Blackmore’s Night: All Our Yesterdays

Somewhere over the rainbow...

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Those who’ve bought into Blackmore’s Night’s Renaissance/medieval musical world can fill their breeches as they dance around the maypole to this collection of jigs, reels and suitably reworked covers of Mike Oldfield’s Moonlight Shadow, Linda Ronstadt’s Long Long Time and Sonny & Cher’s I Got You Babe, where Ritchie Blackmore not surprisingly declines Sonny’s role, leaving Candice Night to duet with backing singer Lady Lynn.

Night’s voice remains a softer, more engaging version of Stevie Nicks’ piercing whine that fits the music and ambience.

Those in continued mourning for the loss of one of heavy metal’s greatest guitarists should suspend their myopia long enough to check out Darker Shade Of Black. It’s a mash-up of Albinoni’s Adagio and Pink Floyd’s Saucerful Of Secrets, which climaxes with a controlled, fast, fluid electric solo that perfectly illustrates where Blackmore now stands, while combining echoes of his past.

The only song that threatens to disrupt Blackmore’s Night’s idyll is the title track, a folky slice of Europop with a Teutonic stomp and a rousing bierkeller chorus. It’s the kind of song that could easily win the Eurovision Song Contest. Now that really would put an embarrassing dent in Blackmore’s legacy.

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Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.