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Thu 23 October 2025 20:15, UK
There’s no accurate way to describe the kind of impact that The Beatles had on the world in such a short timeframe.
As much as people liked to think that they were a fad when they came out on the Ed Sullivan Show with that long hair singing rock and roll, there was a certain innocence about their music that resonated far beyond any kind of traditional pop song. And while Ritchie Blackmore was an avid fan of everything the Fab Four did, he knew that times needed to change as well.
Rock and roll didn’t get to become a cultural force by being stagnant for decades at a time, and it took people like Deep Purple to help shift the conversation. The genre had become much heavier in the years since A Hard Day’s Night, and while Blackmore was more than happy to make the kind of solos that George Harrison wished he had written, he was a lot more interested in modelling his career off of what bands like Led Zeppelin had been doing in the late 1960s.
But The Beatles were far from the first band to captivate people’s hearts. They were a phenomenon that set the benchmark for what everyone had to follow, but not necessarily from a stylistic perspective. There’s no point in anyone trying to sound like a carbon copy of The Beatles, but the massive outreach that they had is what people were going to remember from some of their favourite groups.
Just look at how rock and roll’s most legendary acts have risen to prominence. The Fab Four were never going to be on top forever after their breakup, but that’s when the torch began getting passed to different bands across the world. Led Zeppelin had a hold on it throughout the 1970s, and Kurt Cobain managed to pick it up in the 1990s, but once rock started fading from the mainstream conversation, the pop starlets were there to build that kind of hype.
And while many wouldn’t have wanted to admit it at the time, Taylor Swift knew what she was doing as a businesswoman in the industry. Everyone could make fun of her for writing breakup songs, but when looking at the artistic reach that she had and her ability to relate to her audience in a down-to-earth manner, Blackmore knew that the fans were reacting the same way he saw them acting in the 1960s.
There’s no real comparison in terms of musical style, but Blackmore knew that Swift had that same Fab power over her fans, saying, “When the family all get into the truck and we go on a bit of a holiday – which probably is like 20 miles down the road cuz I don’t like to travel – all I hear is Taylor Swift or something. I find it hard to relate to that, but it’s not wrong, it’s the new generation wanting to hear that. That’s probably as great to them as The Beatles and Cream and Jimi Hendrix was to me. So I can’t really complain.”
It’s not like Blackmore is really expected to like that kind of music, either. He had been in love with music from hundreds of years ago even before he split up Rainbow, but even if the vision of him performing his own version of ‘Shake it Off’ or ‘Bad Blood’ is enough to strike fear into the hearts of rock and roll fans, it’s not like the next generation is absolutely starved for quality songs with her at the top of the musical food chain.
Is Swift going to have the same kind of artistic range as the Fab Four? Probably not, but that hasn’t really been her goal, either. She cut her teeth as a singer-songwriter before anything else, and given how much John Lennon and Paul McCartney respected the songwriters that came before them, they both could appreciate the kind of impact that Swift was having on her own fanbase.
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