DESCRIPTION:
[Ian Gillan:] "If you want to talk about Ritchie, I guess we have to — not many people do these days. But the truth of the matter is, from a historical point of view, the band was dying. If Ritchie had stayed in the band, it would have been the end of Deep Purple. The shows were getting shorter and shorter, the audiences were getting smaller and smaller. We were playing in small halls, and they weren't even full — they were half empty — and Ritchie was walking off stage every night. And so, when he left 20 years ago, it stopped raining and the sun came out, and Jon Lord, amongst others, started walking up straight; his personality re-emerged. So did Roger Glover and Ian Paice; they became they were people originally, instead of fending and cowering in case they upset Ritchie. And so this situation ended, and we're all glad it ended, and we had to rebuild. And, of course, now the distance of time is so great that we just remember the good times. And we remember Ritchie as a great player, a great performer, a great writer, and I remember him as my roommate; I used to share rooms with him. But something happened with Ritchie, and that's the end of that. So we remember the past as it was; it was completely and totally different to Jon Lord." [26/04/2013]