Rainbow

History

In 1975, Ritchie Blackmore walked away from Deep Purple — one of the biggest hard rock bands in the world — as he grew increasingly unwilling to follow the band’s move toward funk and soul.

What he built in its place was leaner, fiercer, and in many ways more uncompromising: a vehicle for his classical instincts and his vision of hard rock stripped back to its most dramatic essentials. Rainbow lasted, in various forms, from 1975 to 1984, again from 1993 to 1997, and once more from 2015 to 2019, sold more than 28 million records worldwide by some estimates, and left a mark on heavy metal that went well beyond that figure.

From Deep Purple to Hertford

The break had been coming for some time. By the end of the Stormbringer (1974) sessions, Blackmore’s vision of hard rock — rooted in classical structure and medieval atmosphere — had diverged irrecoverably from where Deep Purple was heading. On April 7, 1975, he played his final show with the band in Paris. His departure was formally announced in June.

The seeds of Rainbow had already been planted. During the Stormbringer tour, Deep Purple had been supported by an American band called Elf, fronted by the small-framed but powerfully voiced Ronnie James Dio.

Blackmore arranged sessions, initially framed as a solo project, that brought Dio and the core of Elf into the studio. What began as a handful of tracks became a full album. Blackmore kept the musicians, dropped Elf’s guitarist, and renamed the project Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, a name taken from the Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip. The band was formed in Hertford, Hertfordshire.

The debut album, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow (1975), established the blueprint: Blackmore’s neoclassical guitar lines cutting across hard rock structures, with Dio’s vocals soaring over everything. It was not a refined record, but it had an intensity and an ambition that set it apart. Before the band could tour in support, Blackmore replaced most of the rhythm section — dissatisfied with their R&B instincts — and installed drummer Cozy Powell, whose thunderous, measured playing would become one of Rainbow’s defining sonic signatures.

Rising and the Dio Years

The second album, Rising (1976), produced by Martin Birch, was where Rainbow fully arrived. Six tracks, no filler, recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich in under a month. The album opened with the churning “Tarot Woman” and closed with the roughly eight-minute “A Light in the Black,” and at its center sat “Stargazer” — a roughly eight-minute epic featuring the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and Dio’s most commanding vocal performance. In a 1981 Kerrang! readers’ poll published in the magazine’s fourth issue, it was voted the greatest heavy metal album of all time, and in 2017 it placed among Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Metal Albums.

The Rising tour exposed the fault lines that would become a recurring pattern. Blackmore fired bassist Jimmy Bain and keyboardist Tony Carey before the lineup settled again for the next studio record. Long Live Rock ‘n’ Roll (1978), again produced by Martin Birch, held to the same artistic vision and completed Dio’s tenure with the band. By this point, however, Blackmore was already pulling in a different direction — toward more accessible, radio-friendly hard rock — and Dio departed in late 1978. Within months, he had joined Black Sabbath, replacing Ozzy Osbourne.

The Commercial Era

With Dio gone, Blackmore recruited Graham Bonnet — a singer with an R&B and pop background who brought a rawer, more extroverted vocal style — and brought in Roger Glover, his former Deep Purple colleague, as bassist and producer. Down to Earth (1979) was a sharp commercial pivot. It produced two of Rainbow’s biggest UK hit singles: “Since You Been Gone,” written by Russ Ballard, which reached No. 6 on the UK Singles Chart, and “All Night Long,” which reached No. 5. The pop instincts that Dio had resisted were fully in play.

Bonnet played his final Rainbow concert at the inaugural Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington on August 16, 1980 — a show that also marked Cozy Powell’s final appearance with the band. Joe Lynn Turner took over on vocals and fronted Rainbow through three more albums: Difficult to Cure (1981), Straight Between the Eyes (1982), and Bent Out of Shape (1983), steering the band’s sound toward a more polished, radio-ready delivery.

Difficult to Cure, with its title track arranged from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, became the band’s highest-charting UK album. Straight Between the Eyes (1982) was Rainbow’s most commercially successful album in the United States, driven by the hard-edged single “Stone Cold.”

Disbandment and the Nineties Return

By 1984, Deep Purple’s classic Mark II lineup — including Blackmore and Glover — reassembled, and Rainbow was disbanded. A live compilation, Finyl Vinyl, appeared in 1986, and from 1984 to 1993 the band existed only in retrospect.

Blackmore’s second tenure with Deep Purple unraveled in 1993, when creative tensions — particularly with vocalist Ian Gillan — became irreconcilable. He left and rebuilt Rainbow from scratch, assembling an entirely new lineup around Scottish vocalist Doogie White. Stranger in Us All followed in 1995, originally conceived as a solo project but released under the Rainbow name. The band toured extensively, and a Düsseldorf Rockpalast show from that run was later officially released. But Blackmore’s interests were already shifting toward Renaissance and medieval music, a direction he would pursue with Candice Night in the duo Blackmore’s Night. Rainbow gave its final show in Esbjerg, Denmark in 1997.

Late Revival

In November 2015, Blackmore announced a return to rock under the Rainbow name for a series of concerts in 2016. The new lineup, built largely from musicians outside the classic era, featured Chilean vocalist Ronnie Romero, keyboardist Jens Johansson, and Candice Night on backing vocals. Two shows in Germany in June 2016 were filmed for the live album Memories in Rock, while a third performance at the Birmingham Genting Arena that same month was released separately the following year as Live in Birmingham 2016.

Four UK dates were announced for June 2017, but the Manchester show was cancelled following the Manchester Arena attack; the three completed concerts — London, Glasgow, and Birmingham — were documented on Memories in Rock II (2018), which also contained “Waiting for a Sign,” the band’s first newly written studio song since the Doogie White era. Further touring continued through 2019, but no new studio album materialized. By 2023, Romero’s time with the band was effectively over; Rainbow’s last performance came in 2019.

Legacy

What Rainbow built in the decade from 1975 to 1984 had consequences that stretched far beyond their chart positions. The Dio-era albums set a recognizable sound — neoclassical guitar, operatic vocals, fantasy lyricism, dramatic song structures — that influenced the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and became an important precursor to later power metal. Blackmore’s guitar approach, rooted in Bach and the Baroque composers, shaped the way many of the guitarists who followed him approached the instrument. The fantasy and medieval themes that Dio helped popularize through his writing became genre conventions, absorbed so thoroughly that their origins were easy to overlook.

Rising stood as the clearest statement of what Rainbow was capable of at full stretch: a record that sounded unlike anything else in 1976 and lost none of its force in the years that followed. The lineup instability that characterized the band throughout its existence — no two albums shared exactly the same membership — was part of the story, but not the whole story. Blackmore’s vision, however controlling and disruptive to the band’s lineups, produced music that endured long after the revolving cast had moved on.