Ritchie Blackmore, Cozy Powell and Ronnie James Dio were sitting around a fireplace at a French château, drinking and trying to write songs for Rainbow’s Long Live Rock ’n’ Roll. They weren’t having much luck.
That’s when Powell decided it was time to confess something.
“We were all very bored,” Blackmore recalled in a 2024 Instagram Q&A. “And we were getting a little bit kind of irritated because we were not coming up with any ideas.
“And Cozy said, ‘Okay, I have to own up.’ And we looked at him, because we’d been drinking, as usual, and we said, ‘You have to own up about what?’ He said, ‘Are you ready?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I like ABBA.’”
Blackmore’s response was immediate.
“To which I went, ‘Oh my God. I love ABBA.’ And then Ronnie goes, ‘Yes. So do I.’”
So there it was: three of the biggest names in hard rock, all apparently embarrassed to admit that they were fans of Sweden’s biggest pop group.
“And with that, Cozy runs off to get all the ABBA songs and to play them,” Blackmore continued. “And we played, for hours, all the ABBA songs, around the fireside in this chateau. We should have been writing our own songs, but it was much better to listen to ABBA.”
The story sounds almost too perfect to be true, but Blackmore has never been shy about his admiration for ABBA. In a December 15, 1979, interview with U.K. weekly music magazine Sounds, while Rainbow were promoting their Down to Earth album, he said, “I like popular music and I like ABBA very much. Enjoy them. But there’s so much stigma involved with it — like, ‘You can’t do this because you’re a heavy band’ — and I think that’s rubbish. You should do what you want.”
More than four decades later, Blackmore was still singing ABBA’s praises.
“I think ABBA was the best band,” he said in the 2024 Q&A. “I always listened to ABBA when I was a kid. It was so melodic, and it just worked. It was fantastic. And they are probably my favorite band of all time. And I know it’s uncool to say that in certain areas. But they were wonderful.”
But Blackmore’s affection for ABBA eventually went beyond listening to their records. In 1980, he had an opportunity to meet Agnetha Fältskog, one of ABBA’s singers, and the two discussed the possibility of working together.
Agnetha came down to a soundcheck in Stockholm. Cozy and me were playing something and she walked in and there was consternation — she was so beautiful.”
— Don Airey
On January 18 that year, Rainbow were playing Stockholm as part of their Down to Earth world tour. During the band’s soundcheck at Johanneshovs Isstadion, Fältskog came by.
In his 2006 book Black Knight: Ritchie Blackmore, author Jerry Bloom recalled Rainbow keyboardist Don Airey’s account of the encounter.
“[Agnetha] came down to a soundcheck in Stockholm. Cozy and me were playing something and she walked in and there was consternation — she was so beautiful. I think they had a meeting the next day; it was going to be Rainbow with Agnetha, we were going to do an album with her.”
Airey’s recollection gets even stranger.
“I remember it well because there was a Russian ice-skating troupe and it was their day off so we took over the ice rink but all the Russians came down to watch and they were standing around with Russian hats on so we started playing ‘Kalinka’ and they all started dancing and that’s when Agnetha Fältskog walked in and everything stopped.”
Blackmore later confirmed that he had met Fältskog and that their respective management teams had discussed the possibility of a collaboration. Nothing came of it.
Fältskog eventually embarked on her solo career, releasing her first English-language solo album, Wrap Your Arms Around Me, in 1983.
And that brings us to the album track “Once Burned, Twice Shy”: there’s an electric guitar part on the song that sounds remarkably like Blackmore.
That, in itself, wouldn’t be especially remarkable. Plenty of guitarists can sound like Blackmore, and the guitarist officially credited on the track is Lasse Wellander, the Swedish session guitarist who played on numerous ABBA recordings.
But listen closely to the phrasing, tone and especially the slide guitar, and it’s hard not to hear echoes of Blackmore.
Compare it with a couple of examples of Blackmore’s slide playing with Deep Purple and Rainbow:
Could Blackmore have played on Fältskog’s recording? There’s no evidence currently available to say that he did. Wellander is the credited guitarist on “Once Burned, Twice Shy,” and he died in 2023.
But the lack of a Blackmore credit doesn’t necessarily settle the question. Uncredited appearances on other artists’ recordings are hardly unprecedented; Eric Clapton, for example, played the guitar solo on the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” without receiving a credit on the original album.
So the Blackmore theory remains nothing more than speculation, until he or Fältskog settle the question. Until then, it is certainly one of rock music’s more intriguing what-ifs.
