Who Do We Think We Are

Recording

Who Do We Think We Are was recorded in Rome in July 1972 and Walldorf near Frankfurt in October 1972, using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

"Woman from Tokyo", the first track recorded in July 1972, is about touring Japan for the first time (e.g. the lyric "Fly into the Rising Sun"). The only other track released from the Rome sessions is the outtake "Painted Horse". The rest of the album was recorded in Frankfurt after more touring (including in Japan). The group, riven with internal strife, struggled to come up with tracks that everyone could agree upon. Members of the band were not speaking to each other and many songs were only finished after carefully arranged schedules could be worked out for the band of fighting musicians to record their parts separately.

Ian Gillan left the band following this album, citing internal tensions widely thought to include a feud with Blackmore. However, in an interview supporting the release of the 1984 Mark II Deep Purple comeback album Perfect Strangers, Gillan stated that fatigue and management conflicts also had a lot to do with it.

We had just come off 18 months of touring, and we'd all had major illnesses at one time or another. 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.

The last Mark II concert in the 1970s before Ian Gillan and Roger Glover left was in Osaka, Japan on 29 June 1973.

Album title and artwork

The original album artwork has many quoted articles from newspapers. One of them is from magazine Melody Maker of July 1972, where Ian Paice says:

Deep Purple get piles of passionate letters either violently against or pro the group. The angry ones generally start off "Who do Deep Purple think they are..."

Release

Despite the chaotic birth of the album, "Woman from Tokyo" was a hit single and other songs picked up considerable airplay. The fans bought it in record numbers and in the US, for example, it sold half a million copies in its first three months.

It hit number 4 in the UK charts and number 15 in the US charts. It also achieved a gold record award faster than any Deep Purple album released up to that time. These numbers helped make Deep Purple the best selling artist in the U.S. in 1973 (with the prior acclaim for Machine Head and Made in Japan helping much as well).

In 2000 Who Do We Think We Are was remastered and re-released with bonus tracks. The last bonus track is a lengthy instrumental jam called "First Day Jam", that features Ritchie Blackmore on bass. Roger Glover, the group's usual bassist, was absent, lost in traffic.

In 2005 Audio Fidelity released their own re-mastering of the album on 24 karat Gold CD.

Reception

The album received mixed reviews. Ann Cheauvy of Rolling Stone reviewed the album negatively and comparing Who Do We Think We Are to the Deep Purple's breakthrough album In Rock wrote that the former "sounds so damn tired in spots that it's downright disconcerting" and "the band seems to just barely summon up enough energy to lay down the rhythm track, much less improvise." In a retrospective critical review, Eduardo Rivadavia of AllMusic expresses the same opinion and writes that apart from "Woman from Tokyo", the album's songs are "wildly inconsistent and find the band simply going through the motions," although he did praise "Rat Bat Blue". On the contrary, reviewer David Bowling writes in the Blogcritics site that Who Do We Think We Are "is one of the band’s strongest and stands near the top of the Deep Purple catalogue in terms of quality", providing "some of the best hard rock of the era."

Track listing

All tracks written by Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Jon Lord and Ian Paice.

Personnel