The one Deep Purple album Ritchie Blackmore wants to delete from history
When assessing heavy metal’s guitar pioneers, Ritchie Blackmore’s name will stand tall alongside a certain Brummie rock band of the 1970s.
With Jimmy Page also orbiting such heavy burnishing, Blackmore’s blues attack intertwined with Jon Lord’s leaden keys across Deep Purple’s acclaimed album run helped pave the way for the new wave of British heavy metal eagerly awaiting by the decade’s end. Fronted by Ian Gillan during their most famous Mk II era, the immortal ‘Smoke on the Water’ would push 1972’s Machine Head to the top of the UK albums chart.
Blackmore would eventually leave Deep Purple in 1975, fatigued by the funk direction pushed by new recruits Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale, forming Rainbow and launching the career of Ronnie James Dio. Achieving a new plane of pop stardom that won new commercial heights while alienating the old rock purists, Blackmore jumped back into his old Deep Purple day job for 1984’s Perfect Strangers with Lord and Gillan, before abandoning the final time after 1993’s The Battle Rages On….
Yet, Blackmore always held misgivings about his work with Deep Purple, even expressing indifference toward their ‘classic’ era. Candidly putting down their first three records, Blackmore spoke highly of 1970’s Deep Purple in Rock, the first in the Mk II chapter, but lambasted the album efforts surrounding their defining Machine Head.
“The next one, Fireball, I hated that one,” Blackmore confessed to The Quietus in 2017. “Who Do We Think We Are was probably one of the worst records for me, because I really had no ideas and we were being worked so hard, we were touring all the time and when we weren’t touring, we were sick, and then we were expected to go in the studio three times a year to fulfil the contract with the record company”.
As ever, industry pressure is never conducive to creative flow. Dropped in early 1973 and recorded with The Rolling Stones’ famous mobile recording turbo truck, Who Do We Think We Are still managed to eke a decent chart position and produce the future live favourite ‘Woman from Tokyo’. However, internal turmoil and frayed relationships pushed their frontman to jump ship several months after their seventh album’s release.
“We had just come off 18 months of touring, and we’d all had major illnesses at one time or another, Gillan once revealed. “Looking back, if they’d have been decent managers, they would have said, ‘All right, stop. I want you to all go on three months’ holiday. I don’t even want you to pick up an instrument.’ But instead they pushed us to complete the album on time. We should have stopped. I think if we did, Deep Purple would have still been around to this day”.
It may be a kicker to the Deep Purple fans of what could have been if the bigwigs had just eased off. For better or worse, but Who Do We Think We Are likely spelt the swift road to Gillan’s turn as Black Sabbath frontman, and Blackmore’s flirtation with pop off the back of Rainbow’s 1980s success.
