Deep Purple: Made in Japan
Everything louder than everything else
This was an easy pick. Made in Japan has been on my list of possibles since the off, so the recent release of a special box set edition was the trigger to head east. I am only reviewing the original double delight of an album, which was culled from three performances in Japan that were originally only intended for release in that market. However, when it had been mixed, there were no overdubs, using tracks from all three nights, but mainly the second in Osaka, the band agreed it should be released more widely.
I know some members of this club frown upon live albums but, as I am sure I have said many times, I love them, and they are a very important part of my album collection. Also, some bands’ best releases are live albums, often because they feature better versions than the original studio ones. This is not the first and it will not be the last live record that I review. My decade is the 1970’s and it is also the decade of the double live album; this album can claim to be the one that started the trend and set the gold standard. I did not know much Purple when I went to see Rainbow in concert for the first time, which I have written about previously, but very quickly went and added this to my collection thereafter.
The swirling, technicolour maelstrom that is Deep Purple's Made in Japan is not just any old live album, dashed off for contractual obligations or as a meagre stopgap between studio ventures. No, this is the roaring sound of the Mark II lineup (Blackmore, Gillan, Lord, Glover, Paice) immortalised in the blistering heart of Nippon, 1972. Made in Japan is both artefact and testament to the argument that Deep Purple at full force were untouchable on stage.
If Made in Japan were a Hollywood blockbuster, this would be the car chase that opens the film. The band start to rev up and then hurtle off like a dragster on a race out of Hades. Highway Star does not so much start the show as detonate it. You are instantly drenched in the nitro-fuelled, intense energy that defined Deep Purple in their prime. Every note explodes like the fireworks at the end of an F1 race.
Blackmore's Stratocaster screams with the ferocity of a chainsaw symphony, notes bending like they are dodging bullets as he tears through his opening arpeggios with the virility of Paganini jamming on steroids and amphetamines. Meanwhile, Jon Lord’s Hammond stabs hit with the weight of a Mike Tyson jab.
Paice's drums hammer like pistons in overdrive, Glover's bass throbs like a V8 heartbeat, locked in together, a fuel injected power unit that defies any notion that Deep Purple’s rhythm section were mere passengers.
At the centre of it all is an Ian Gillan masterclass. His vocals sprint and soar, from rubber-burning lower registers to those dizzying, banshee-high shrieks. Gillan not only navigates Highway Star's notorious vocal lines; he relishes them, dispatching each phrase with an insouciant confidence that makes you want to leap into a Porsche and chase the rising sun. Amazingly, Gillan was not happy with his performances because he had just recovered from bronchitis.
Jon Lord takes the first solo, a high-octane affair – almost classical but with an unmistakably aggressive mien, like Max Verstappen driving a Red Bull through Maggots and Becketts.
Ritchie Blackmore, ever the darkly enigmatic fret-wizard, delivers and extends his famous solo, going through the gears as if it is Hammer Time – fast, furious but sublimely controlled and melodic. A solo that has inspired guitarists, both amateur and virtuoso, for generations: both John Petrucci and Joe Satriani have genuflected at its altar and Phil Collen of Def Leppard, who can be seen as a 14-year-old at his first concert on the album sleeve, took up the guitar the following day (the pictures on the cover were from London shows for aesthetic reasons).
What sets this breathless opener apart is the palpable sense of urgency. You hear a band teetering on the very edge of control and chaos, stretching every beat and break until the whole thing blooms into a delirious, adrenaline rush. This is immortal, asphalt-melting, turbo charged hard rock in its purest, most uncaged form.
Here be monsters. Child in Time is the Deep Purple epic and, on Made in Japan, it emerges not just as a song, but as an outpouring, equal parts lament, explosion, and exorcism. Gillan himself has reflected on the sheer emotional magnitude of these performances. Originally seeded by the turbulence of the Cold War, Child in Time becomes, in the crucible of the stage, a cathartic wail for all humanity’s follies.
This live version is not a mere carbon-copy of its studio twin, but a living, breathing beast. Lord’s organ introduction is slow and stately, like the lowering of a velvet curtain before the apocalypse; resonance and dread clings to every note, casting a cathedral-like grandeur that is almost funereal. The audience is hushed, waiting. And when Gillan enters, it is with a haunting fragility, a whisper before the storm.
