Gig 043 Rainbow


Rainbow
Oxford New Theatre
16 November 1977


I don’t really like heavy metal, never did if I’m honest. When I was 15 or so I bought Black Sabbath Vol. 4, couldn’t cope with its lack of tunes and general cloddishness, and quite quickly swapped it with a friend for something less, well, cloddish. I had a taped copy of the Paranoid album which had the benefit of being funny, and I was kind of ok with Led Zeppelin for a while, since they had melodies and something of a groove, though the lyrics were twaddle. Deep Purple, nah not really having it. Motörhead were ok because they were fast and punk-ish. So why would I want to see Rainbow? Probably because my friends were going, also I thought it might be entertaining, and in this respect I called it right.


Rainbow’s main man was ex-Deep Purple guitarist Richie Blackmore, who cultivated an image of dark menace in the style of Jimmy Page. He must have made a serious amount of money out of Purple and could have carried on doing so, but wanted to branch out and indulge his interest in classical and medieval music, some of which was on display at this gig and which I found most enjoyable. Metallers might have dismissed this stuff as dicking around but in general the audience were receptive, and after the show our prog-head pals Dude and Gol were full of it, which sort of made sense as there was a certain medieval quality about the pair of them. The group also featured noted sticksman and local boy Cozy Powell from nearby Wantage, and a funny singer called Ronnie James Dio, who was very short. This obviously didn’t bother him too much as his pre-Rainbow group was called Elf, he had a big voice for a little guy, and his stature lent a particular visual dynamic to the group which was only occasionally comical.


I was up in the gods for this gig and prepared to be a bit sneery from my architecturally and aesthetically lofty perch. Musically – apart from the early music stuff – it wasn’t my thing at all, but they were real pros and put on a top show, with ace lighting and a neon rainbow arching over the stage. Plus they could really play, which was very non-punk but impressive in its own right, even if I didn’t really like much of what they were playing. Towards the end of the set the drum riser started to move, raising Cozy Powell and his kit maybe 4ft into the air and slightly forward as he thrashed away like Animal out of the Muppets. Then it returned to its original position. ‘What was the fucking point of that?’ I wondered, almost aloud.

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