record company
in Japan and they told us we could put out something if we
wanted to as long as Ritchie’s name was on it. That is where
Blackmore’s Night came from. Ten years later, here we are.
Jeb: How does Ritchie continue
to come up with new melodies on simple acoustic instruments?
Candice: If you look at a piano
keyboard or a guitar fret board there are only so many notes on
there. How does he keep doing it? I don’t know; it has to be
some other kind of power. I do notice that as he has started
playing other instruments, some of the scales are quite
different. He might be playing hurdy gurdy and he might expect
a certain note to be there but it is not because it is a
keyboard idea on hurdy gurdy. You end up having things thrown
at you from these different instruments and you end up getting
new ideas that you would have never thought of on electric or
acoustic guitars.
Some people were shocked at the
musical direction he went with but I have found that a lot of
the people who have been following him since 1968 – or even
before that with the Three Musketeers or the Outlaws – they
understand what he is doing. He was always into Renaissance
music. You can hear it on “Temple of the King” or “16th
Century Greensleeves.” He used to play King Henry the 8th’s
“Greensleeves” onstage in Deep Purple. If you listen to
“Smoke on the Water” he is playing that riff in medieval modal
scales to give it a darker sound in fourths and fifths. Anybody
who really lives and breaths Blackmore saw this coming. Now the
music has a softer female singer instead of one of those loud
screaming singers.
Jeb: Do the songs start out
with just Ritchie and you together?
Candice: Everyday after
breakfast we go right into music time. He practices about six
hours a day. He can have the television on and he will be
staring at the screen and not even know what is going on because
he is just playing away. I am the luckiest girl in the world
because I get to wake up in the morning and the first sound I
hear is the world’s greatest guitar playing sitting there
serenading the cats or the birds or just playing to himself.
Jeb: Do you ever stop him and
tell him to remember something he played because it was really
good?
Candice: I think everything he
does is really good. I would never stop him from what he is
doing. If you went to Match.com and you would have seen the
breakdown on him and me, then you would see that it should never
work. Everything is opposite. I am not just talking about the
age difference. We are totally opposite. I am the light and he
is the dark. He is the mysterious one and I am the light
airy-fairy chick. He listens to Renaissance music and I still
listen to 80's rock music. Our backgrounds and education are
different. Everything is worlds away yet because of that we are
like the ying-yang balance. We complete each other. All of his
strengths are my weaknesses.
Ritchie can improv his way
through anything. He will never play the same solo or the same
arrangement, not because he doesn’t want to but because he
physically can’t. He never does anything the same way twice and
that astounds me. It is hard for me to improv. I hear
something and it is like it is in a tape recorder in my head.
You can ask me how it goes twenty years later and I will know
exactly how it went, note for note. It works out well in this
project. Our fans come up to us with compilation tapes that
they have made and they tell us that these songs are from their
soil and their roots. We find incredible inspirations from
these songs that you might never stumble upon.
Jeb: Then, like you say on the
DVD, it goes through the Blackmore-izer.
Candice: That is the infamous
machine! Ritchie starts to play it but he can’t play it exactly
the same way. It is almost like you are hearing the spirit of
that song and it’s melodic content. He hears it and it goes
through him and it comes out the other side a completely
different song. Once he has settled on a melody that he is
pleased with – it still has the other melody but to the normal
ear it sounds completely different. If you knew where it came
from then you would hear that it has reflections of what came
before. He then presents it to me and says, “Try singing this
melody line.” Once he is happy with the arrangement and the
melody line then I will go and lock myself in the other room and
just sit down and come up with the lyrics. The great thing
about Ritchie’s music is that it is so visual. You can just sit
outside on your deck or in your garden and have a glass of wine
and you will have these pictures painted in your mind from
wherever the music is trying to take you. You have to be open
to that journey.
I close myself off from any of
the stresses and pressures from the modern world. I unplug all
the phones and turn off the electricity and light a couple
candles and really listen to the backing track. A story line or
a melody line always starts painting pictures in my head and I
just translate it so other people can hear it in words and
relate to it. I try to take a lot of myths and legends and
weave them into the images that are coming to me. I like to
have people be able to relate to it so they can be involved in
the storyline and see reflections of themselves within it. It
goes through all of that and comes out the other side and winds
up a completely new song than what it started out as back in the
fifteenth century.
Jeb: You guys are more that
just a band. You are really a family.
Candice: It is not just the
band. It is everyone who surrounds us. The security guys to
the management are all family. We involve everybody. We are
really lucky because a lot of the crew guys who are with us
really like a challenge. We will pull up on a dirt road or a
cobblestone street and we will say to them, “Do you see that
mountain up there? Well, there is a castle on top of it and
that is where you need to get the equipment up to. We will see
you tomorrow; have a great time.” We leave them on the side of
the road kind of scratching their heads.
