The one song Ritchie Blackmore deeply regretted
“Selling out” is a complex idea. It’s a phrase thrown at artists repeatedly, sometimes when they change their sound and fans perceive it as a purposeful move towards the mainstream, or sometimes after a simple image change or brand link-up.
What is rarer, though, is for the band themselves to admit it in retrospect. No one wants to own up that perhaps they picked a lazy artistic option for the sake of business, but Ritchie Blackmore was willing to.
However, the very idea of selling out is tricky when we’re talking about one of the most commercially successful rock bands in the world. Deep Purple were never some little, underground act. They were never really a cult act. Their debut single landed at number four on the US charts, ‘Black Night’, and gave them their first UK number two hit within only a few years of forming. Then, by 1973, they had released ‘Smoke on the Water’, a track which didn’t perform super well at the time but has gone on to become one of the most recognisable rock songs of all time.
Deep Purple is a name people know, whether they can sing you a song or not, so the band were never really the type of act who were going to leave cultish fans in uproar about a more commercial move because that fanbase was broad from the beginning.
But Blackmore’s own feelings on the matter are more about artistic merit. Over time, perceptions change far more than tired commentaries on business moves. While the heart of the song that endures, in the guitarist’s eyes, that’s what makes this one hit falter now.
The track in question is ‘Woman from Tokyo’, a 1973 track written to celebrate their time playing in Japan in the early ‘70s. “I first heard it in my manager’s house, and I said, ‘It’s a hit, let’s do it’. He was totally: ‘What? You want to do it?’, ‘Yeah, of course’. So we did it, I think in about two takes because Cozy [Powell] hated it,” he explained, with other bandmates having immediate issues with the track.
Blackmore liked it for a while, though, and it served them well. “It was released, and it was a hit, which we knew all along. But it was a way of getting our foot in the door. getting a broader public,” he explained, admitting that really, it was a business move.
His thoughts on the topic are more nuanced, though. A lot of people prescribe selling out to an artist leaving their home genre, but Blackmore won’t go for that. “People say: ‘How can you do that? How can you sell out? You’re a heavy metal guitarist, known to be uncommercial’,” he said, defending himself by adding, “That’s rubbish, I’ll play anything if it has a good melody.”
The issue with ‘Woman from Tokyo’ is simply that he doesn’t feel it’s held up over time. Unlike their other more mainstream-sounding tracks, like ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’, which he still calls “a very good song”, this 1973 track just hasn’t endured, as it feels phoney to him.
“Things like ‘Woman from Tokyo’,” he said, “I can’t stand things like that”.
