DEEP PURPLE TRIVIA
Trivia
Made in Japan was recorded on the understanding that it would be sold only in Japan. When the live album was proposed the band agreed on that condition and no other. What changed matters was hearing the tapes back: their own assessment of what they had shifted, and the record went out worldwide instead.
Woman from Tokyo was written and recorded before the band had ever played in Japan. It was the only track finished at the sessions that began in Rome in July 1972; the rest of the album was made in Germany. Their first Japanese concerts came the following month — two in Osaka and one at the Budokan in Tokyo — and those are the shows that became Made in Japan.
On 12 August 2026, at Jones Beach in Wantagh, New York, Ritchie Blackmore walked out for the encore and played Smoke on the Water. It was the first time he had stood on a stage with the band in thirty-three years, and their own site described it as the surviving Mark II members playing together again alongside the current line-up. By Ian Gillan's account the approach came from Blackmore, who wrote to say that he lived nearby and asked whether he could join them.
The score of 1969's Concerto for Group and Orchestra was lost after the premiere. In the late 1990s the Dutch composer Marco de Goeij spent two years transcribing the whole work from recordings and film, restoring the full score between 1997 and 1999. Jon Lord and Paul Mann then revised it, and the piece was performed again at the Royal Albert Hall on 25 and 26 September 1999.
Made in Japan was produced for three thousand dollars, and nothing was overdubbed onto it. A record routinely named among the great live albums is, in other words, very close to simply what was played in the room on the night.
The 1975 edition of the Guinness Book of Records listed Deep Purple as the loudest band in the world. The measurement behind it was 117 decibels, taken at the Rainbow Theatre in London in 1972. The Who took the record away in 1976 with a reading of 126 decibels.
Highway Star was put together on a moving bus. The band wrote it on 13 September 1971 on the way to Portsmouth Guildhall in England, and played it on stage that same night. The studio version came three months later, at the Machine Head sessions.
Their first American hit was not one of their own songs but a cover: Hush, written by Joe South. Billy Joe Royal's 1967 original had reached number 52; Deep Purple's 1968 version entered the chart at 83 on 11 August, climbed to number 4 on 15 September and held that place for two weeks.
In Japan the album first appeared under a different title, Live in Japan, and with different sleeve artwork — so the domestic edition looked and was named differently from the one the rest of the world bought.
The August 1972 visit was the band's first time playing in Japan. The dates had originally been set for May of that year and were put back, partly because American shows had to be rearranged and partly because Ritchie Blackmore had hepatitis. What was taped was Osaka's Koseinenkin Hall on 15 and 16 August and the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo on the 17th.
Concerto for Group and Orchestra was first performed on 24 September 1969 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Arnold. The revised version played in 1999 was dedicated to Arnold.
Only two tracks on Made in Japan come from the Budokan: The Mule and Lazy. The Tokyo tapes were of poorer quality than the two Osaka nights, so everything else on the original album is Osaka.
Neither Ian Gillan nor Ritchie Blackmore heard Made in Japan before it came out. Only Roger Glover and Ian Paice were there for the mixing — the account is the engineer Martin Birch's.
Made in Japan reached number 6 in the United States — a chart placing for a recording that was supposed to have stayed inside one country.
The Machine Head sessions actually started at a venue in Montreux called the Pavilion. Complaints about the noise brought the police in and the band could not carry on there, which is how they ended up working out of the Grand Hotel instead.
The recording at the Grand Hotel was made with the Rolling Stones' mobile studio. The gear was set up along the hotel corridors and long cables were run out through the windows to the truck parked behind the building. The sessions ran from 6 to 21 December 1971.
The hotel was too brightly lit to work in, so the bulbs were swapped for red ones. The acoustics were dealt with just as directly: mattresses were stood up around the rooms to soak up sound.
The riff to Smoke on the Water was already on tape from the first day's soundcheck, with no words to it. The song itself went on the record last, added to make up the album's running length — the track the band is now known by got in at the back of the queue.
The title Smoke on the Water was Roger Glover's idea. Ian Gillan wrote the words to fit it and Ritchie Blackmore came up with the riff — three people, three separate pieces of the same song.
By Blackmore's own account the riff is built on fourths and fifths from a medieval mode, and it is meant to be sounded on open strings plucked with the fingers rather than struck with a pick. It is commonly played from the fifth fret instead, which he says is not how it goes.
In 1989 Blackmore and Gillan re-recorded Smoke on the Water for the charity project Rock Aid Armenia, with a cast drawn from other bands: Robert Plant, Brian May and Bruce Dickinson among them.
Child in Time is built on Bombay Calling by It's A Beautiful Day. Jon Lord was playing it on keyboards and the band worked their own piece out of it from there. Gillan has said that he had not heard the original before they made their version.
The guitar solo in Highway Star was written out note by note about a week before it was recorded. Blackmore has described aiming at a Bach-like sound, laying rigid arpeggios over a progression of Dm, Gm, C major and A major.
Black Night was written for a single after Deep Purple in Rock was already finished. The label wanted one because the album had no obvious hit on it. An afternoon spent hunting for a riff produced nothing; what became the song was something Blackmore played later the same day. Glover has traced the idea behind it to Ricky Nelson's 1962 recording of Summertime.
The title Black Night was not the band's invention. Gillan has said it was taken from a 1964 record of the same name by Arthur Alexander. Follow it back further and it reaches a song written by Jessie Mae Robinson and recorded by Charles Brown in December 1950.
Hush was re-recorded in 1988 to mark the band's twentieth anniversary and reached number 62 in the UK. In 1997 a version by Kula Shaker went to number 2 there. Joe South's song, in other words, has charted twice by way of Deep Purple.
Woman from Tokyo was never played on stage in the 1970s. It entered the set only after the 1984 reunion. Some compilations from that decade list it as a live recording, which Glover has flatly denied.
Machine Head reached number 7 in the United States and stayed on the chart for 118 weeks. Smoke on the Water was not issued there as a single until May 1973, and peaked at number 4 on 28 July.
Ian Paice is the only member to have been present in every line-up the band has had. From the 1968 start onwards, he is the one player who has never been absent from it.