We played these salt mines in
Poland – we just saw it on the History Channel. The only way to
get there is through the mineshaft. Our crew spent nearly
twenty-four hours lowering all the equipment down the
mineshaft. Imagine the soundboard, the lighting rig and
everything else all going down a mineshaft. They are an amazing
group of people. I think a lot of it comes through mutual
respect. Ritchie had been touring for a long time and he has
been through playing three shows a day and then having to
travel. He has been on the road for a year or a year and a half
and play shows nearly every night and then the one day off is a
travel day. Everybody either winds up exhausted or sick or on
autopilot. We reap the benefit of Ritchie’s experience. We
will get to a place and everybody gets a couple of days off to
acclimatize themselves to the time changes so no one has jet
lag. We stay in really nice hotels – there are no roach
motels. He really takes care of everybody. We will usually
play one day and then take a couple of days off. He gives so
much of himself on stage that he needs to recharge. The crew
guys get a couple of days off to rest. We are always refreshed
when we walk out on stage and that allows us to give our all and
be the best that we possibly be can every time we play.
Jeb: Having such a close knit
clan can be both positive and negative. I don’t know many
families that are not dysfunctional.
Candice: [Laughing] I am not
saying none of us are dysfunctional as we all are a little.
Luckily, we don’t have anyone killing each other. It takes a
special kind of person to be on the road. You never know when
you are going to have to run an obstacle course. You may have
to check out of a hotel at six in the morning because they have
decided to do maintenance in the room above you and all you hear
is a drill above your head. I think we have seen it all. We
have seen Salvation Army bands playing outside our window at
8:00am. They have decided to paint the hotel room the day you
check in and you can’t even breathe in your own room. We do it
for about a month at a time and then we come home for a month
and rest up.
Some people can’t do that; they
can’t bend like that. You have to be ready to go at any time
and you have to be able to roll with the punches. We call it
being road worthy. You have to be willing to deal with it. If
it is really a difficult situation then you know everyone is
dealing with it together so you don’t just turn to the person
next to you and snap at them. It is all part of the
experience. Luckily, we have a really good group of people who
all look at it like that. They really enjoy and appreciate the
moments on stage and the friends they have made in the band, the
crew or in the audience.
Jeb: You didn’t just adopt a
new musical style. You adopted an entire lifestyle. A lot of
people dress in the Renaissance garb for example. How does a
chick into 80's rock end up doing this kind of music?
Candice: If you remember,
Spandex was really big in the 80's so its really no different
for Ritchie to stand on stage wearing the tights now then it was
for him to stand on stage in the 80's – he just has a feather in
his hat now. Before he was with Purple he was an outlaw and a
savage and a musketeer. He always had to dress up in these
costumes. He told me that he has really been doing that his
whole life. Now, he has just returned to it.
Ritchie introduced me to this
kind of music, as I had never been exposed to it before. I did
go to Renaissance fairs. There is at least one Renaissance fair
in every state and they have huge turnouts yet it is the
unspoken subject as no one admits that they go to them. The
more people you talk to the more you will find out that they
have tights in their closets – whether they admit to it or not
is a whole different thing.
Ritchie is more into the
historical accuracy. Going back to the Purple days he was
listening to this music. Back in 1985 he met a band who played
in full minstrel garb. He asked them if he could be the
guitarist in their band. They said, “No, we don’t need a
guitarist” and they strolled away. As soon as they found out
who he was they came back and wanted him to join but he didn’t
want to do it anymore.
For me it was not so much about
the historical accuracy or the purist point of view. I like the
whole fantasy aspect of it. I love dressing up in costumes and
making it my own. I have never been one to follow fashion and
have some corporation tell me what is fashionable. I don’t want
them to tell me that if I don’t buy it, wear it or watch a
certain movie then I am not cool. I think that is the
ridiculous brainwashing that goes on today. If you follow
fashion then you are chasing your tail as five minutes after you
buy it then it is out. I think it is important to have your own
strong identity and your own personality. I think you should
express your opinions and wear it on your sleeve. If you feel
like dressing up as whatever your identity tells you to be that
day then do it. I think it is more important to do that then to
wear the same jeans that everyone else is wearing.
In my teenage years I got
turned onto to Stevie Nicks. Looking at the clothes she wore and
how she acted, she was always true to her femininity. Even
through the 80‘s when every other female in a band was crawling
across the stage and licking guitar fret boards, she stayed true
to herself. She always kept that mysticism and she always kept
the flowing skirts. She was a strong inspiration and I always
appreciated that strong feminine energy and how she was always
true to herself. I try to incorporate that into what I am
wearing and what I am doing on stage.
