He may be Deep Purple’s longest serving guitarist, but Steve Morse isn’t expecting – or pushing for – a reunion with the band any time soon.
Morse joined Deep Purple in 1994, stepping into an unenviable role after Ritchie Blackmore’s departure, and went on to record eight studio albums with the band over a 28-year run. But since stepping away in 2022 to care for his late wife Janine, the guitarist has been candid about where he stands, and where Deep Purple are headed without him.
In a recent chat with Guitar Interactive, Morse was asked about the possibility of reuniting with the Deep Purple for one-off shows, to which the guitarist replies [via Blabbermouth]: “I think if the band felt differently, I would feel differently.”
“But I think that there’s a couple of guys in the band that were really glad for me to be gone, because they were sort of heading back to their roots and wanted just to be a rock band, and ‘don’t give me any of that fancy crap.’ And when you look at me as a writer, I definitely give you that fancy crap. I can’t help it. [Laughs]”
Which is why he doesn’t believe a reunion would make sense for either side.
“So I think the band’s happier the way they are, and it would be kind of a step back for them to wanna do something like that… Anyway, they’re happier and better off. And I think same here.”
Elsewhere, Morse has also opened up about the resistance he faced from some Deep Purple fans after replacing Blackmore. Speaking to Prog magazine about that period, he said that “For acceptance from a percentage of them, it took the first album and our first tour. But I never won over the whole audience. You can’t!”
That hostility sometimes turned physical too: “It sure as hell happened in the form of things whizzing by my face,” Morse recalled. “One of the bottles one time hit Jon [Lord, keyboardist] right in the head, nearly knocked him out.”
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