Guitar legend Ritchie Blackmore suffered a heart attack a year and a half year ago and has been warned not to travel by air, his wife, Candice Night, says.
Night, who performs with the former Deep Purple and Rainbow guitarist in their renaissance rock band Blackmore’s Night, says Blackmore has six coronary stents, indicating the rock guitar legend has coronary artery disease.
He will turn 80 on April 14.
News of Blackmore’s health was shared when Night spoke with Dawn Osborne of TotalRock about Blackmore’s Night returning to Europe for live shows.
“As far as flying anywhere right now, Ritchie has actually been told by his cardiologist not to get in a plane,” Night says. “He had a heart attack about a year and a half ago. He’s got six stents. And I can’t believe he’s gonna be 80 on April 14th, which is crazy.
“But he doesn’t look it, still doesn’t act it. But eventually medical things wind up catching up with you. So we’ve gotta make sure we keep him happy and healthy.”
Night adds that the guitarist is also suffering from gout and arthritis, while dealing with back problems.
“So it’s getting harder for him — it’s tricky,” she says. “But, hey, I’ve seen people younger than him in wheelchairs onstage doing what they do.”
While Night says she understands why Blackmore wouldn’t want fans to see him in a wheelchair, “I would think people would just be happy to be under the same roof with him and listen to him play whatever he comes up with,” she says.
Ages have passed since Blackmore was among the reigning guitar champions of rock. As Deep Purple’s axman, he was known for flaying his Fender Stratocaster around the stage in extended bouts of guitar destruction.
Blackmore also became known as one of rock’s loudest guitarists, due in no small part to his use of a specially modified Marshall amplifier. Although he was no fan of Marshall amps, he appreciated the volume he could coax from them, and had the company place the electronics from his much-loved Vox AC30 into a Marshall Major head and tweak its output from 200 to 280 watts.
Blackmore subsequently went on to form Rainbow, the heavy metal group he regrouped in 2015 for a series of live shows that marked the guitarist’s return to rock after years playing with Blackmore’s Night. Blackmore formed the renaissance-rock group with Night in 1997. Although best known for his electric guitar work, Blackmore also performs on acoustic guitar and various renaissance-era strings instruments with the act.
He is not the only guitarist whose health issues are affecting his career. Rockabilly guitar great Brian Setzer revealed in February that an autoimmune disease has left him unable to play guitar, although he said recently that he is “getting better day by day.”
Peter Frampton, meanwhile, is dealing with Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a degenerative order, that he’s been battling for the past 10 years. The guitarist made a surprise visit to the Martin Guitar booth at NAMM 2025, where he revealed he will tour and record in 2025 as his health allows.
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