Jeb: Is there a spiritual
aspect to the music you play?
Candice: I think there
definitely is. I think it is easier for us to be spiritual. As
a pastime we like to light a bonfire in our backyard. We invite
all of our friends over and we get out all acoustical
instruments. Everyone is dressed in garb and we even have a
maypole in our backyard. We get back to that old style of
communicating. We watch shooting stars and we tell stories. We
wonder where we are going and we ponder the mysteries of the
universe. Someone will break into song and then we will start
talking again. I find it really charges your batteries as
opposed to everyone plugging into a one dimensional computer
screen. Everything is cyber-reality and you have all the
stresses of everyday life on you, more so than every before.
Twenty years ago when the phone rang that was going to be your
stress and then it was the phone and the fax. Look where we are
at now. We have the phone, the fax, the pager, the cell phone,
the email, the Blackberry and everything else. You cannot
escape it unless you put your foot down and say, “I have got to
make time for me.” Unplug everything just for five minutes or
for an hour or for an evening. Put headphones on and have a
glass of wine and enjoy the silence. I think many people are in
survival mode today and they just get up, go to work, come home
and eat something and go to sleep and then do it again the next
day. There is so much stress and rage going on because
everything is kept so internal. You need to go outside and
appreciate nature and the miracles that are right in front of us
everyday but we never notice because we are in survival mode.
We get a lot of our spirituality from nature. It is very
important but it is very easy to get away from that when you are
caught up in today’s high stress world.
Jeb: Ritchie has never stayed
in a band for ten straight years. How did you do that?
Candice: You don’t keep Ritchie
anywhere; he keeps himself. You don’t tell him what to do.
Jeb: What is different about
him? Have you been a positive influence on him?
Candice: We have this mutual respect. There is no ego in our
music making. It is all about the song. No one throws a temper
tantrum about not getting a solo or the lyrics not being about
this or that. We are really involved in the creative process
and the journey. If there is a problem with whatever we are
doing, we talk about it. No one slams the door and storms off
for a week and a half. If he has a creative idea and I am in
the kitchen then he can say, “I have this idea. Can you come
work on this with me?” and I am right there. We both have this
passion and love for the same direction of what we are doing.
Nobody is pulling us in opposing direction. We also don’t have
a record company dictating to us what it should be about. He is
in a really freeing stage of his life where he is able to do
anything that he wants to do. I think he has really earned
that and I give him a lot of respect. The man has been in the
business a long time and he has written some amazing songs. He
can play anything from finger style acoustic guitar to hurdy
gurdy to just wailing away on his electric guitar. He exceeds
himself and anyone I have ever heard. It blows my mind every
time I hear him pick up a new instrument. I don’t know if he
has ever had that kind of appreciation or if he has had anyone
kind of verbalize that appreciation to him in any other
situation he has been in. I have no problem going up to him and
saying, “You are fricking unbelievable.”
We also have the deal where he
is responsible for the musical aspect and I am responsible for
the lyrical aspect. He is the master of that domain and I am
the mistress of my domain.
Jeb: You have to travel to so
many awesome places outside of the USA. Does it ever get normal
to do that or is it still awesome?
Candice: I think because I am
an American and because I live in New York – I love New York
City. I love the energy of the city and at Christmas time there
is not a better place to be. A lot of times in interviews I get
people asking me why I don’t live in a castle or move to one of
the historical places we visit. I think if I moved to a place
like that then I would not see it through fresh eyes. I am able
to see through the eyes of a child every time I see a new place
or every time I put my hands on the stonewalls of a castle. I
think of all the different stories that have gone through those
walls. I think of what they would say if they could talk. The
castles blow my mind each time I go to one. They each have
different stories and histories that they have been through. It
is not just the historical walls of a castle that I think that
about. It could be one of those grand oak trees they have trees
in England that you could stand hand in hand with twenty-five of
your friends and still not make it all the way around. They
have seen just about as many stories as those castle walls
have. You can go to a Japanese shrine or to Stonehenge in
England or the crop circles – there are so many mysteries
throughout the world. I never get tired of it and it is always
inspirational. I have a lot of friends who live right down the
street from mysterious places and they drive past them everyday
when they are going to work, they tend to take them for granted;
they don’t even notice them. I never want to get to that
place. I always want to see it with fresh eyes.
Jeb: Have you stayed in any
haunted castles?
