DEEP PURPLE frontman IAN GILLAN spoke to KNAC.com recently about a number of topics. Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

KNAC.com: Your relationship with most of your mates from Deep Purple is good, obviously. Do you ever talk to Ritchie Blackmore?

Gillan: "No, I don’t talk to him at all. That asshole-I will never speak to him again, as far as I’m concerned. I loved Ritchie, though. I used to be his roommate and everything was fine. We all respect Ritchie for what he did--the foundation. But he turned into a weird guy and the day he walked out of the tour was the day the clouds disappeared and the day the sunshine came out and we haven’t looked back since. And there are certain personal issues that I have with Ritchie, which means that I will never speak to him again. Nothing I’m going to discuss publicly, but deeply personal stuff. As far as I’m concerned, the divorce came a long time ago. I never want to see or hear of him again."

KNAC.com: Are you friends with DAVID COVERDALE and GLENN HUGHES?

Gillan: "No. I know them, obviously, and I get on fine with them. I’ve only met David a couple times in parting. I’ve met Glenn a couple of times and I have great respect for him. He’s a great musician, a great singer. Glenn’s an extraordinarily talented man. But I wouldn’t classify them as friends because I didn’t develop any relationship with them because I was doing different things when they were in Deep Purple. And to be honest, that was a weird period anyway, because I take these things extremely personally and I get quite emotional about things. When I left the band I didn’t pay much attention to what Purple was doing—it’s like watching your ex-Missus making love to some other guy. That doesn’t turn me on."

KNAC.com: Obviously there is a blues influence in Deep Purple’s sound. What were you listening to around the time Deep Purple started?

GILLAN: "Deep Purple was not influenced by any one thing. Deep Purple was five different people that each brought their own set of influences in to the band from their formative years. So you had everything from classical music to Blue Note jazz to blues to delta blues to Chicago blues, you had folk music, you had southern American rock, you had American pop music, you had English pop music. You had blues, certainly. In my music files I’ve got the entire Chess catalog, which is probably my favorite collection of records along with my young Elvis collection. Motown, soul, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding. A lot of the things I grew up with. Dusty Springfield, Nat King Cole, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Wes Montgomery, Roland Kirk. All of these people were major players in my evolutionary years. Music’s been a good friend to me. My grandfather was an opera singer, my uncle was a jazz pianist, and I was a boy soprano in the church choir before I turned to rock and roll. It’s been my life, really. I was telling my daughter, ‘You know, you got to breathe and you got to eat to stay alive.’ I put music, pretty much…almost in that category."

You can read the entire interview here.