But then, that voice arcs and trembles as it clambers to vertiginous heights, erupting into that legendary “wailing banshee” scream that could stun at 1,000 paces. If your spine is not tingling, you have joined the living dead.
Blackmore stalks the song, his guitar initially restrained; but as Gillan’s voice recedes, the Strat suddenly ignites. His epic solo unfurls with a seething, almost anxious tension, growing from gentle bends and melodic motifs to blistering flurries of notes. Jon Lord answers with surging orchestral stabs. The interplay, the drama, is almost operatic, an aural contest between apocalypse and redemption.
What is easy to miss, amid all the grandstanding, is the control: Made in Japan’s Child in Time is both on the edge and utterly in command. The band toys with dynamics and silence, building and releasing tension with orchestral assurance. No wonder later critics and musicians cite this as one of the greatest live vocal performances ever pressed to vinyl.
Historically, Child in Time helped to redefine what hard rock was capable of, stretching the genre’s emotional and musical scope. As the last note rings out and the crowd erupts, you hear both awe and relief: Deep Purple have led us, trembling, back from the brink.
The crowd’s anticipation is already smouldering as Blackmore teases then cranks up that immortal, serrated Smoke on the Water riff. The live version positively heaves with weight. Blackmore sculpts each blow like a blacksmith hammering metal, dense, unhurried, monumental, meatier than a Japanese Black bull’s hind quarters.
One by one the band join, Paice cracks his snare and Glover rumbles in before Gillan commences the story telling, his voice rawer, more urgent than on the studio cut. He declaims the infamous Montreux fire saga not as a historical footnote, but as a living myth. Lord’s organ races alongside Blackmore, doubling the riff, inserting jarring counterpoints - a sonic echo of smoke snaking through a ruined casino.
But it is in the solo section that the performance expands. Blackmore’s improvisational flourishes are volcanic, darting and shifting direction on a dime. Paice and Glover keep the groove taut and true, never letting the song sag under the weight of its own legend. There is a palpable sense of play, a band not just recreating magic, but freshly forging it, right before a rapt Japanese audience.
Smoke on the Water, on Made in Japan, is both the communal hymn and the centrepiece. It is impossible to imagine hard rock or, indeed, popular music, without it. And this incarnation remains the definitive performance, eternally referenced, endlessly emulated, universally adored.
Purple are not horsing around when they charge into The Mule like the cavalry of the Polish Winged Hussars at the Battle of Vienna, led by Blackmore’s chiselled guitar and Lord’s serpentine organ lines. For a few brief minutes the whole band gallop purposefully; but then, all bar Paice stable their instruments.
What follows is a powder keg showcase, a drummer’s equivalent of a Rodin sculpture: muscular, intricate, and bristling with life. The song is transformed into a sprawling canvas for percussive pyrotechnics with several minutes of controlled mayhem. Paice his whole kit with virtuosic abandon. His solo brims with invention: military rudiments mingle with jazz flourishes, sudden silences, and ricocheting accents. Paice punctuates crescendos with explosive triplets and lightning-fast rolls that left contemporary drummers wide-eyed and open-mouthed (John Bonham included).
Crucially, this is not a drum solo built on hollow flash. There is a song-structure and narrative here with deliberate pace shifts and dramatic pauses. This version captures not only Paice’s technical command, but the sly humour and joy with which he toys with expectations. The Japanese audience is mesmerised, their shouts and applause tracking every rhythmic turn.
Strange Kind of Woman’s opening bars are playful and set up a full-throttle boogie. Lyrically it delivers a typical Purple narrative: a love story with an edge. Musically Jon Lord takes a supporting role spicing the background with streaks of organ thunder. This live version is the Blackmore / Gillan show. The Man in Black takes two solos, the first melodic and inventive. The second builds to a crescendo that ends with Ian Paice laying down a memorable funky beat over which Blackmore and Gillan do battle, squaring off in a call-and-response duel, trading boisterous high pitched scat vocals for incendiary guitar phrases. It is camp, it is competitive, and it is absolutely jaw-dropping. The crowd soaks up every twist, urging Gillan ever higher, Blackmore ever faster.
The Made in Japan take remains the song’s standard-bearer, both fiery and fun: confirmation that heavy rock, at its best, can be as irrepressibly joyous as it is powerful.