Candice: If we are not staying
in a haunted castle then we will bring our own ghosts. We
have stayed in a lot of places where a lot of interesting things
are going on. One that comes to mind is Waldeck in Germany. We
know the owners of the castle and we have played there a couple
of times and we stay there when we play. They have these
witches dungeons there. In a lot of places in Germany, the
place started out as a castle but later it became a prison and
they had the courtrooms right there. A hundred years later and
they are all hotels!
They still keep part of their
museum open with the original purpose of the area. The stories
are horrific. You can enter one section and you can feel the
air get heavy as soon as you enter the room. They still have
the torture devices in there. The have their courtroom there as
well. They would bring people who were accused of being witches
into the courtroom – hardly anyone got out of there alive. If
you had red hair or were too attractive or too ugly or gossiped
or had a mole then you could have been pulled in to go in front
of the courtroom. They were told that they were witches and
they put them in a holding cell. They walked them to the next
room where there was a hole in the ground that went down several
meters. They would bind their hands and throw them into the
hole on top of other dead bodies. There was no food and rats
were eating away at the dead bodies. If they survived the fall,
most of them didn’t survive, but if they did then they were
taken out a few days later and told to cross the river. If they
made it across the river then obviously magic must have helped
them and they were burned at the stake. If they didn’t make it
across the river and they drowned then they said the water
accepted their purity – either way they were dead.
Because we know the owners, the
tour guides came out at Midnight, dressed in garb from head to
toe with wax torches – it was like something out of a movie.
After hearing all of these stories, we went back to our room to
ponder all of it. As we were walking through the courtyard, we
opened the windows and looked outside and there was this moaning
coming out of the courtyard. There were chains going. Nobody
was out there. We have it on videotape. We ran out there and
we looked but there was nobody there. When you hear those
sounds then you know there are definitely other dimensions.
I am always amazed at people
who close their minds to the possibility of there being
something else. If you think about it, it was only a couple of
hundred years ago when they thought the earth was flat. It
takes a person to believe in another realm of possibility to
actually allow us to move forward with the knowledge that we
currently have. If you completely close yourself off to that
then you will never move forward spiritually, mentally or
emotionally. You will remain in the same place.
Jeb: Does Ritchie still do
séances?
Candice: Sure but it is not
like a Hollywood movie, though. The walls don’t start moving or
anything. It is really pretty tame. We are all made of energy,
whether it is coming from your heart or from your brain — that
is how they measure brain waves. Energy never dissipates or
dies; it just changes form. Where does that energy go when we
no longer need it physically? It has to go someplace. If we
are in the séance realm then we are really pulling on energies
of other realms. It could be from people who passed or
something else. Ritchie did a séance and he was speaking to
someone who was in Australia who was actually in an astral
state; he was in a very deep sleep. Ritchie was picking him up
on the séance board. Once you start thinking of that then that
opens up another realm of possibilities. There are so many
different aspects and ways to interpret that or think about that
idea. It is fascinating to think of the other dimensions you
can get involved with. Someone could not even have been born
yet or they are just an energy form or a thought process or a
guide. It is a fascinating subject.
Jeb: You met Ritchie back when
you worked for a New York radio station. I know you met at a
soccer game. Did you like him right off the bat or were you so
different that you did not automatically like each other?
Candice: I was very nervous
when I met him. He was really sneaky. His publicity people
called up the station and said that they wanted to play a
charity soccer match. They told us to take it easy on them
because they were getting a little older and that they were not
real good at this so don’t bring anyone athletic. I was working
at the radio station with guys who eat pizza and push buttons
all day. They don’t exactly run around.
The only guys who showed up
from Deep Purple were Ritchie and Roger Glover. They stacked
their team with ringers. The absolutely killed our team. It
was like 30-1 and the one was luck. I am kind of competitive.
I had played soccer before but they wouldn’t let me play – maybe
it was because I was a girl. I love it when they think you
can’t do anything on the soccer field because you are a little
blonde girl. I have a great kick. I am the secret weapon. I
am like, “Underestimate me.” I stand on the side like a pompom
girl until the ball comes to me and then I wail on it; it’s a
great feeling. We still play every Sunday and I love it.
After the game, I begrudgingly
went over to him and asked him for an autograph and
congratulated him on beating our team to a pulp. He actually
looked up and took the paper and said, “You’re a very beautiful
girl.” I thought that was going to be my Ritchie Blackmore
story, that he thought I was pretty. I walked through the crowd
with my little autograph and he sent a couple of his roadies
through the crowd and they told me he wanted to meet me later at
a little pub down the road. I went and we actually talked for
hours upon hours, into the early morning light. It was not
about music, we talked about the paranormal. We talked on many
levels and it was just like talking to an old friend even though
we had just met. We immediately clicked. After that he went
back on the road and I would get postcards or he would call me
and we would talk for hours. We were friends for a couple of
years and then it became more. We just celebrated our 18-year
anniversary on November 5th.
