Success, as Deep Purple discovered in the winter of 1970–71, creates a very particular problem: you have to do it again. “Black Night”, the single they had improvised in a drunken evening and tried to talk their label out of releasing, had reached No. 2 in Britain. Now Harvest Records wanted a follow-up, and this time there would be no pub-based shortcuts — or rather, no excuses. The band delivered “Strange Kind of Woman”, released in February 1971, a swaggering blues-rock single with a past its title tried to conceal: before it acquired its name, the song had simply been called “Prostitute”. It reached No. 8 in the UK, topped the chart in Denmark, and went on to become one of the great live vehicles in the band’s history, the song in which Ian Gillan and Ritchie Blackmore fought their famous musical duels.
The Pressure of a Follow-Up
“Strange Kind of Woman” was recorded in January 1971, only months after the Deep Purple in Rock album and the “Black Night” single had established the Mk II line-up — Gillan, Blackmore, Roger Glover, Jon Lord and Ian Paice — as one of the biggest new bands in Britain. It was not part of the sessions for the next album, Fireball, but a purpose-built single in the mould of its predecessor: compact where the album tracks were expansive, built on a riff, a strut and a chorus designed to survive the transition from turntable to stage. Like “Black Night”, it was credited to all five members of the band and produced by the band themselves.
The recording also had to be squeezed into a schedule that was already becoming punishing. Deep Purple spent much of late 1970 and 1971 shuttling between the road and the studio, assembling Fireball in fragments between tours; the album, when it arrived, would top the British chart. A stand-alone single was, in part, a way of keeping the band visible while the album took its time — a stopgap that ended up with a life of its own.
Musically, the song is a masterclass in the Mk II band’s economy. Where Deep Purple in Rock had favoured the sustained assault, “Strange Kind of Woman” works by space and suggestion: a stop-start blues riff, Paice’s drums swinging rather than bludgeoning, Lord’s organ colouring the edges, and Gillan riding over the top with a vocal that is half boast, half confession. It is the sound of a heavy band discovering it could also be a lithe one.
The song was released on 12 February 1971 with “I’m Alone” as its B-side. It consolidated rather than repeated the earlier success, peaking at No. 8 on the UK singles chart and No. 8 in West Germany, reaching No. 1 in Denmark and charting in Austria, Ireland and Australia as well. For a band that had insisted it was constitutionally incapable of being a singles act, Deep Purple had now produced two consecutive British Top 10 singles almost in spite of themselves.
A Woman Called Nancy
The song’s original title was not a secret the band kept particularly well, because Gillan delighted in telling audiences the story behind it. Introducing the song on the live recording Deep Purple in Concert, he explained: “It was about a friend of ours who got mixed up with a very evil woman and it was a sad story. They got married in the end. And a few days after they got married, the lady died.”
In his online Wordography, Gillan gave a longer, stranger and rather more tender account, explaining that the song’s heroine was not one woman but a compilation he called Nancy. “I loved her in a strange post-adolescent-pre-adult way, but then so did quite a lot of other people,” he wrote. “She loved them too and gave them good return for their money. I failed miserably when I tried to break her from the habit… she said it wasn’t a habit, it was her life and what did I know anyway? I did get promoted from Wednesday morning trysts to Saturday evening dates (sort of). The fact is, this song is not about one woman… but a compilation of thrills and disappointments, and such a package can only be called Nancy. I grew up fast… the innocence died.”
The two tellings do not quite agree — in one, the woman is a destructive force who drags a friend of the band into a fatal marriage; in the other, she is a composite of the young Gillan’s own thrills and disappointments, and the wounded party is the singer himself. That doubleness is part of the song’s charm. Gillan, a storyteller who never let the facts entirely restrain a good introduction, seems to have understood that “Nancy” worked better as a legend than as a person, and the band were content to let the mystery, and the discarded title, do their work in the imagination of the audience.
Read with that confession in mind, the lyric turns into something more rueful than its strut suggests: a young man’s boastful admiration for a woman entirely beyond his means to change, equal parts infatuation and humiliation. It is the blues, dressed in hard rock clothes — the oldest story in the songbook, told by a singer who had lived just enough of it to know where the joke landed.
Across the Atlantic on Fireball
Although “Strange Kind of Woman” had not been recorded for Fireball, the band’s American label took a pragmatic view of its success. When the album was released in the United States and Canada, the single was inserted into the track listing in place of “Demon’s Eye”, which British buyers got instead — an early and confusing example of the regional track-swapping that plagued the era, and a permanent headache for discographers. The single version runs 3:49, while the American album version stretches to 4:04.
The B-side, “I’m Alone”, had to wait far longer for respectability, eventually surfacing on the compilation The Deep Purple Singles A’s and B’s and, decades later, on the 25th anniversary reissue of Fireball. The single itself returned in 1996, when a remix by Roger Glover was included on that same Fireball re-release, while the original version took its place on the band’s many compilations. Between the two versions and the two editions of the album, the song exists in a small maze of variants — fitting, perhaps, for a track that began life under an assumed name.
The Duel
Whatever the single achieved in the charts, it was on stage that “Strange Kind of Woman” became immortal. In concert, the song’s middle section opened out into one of the defining rituals of Mk II Deep Purple: a call-and-response duel between Gillan’s voice and Blackmore’s guitar. Blackmore would play a phrase; Gillan would answer it with his voice, matching the guitar lick for lick, the exchanges growing faster, higher and more absurd until the whole thing collapsed into a single, impossibly long, high-pitched scream from Gillan, held until the band crashed back into the song.
The spoken introduction quoted earlier survives on Deep Purple in Concert, the album of BBC recordings released in 1980, which preserves the band performing for radio in 1970 and 1972 and catches Gillan in full ringmaster mode, setting up the song’s story for the studio audience before a note is played. It is a reminder that the song’s mythology was being constructed in real time, by the singer, on stage, years before anyone thought to write the band’s history down.
The definitive document is Made in Japan, recorded on the band’s first Japanese tour in August 1972 and still regularly cited among the greatest live albums ever made. On it, the duel unfolds with a wit and athleticism that explains why audiences came to demand it: two of the most competitive musicians in rock, showing off for each other as much as for the crowd, in a contest neither was ever allowed to win. The passage became so beloved that later line-ups of the band kept the song, and the routine, in the repertoire long after Mk II had dissolved.
The duel format proved so durable that it outlived the band that invented it. Later incarnations of Deep Purple kept “Strange Kind of Woman” in the set and preserved the exchange at its heart, the singer still sparring with the guitar long after Blackmore himself had departed; it remains one of the moments audiences at a modern Deep Purple concert wait for. In Denmark, where the single had reached No. 1, and in Germany, where it matched its British No. 8 peak, it has the standing of a national-radio perennial rather than a mere album-era souvenir.
That double life is the song’s real legacy. As a single, “Strange Kind of Woman” did its job efficiently, following one of British rock’s most unlikely hits with another Top 10 entry and keeping Deep Purple on the radio while they finished Fireball. As a stage number, it became something else entirely — the place where the band’s virtuosity turned into theatre, and where a renamed song about a woman called Nancy found the immortality its writers had been too embarrassed to give its first title.