“Woman From Tokyo” by Deep Purple

"Woman from Tokyo" came off Who Do We Think We Are, Deep Purple's 1973 album, and it's the band's thank-you note to Japan, where they'd been among the first rock outfits to play in the early '70s. All five members share the writing credit, and you can hear every one of them: Ritchie Blackmore's riff barreling along like a bullet train, Jon Lord's Hammond organ swirling, Roger Glover and Ian Paice locked tight underneath, and Ian Gillan singing about a Japanese woman who has the narrator completely under her spell.

It was one of the last songs Gillan made with the band before leaving to go solo in 1973. Deep Purple produced it themselves with Martin Birch engineering, and Glover and Paice handled the mix. Radio played it hard and it grew into one of their best-loved songs, yet they kept it out of the live set until the 1984 reunion.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.