Jeb: At the time when you guys
started the band there were a lot of Purple and Rainbow fans who
thought Ritchie had met this young hot blonde and she was not
letting him play rock music anymore.
Candice: Oh yeah, that’s right,
I’m the Yoko Ono of the group. I love those people who think
they know everything and throw rotten tomatoes at you. Ritchie
has to follow his own path and his own heart. If he wanted to
do something else then he would do it. Nobody shackles him in
anything. He does what he wants to do and he always has done
that.
When he formed Rainbow all the
Deep Purple guys were pissed off that he went and formed
Rainbow. When he went back to Purple all the Rainbow guys were
mad. No matter what this poor guy has done it has been wrong.
We find now that a lot of the guys who have grown up with
Ritchie are in their forties or fifties. Although the Purple
stuff is amazing, a lot of it is nostalgia. It takes you back
to a great place. Now, a lot of these guys still love that
music but they are looking for something else now. They are
married and their wives don’t want to go see Deep Purple because
it is too hard and they don’t want to be surrounded by guys
wearing Iron Maiden shirts. The wives get pulled into our band
because there is a female singer and they like the visual
aspects of the show. But wait, there’s more! I feel like an
infomercial. But now they have children and the children have
that innocent mind. The little boys want to be Robin Hood and
the little girls want to be princesses. They want to dress up.
The parents of the parents are tired of listening to Tony
Bennett and they want to listen to something that is melodic and
is not screaming at them. We get the older crowd and we get the
entire family.
Jeb: Tell me about your holiday
album.
Candice: It is called Winter
Carols. We hope it is the first of many. We have been
playing these songs for many years so we decided to put out an
album. Every year we open the house up and invite all of our
friends over and have a huge Christmas party. We have magicians
and psychics and we just go crazy. They last for a long time;
usually it is about eleven the next morning.
We have to leave to go Germany
to promote the Christmas album but when we come back we are
going to have one of our legendary parities. Ritchie is
actually doing the house up now since we have to leave.
Jeb: Will you ever do a rock
tour?
Candice: A lot of times our set
list is based on the place we are playing. If we are playing a
place with stonewalls then we can’t because the sound will just
bounce right back at you. If we are doing a theater or we are
outdoors then Ritchie will break out the electric and we will do
more rock songs. Every once in a while he will even pull out
“Smoke on the Water.” I think it is nice for him that he does
not have to play the song. If he chooses to play it then it is
like having the cherry on top. You never know when he is going
to do it.
Jeb: Would you be the female
singer for Rainbow?
Candice: I leave the musical
decisions up to Ritchie. If he thought it was something that I
could handle then I would take my best stab at it. I tend not
to follow in the footsteps of any of the singers that he has had
before because they are all such amazing singers. Each one of
them had such a different identity. The Dio fans are not going
to like the Joe Lynn Turner stuff. Joe Lynn Turner has such a
soulful voice that is very different from Dio’s. It would be
impossible to step into all of those shoes, although they can’t
fit into my high heels either. I am ready to do anything he
wants to try whether it is with me or without me. We are always
really supportive of each other. Ritchie does play some of the
rock songs in Blackmore’s Night. We have even covered “Child in
Time.”
Jeb: The fans that have not
followed Blackmore’s Night think he has turned his back on
them.
Candice: There is a lot of rock
stuff in there. It is just so confining for him to play only
one style. It is nice for him to be able to pick and choose.
One of his favorite bands was Abba. There are a lot of
classical influences and great harmonies in Abba. I think once
people delve into it a little bit then they will see where he is
coming from a little more. I think they will see that the
decisions he has made are not really that different from what
his inspirations have been for many years.
Jeb: Now you are really
destroying the myth of the dark and mysterious Ritchie Blackmore.
I am picturing him putting up Christmas decorations and
listening to Abba....
Candice: [laughing] Should I
have not said that? Ritchie is a multidimensional personality –
I will leave it at that.
Jeb: Last one: I was watching
the Paris Moon DVD and I swear at one point I saw a guy in a
bunny suit hop across the stage.
Candice: I hear about that
hallucination quite often. I think the beauty of music is
evoking the spirit of the bunny to hop across the stage. It is
comic relief. He actually got that from Jethro Tull. Ritchie
was very taken by them years ago when he saw them have people in
bunny suits hopping across the stage.
www.blackmoresnight.com
www.candicenight.com
Please email us your feedback on this
interview
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