In July 1972, Deep Purple were installed in a rented villa outside Rome, supposedly to record the follow-up to Machine Head, and by almost every account the sessions were a shambles. The band had been touring almost without pause for two years. They were exhausted, several of them had been ill, and the two men at the band’s creative centre — singer Ian Gillan and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore — were barely on speaking terms. Journalists who visited the villa found the musicians set up in separate rooms, working at separate times, like tenants in a boarding house rather than members of the biggest hard rock band in the world.
And yet that unhappy Roman summer produced exactly one finished song for the album, and it was a beauty: a swaggering, good-humoured rocker addressed to a woman in a country none of them had ever set foot in. “Woman from Tokyo” was written in anticipation. In a few weeks’ time, in August 1972, Deep Purple would fly to Japan for the first time — three concerts, in Osaka and at the Budokan in Tokyo — and in the villa’s makeshift studio, with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio parked outside, they tried to imagine what was waiting for them on the other side of the world.
A Riff, Two Syllables, and an Imaginary Woman
The song began, as so many Deep Purple songs did, with Blackmore. The guitarist came up with a bouncing, blues-inflected riff — brighter and looser than the machine-tooled attack of “Highway Star” — and Gillan, hearing the rhythm of it, found he could hang two syllables on its cadence: To-ky-o. From that small accident of phrasing, he and bassist Roger Glover built the lyric together, writing, as Glover later cheerfully admitted, with great confidence about a place neither of them had ever been. The “eastern dream” of the lyric, the rising sun, the woman who “makes me see” — all of it was invented in Italy, out of anticipation, jet-age glamour and a poster-paint version of Japan assembled from films and headlines.
It is worth pausing on how cheerful the results are. The album taking shape around it, Who Do We Think We Are, would become a byword for a great band souring on itself. But “Woman from Tokyo” sounds like five men still delighted to be alive: Ian Paice’s drums swinging rather than pounding, Jon Lord’s organ smearing colour around Blackmore’s riff, and a wide, dreamy bridge in the middle — a slow, spacey drift that the single edit would later cut away entirely — before the riff comes barrelling back in. Lord even gets a barrelhouse piano flourish, a reminder that beneath the volume this was a band steeped in rhythm and blues.
The Only Survivor of Rome
The Rome sessions collapsed around the song. Between the summer heat, the swimming pool, the cheap local wine that arrived by the crate, and a band increasingly unable to agree on anything, almost nothing else was finished. One other track, “Painted Horse”, was recorded and then vetoed by Blackmore; it stayed in the vaults for decades. Everything else on the album was cut later, in October 1972, at Walldorf near Frankfurt — again with the Rolling Stones Mobile, again with engineer Martin Birch, and again with the members frequently recording their parts at different times so as not to cross paths. “Woman from Tokyo” stands alone as the sole evidence Deep Purple were ever in Italy at all.
The album’s title carried the same bruised humour. It came from drummer Ian Paice’s observation that the angry letters and hostile reviews the band attracted so often began with the same spluttering phrase: who do Deep Purple think they are?
The Sound of a Band Enjoying Itself
It is worth asking how a record this sunny came out of sessions this miserable. Part of the answer is sheer professionalism: the album was produced by the band themselves, engineered by Martin Birch — the man who would become their defining studio collaborator — and mixed by Paice and Glover, the rhythm section acting as the group’s steady centre while its two stars orbited each other at a distance. And part of it is that the song’s construction leaves no room for gloom. Blackmore’s riff is almost jaunty, Paice plays it with a swing that borders on the funky, and Lord — so often the band’s dark cathedral voice — spends much of the track grinning through rhythm-and-blues organ fills before the famous dream section arrives: a slow, weightless drift in the middle of the song, all shimmering guitar and haze, like the band pausing mid-flight to watch the sunrise it was singing about. American single buyers barely heard that passage — the US single edit cut the bridge away almost entirely to bring the record under three and a half minutes.
Gillan would later sum up the paradox of the whole period in one weary sentence: the band had just come off eighteen months of touring, and they had all had major illnesses at one time or another. “Woman from Tokyo” is what that exhaustion produced when it briefly turned into euphoria — five men imagining, very hard, somewhere far away and welcoming.
Japan, and the End of Mark II
The real Japan, when they reached it that August, exceeded the imagined one. Japanese audiences received the band with an adoration that stunned them, and the Osaka and Tokyo concerts were recorded — almost as an afterthought, on a modest budget — for the live album Made in Japan, released that December to enormous acclaim. The strange thing is that the band did not play “Woman from Tokyo” at those shows, or, as Roger Glover has often insisted, anywhere else in the 1970s at all; the song they had written for Japan waited more than a decade for its live debut on Japanese stages.
Meanwhile the clock was running out on the classic line-up. Gillan had already handed in a letter of resignation — written while the band was on tour in America — telling management he intended to leave at the end of the next tour. Astonishingly, nobody spoke to him about it. The band simply carried on, made the album, and went back out on the road, until the touring schedule ran out in the place the whole story had been pointing at: Japan. Mark II’s final concert took place in Osaka on 29 June 1973, in the same city where Made in Japan had largely been recorded. When it ended, Gillan walked out alone. There were no goodbyes — not from the band, the crew, or the management. Glover, squeezed out in the reshuffle, left with him. Jon Lord would later call the end of that line-up “the biggest shame in rock and roll”.
A Hit That Outlived the Farewell
Who Do We Think We Are arrived in January 1973 in America and the following month in Britain — Deep Purple’s seventh studio album, and the Mark II line-up’s last for eleven years. It reached No. 4 in the UK and No. 15 in the United States. “Woman from Tokyo”, issued as the lead single in March 1973, climbed to No. 60 on the Billboard Hot 100 and considerably higher in parts of Europe — No. 16 in Germany, No. 23 in Belgium — and, more lastingly, it never left the radio. Of all the songs on that troubled album, it is the one that has grown in stature with every passing decade.
When the five men finally reunited in 1984 for Perfect Strangers, “Woman from Tokyo” came with them at last, taking its permanent place in the live set, where it has remained ever since — the joyful postcard from a band at war with itself, written in a Roman villa, about a woman who did not exist, in a country they were about to fall in love with.
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