Who Are Deep Purple?
The simple answer is they are greatest band ever to have cut a record. You can find more detailed information elsewhere but put simply that is my view on the band!!
Who Do We Think We Are – The Review
There are records made by happy men in clean rooms, with clocks on the wall and somebody from the record company standing outside the glass with a clipboard. And then there are records like Who Do We Think We Are, which sounds as if five heavily armed lunatics were dragged into a studio after three years without sleep, handed their instruments, and told they had until Thursday to produce something dangerous.
Naturally, they did.
Deep Purple’s seventh studio album arrived in 1973, although its bones were forged during the feverish summer and autumn of 1972. At the time it was the last studio statement from the legendary Mark II lineup: Ian Gillan screaming at the heavens, Ritchie Blackmore sharpening his guitar like a switchblade, Jon Lord operating the Hammond organ as though it were a stolen locomotive, Roger Glover holding the whole machine together from underneath, and Ian Paice beating the drums with the grim efficiency of a man demolishing a hotel room.
And what a machine it was. The trouble was that the machine was beginning to hate itself.
Deep Purple had been touring relentlessly. They had made Machine Head, conquered the world with Smoke on the Water, recorded the extraordinary Made in Japan, and then—rather than stopping to breathe—were pushed straight back into the grinder. By the time they began work on this record, fatigue and internal conflict were everywhere. Gillan and Blackmore were barely communicating, and the band’s sessions increasingly involved musicians recording parts separately rather than behaving like a functioning human unit.
“Woman From Tokyo” is one of those songs that kicks the door down before you’ve even decided whether you want to let it in. Blackmore’s riff comes roaring out of the speakers, Glover’s bass gives it the necessary weight, Paice attacks from behind, and Lord’s Hammond swirls around the whole bloody structure like an electrical storm.
Gillan, meanwhile, sounds magnificent.
The song was inspired by the band’s first Japanese tour and was the first track recorded during the Rome sessions in July 1972. It was also the only finished album track to emerge from those initial Roman sessions.
There is something wonderfully absurd about it. They had barely seen Japan, yet they wrote an exotic fantasy about a mysterious Tokyo woman as though Gillan had been living in a geisha house for six months. But that is rock & roll: ignorance converted into mythology, preferably at 110 decibels.
And the middle section is the secret weapon. The song suddenly changes temperature, pulling away from the hard-rock assault into something dreamier and more spacious before the riff comes charging back. It is one of the reasons the song remains more than just another Purple riff machine.
Then comes “Mary Long,” a filthy little piece of social commentary aimed at the moral crusaders of the era. Gillan’s target was the sanctimonious world of Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford, fused into the composite figure of “Mary Long.”
This is Deep Purple at its most gleefully adolescent, which is another way of saying: completely alive as Blackmore does not waste time decorating the song. He cuts into it. Lord’s organ gives it that familiar Purple menace, while Gillan spits the words with the theatrical contempt of a man who has just discovered that somebody has complained about the volume of his stereo.
“Super Trouper” is the sleeper here, a chunky, blues-inflected beast with enough swagger to make the furniture nervous.
“Smooth Dancer” has teeth. It is another riff-driven piece, but underneath the swagger there is the poisonous atmosphere of a band whose internal relationships had become increasingly ugly.
That is one of this album’s great strengths: the tension became part of the music.
They were not falling apart politely. They were falling apart at full volume.
But “Rat Bat Blue” is where the record gets really strange—and really good. It has a stop-start rhythm, an elastic groove, and some fantastic scat singing from Gillan.
This is not the Deep Purple of giant ceremonial riffs marching toward some enormous climax. This is five musicians getting weird in a room.
Lord gets plenty of room to operate, Blackmore prowls around the edges, and Paice gives the song its peculiar muscular swing. Gillan’s voice becomes another instrument rather than simply a vehicle for lyrics. For a singer famous for screaming, his rhythmic vocal work here is almost more impressive. It is nasty, loose, funny and alive.
The final two tracks reveal another side of the record. “Place in Line” drifts deeper into blues territory, while “Our Lady” closes the album with something more reflective and spacious. They are not the songs most people reach for when discussing Deep Purple, but that is exactly why they deserve another listen.
All five received songwriting credit across the original album. Deep Purple produced the record themselves, with Martin Birch handling the engineering. And that is the miracle.
They were exhausted. They were fighting. They were touring themselves into the ground. The singer and guitarist were barely talking. The record was being assembled in two countries around an increasingly dysfunctional schedule.
And it still rocks.
It is cracked around the edges. It sweats. But when it catches fire—as on “Woman From Tokyo,” “Mary Long,” “Super Trouper” and especially “Rat Bat Blue”—it reminds you that Deep Purple were not merely a great hard-rock band. They were a volatile musical organism capable of turning exhaustion, anger, blues, ego and sheer technical firepower into something that still sounds dangerous half a century later.
The Vinyl Review
For a vinyl older than my good self then it is in fine working order. The odd very slight marks on Side 1 don’t affect the quality of the sound and the vinyl comes complete with separate lyric sheet which is always a winner. Purchased alongside the Scorpions Tokyo Tapes for a tenner at BPM Records in Derby then I consider it another purchase well made.
Donnie’s Rating: 10/10