Lazy opens with what can only be described as a Jon Lord masterclass. First, he lands his Hammond on stage, makes like a wild thing and, for nearly three minutes, toys with motifs straight out of Bach or blues, recasting his Hammond organ as a cathedral pipe, jazz lounge instrument, and demonic siren in quick succession.
Then, Blackmore answers. Initially taunting the audience with one of his favourite riffs (the number of times I’ve seen him incorporate it into a Rainbow show!) before launching into bluesy licks that are both highbrow and low-down, sneaking jazz flavours into a pure rock structure. Gillan’s harmonica cuts in like a chainsaw-wielding preacher, exhaling nicotine and whiskey while Lord and Blackmore duel like pianists in a Wild West saloon.
But do not mistake these flourishes for mere musical window dressing. When the full band hits the now-iconic shuffle groove, the swagger is physical, you can feel it in your bones and boots. Glover’s rolling bass anchors the mayhem, while Paice swings like Charlie Watts.
What’s striking about the Made in Japan Lazy is how it stretches, a platform for improvisation, each member striving to outdo the last while never losing a grip on the groove. The interplay is dense with attitude, wit, and technical prowess. At its core, Lazy epitomises Purple's fusion of blues tradition and progressive daring, and this performance is still revered by musicians and diehards alike as the pinnacle of keyboard/guitar interplay within the hard rock canon.
Buckle up. Space Truckin’, in the studio, is a punchy, almost cartoonish slice of proto-prog. Here, it morphs into a monstrous, twenty-minute intergalactic odyssey. A musical 3I/Atlas. This is Deep Purple exploring the musical cosmos: rock ’n’ roll astronauts jamming far beyond comfortable orbit.
The song begins with atomic force, propelled by Lord’s jittery alarms and Blackmore’s rocket fuelled, razor-sharp riffing. Gillan, never knowingly undercooked, howls out the lyrics as if casting spells to ward off cosmic debris. Yet, it’s the midsection, where the form evaporates and improvisation takes flight, that cements this rendition’s legendary status.
The band launches into a transcendent extended jam session. Glover and Paice lay down a granite-solid, jazz-infused foundation while Lord weaves in and out with classical motifs and dystopian sci-fi stabs, the type of sounds that would soon course through krautrock and prog.
Blackmore then goes on sonic spacewalk that mixes unearthly feedback with gentle knob twiddling sound modulation before a clanging false ending; the crowd thinks it is all over but the band burst back in like a flaming meteor and Blackmore wrings the neck of his Strat, conjuring up flurries of notes, feedback and using his tremolo and whammy bar like a space-age weapon. The song ends in an explosion of noise, like super nova imploding, leaving a black hole that seems to have sucked the stunned audience into silence, astounded by what must have felt like stepping into a musical event horizon.
There are now entire generations of jam bands who cite this one performance as a fountainhead of musical possibilities. There’s simply nothing else quite like it on record.
When Made in Japan landed in late 1972, many critics were gobsmacked by the clarity and danger of the performance, and especially, the documented rawness of the “what-the-hell-happens-next?” dynamic. Rolling Stone praised the “supersonic musicianship,” while other pundits hailed it as the definitive live album for a generation hungry for harder, faster, more experimental sounds.
The impact has only grown over time. Successive generations of musicians, from Metallica and Iron Maiden to Dream Theater and beyond, place Made in Japan on the top shelf. In subsequent decades, the record has charted highly in classic album polls and is universally cited as one of rock’s greatest live documents.
Crucially, Made in Japan immortalised the Mark II Deep Purple line-up at their zenith and, in doing so, cemented live rock as a legitimate form of art: as unpredictable, exhausting, and transcendent as the best of jazz or classical. No live album shaped the future of hard rock and heavy metal quite like this one.
Made in Japan stands as one of the few albums to truly transcend format and era. It is a record about risk, revelry, and above all, the alchemy of live performance. The wonderful irony is that, in trying to capture the ephemeral, Deep Purple locked themselves into something eternal. The record’s place at the summit of rock history is unchallenged. Whether you come for the jaw-dropping solos, the sky-scraping vocals or the tectonic rhythm section, you’ll find, at its glorious core, a single, immutable truth: no one did it better, and maybe no one ever will.
