Montreux, Switzerland

Inspired Deep Purple

When I was a kid, listening to music was a very different experience to that of today; at my school, you were either a rocker or a new romantic... One wore studs, the other wore make up. Later, I would come to wear both, but that's another story. For now, I was firmly in the denim & leather army, playing air guitar when I didn't have a real one to hand, and making nonsensical hand gestures to my peers. We spent hours admiring the airbrushed intricacy of the vinyl gatefold sleeves, faithfully duplicating the images & logos onto our denim jackets and maths book covers. Albums would be exchanged amongst friends, recorded onto dodgy cassettes and discussed at great length the following day over a Wagon Wheel & Coke. And certain songs were discussed more than others. One such song was "Smoke On The Water" by Deep Purple, never one of my personal favourites it must be said, but undeniably significant at the time. Virtually anyone who can play four chords on a guitar will have played the four chords you hear on that track, much to the irritation of music store owners worldwide; a guitar shop in Denmark Street, London's 'Tin Pan Alley', even banned the riff from being played.

The story goes that, on the night of 4th December 1971, Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention played a concert at the casino theatre that was part of the Montreux Entertainment Centre. During the show, a Swiss fan fired a flare gun, the ceiling caught fire, and the casino was completely destroyed. Deep Purple were also in town, due to begin recording an album there the following day, and they watched the casino burn from their hotel across Lake Geneva, a moment they immortalised in the song "Smoke On The Water"...

"We all came out to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline,

To make records with a mobile - We didn't have much time.

Frank Zappa & the Mothers were at the best place around,

But some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground.

Smoke on the water... A fire in the sky"

The band themselves didn't think the song was up to much and it was far from a regular feature of their live set. Bass player Roger Glover was worried it may be misinterpreted as a 'drug' song, and I remember reading an interview where guitarist Ritchie Blackmore wrote it off as overly simplistic & wooden. Perhaps it was what the song captured, rather than what the song did, that elevated it to its legendary status. Bizarre things happen on the road, that's for sure... With travel comes adventure, and with adventure comes excitement & the feeling that anything can happen, and rock'n'roll bands in the 1970's seemed to revel in pushing the parameters to the limit. The stories of triumph & tragedy have survived the decades almost as well as the songs themselves.

One look at the view from my luxurious room at the famous Raffles Le Montreux Palace hotel is all I need to understand what tempts bands to come & play here; it is truly spectacular, with the clear waters of Lake Geneva glistening in the sunshine and a majestic backdrop of snowy-white mountains piercing the deep blue sky. My time in Switzerland would take in a cable car to the summit of the Schilthorn (with a revolving restaurant that James Bond fans will remember from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"), and a train journey through some of the most stunning scenery anywhere to the "top of Europe", the Jungfraujoch. But today was all about my pilgrimage and Montreux. I took a walk along the promenade; the air was ice cold and felt like it had been scrubbed clean. The proud relationship the town has with music is evident all around; posters, photographs, statues of musicians (Ray Charles & BB King are right outside the hotel) and, in the Jardin En Musiques lining the promenade, a series of tall quirky figures bound from leaves & branches, playing wire pianos, cellos, trumpets & double basses. A few minutes walk further on and one of Montreux's most recognizable landmarks; a large bronze statue of Freddie Mercury in a familiar pose, one hand clutching his microphone, the other raised to the sky, facing out across the lake. And then we come to the casino, an imposing, modern structure on the shoreline, built directly on top of the site of the old casino that burnt down.

The peaks across the lake changed colours as the day wore on, from white to orange, from red to purple. Later in the afternoon, a faint mist descended and hung across the lake as the sun disappeared behind the mountains and the stars began to twinkle. As a noisy little headbanger back in the seventies, I didn't for one moment imagine that I would be making that song by Deep Purple my journey of rock pilgrimage some thirty years later, but I'm certainly glad I did. No wonder the band chose this place to record their album... Inspiration must have been well & truly forthcoming, because the resulting album "Machine Head" became arguably the definitive heavy rock album of the seventies, a flawless record of a band at the height of their all-conquering power.

"Smoke On The Water" features a lyric which goes "Funky & Claude was running in & out, pulling kids out of the ground" and I had heard that this referred to Claude Nobs, who was the promoter of the Frank Zappa show that night and who had apparently risked his own life to save the lives of others from the inferno. Claude is now 70 years old, and is better known as the Founder & Director of the world-renowned Montreux Jazz Festival. He has devoted his life to music and in Cannes last week he was honoured with the MIDEM "Personality of the Year" Award for 2007 at a gala dinner attended by all the music industry VIP executives, the first person outside of the record industry to do so. When I learned I was going to Montreux to write this piece, I wanted to know how accurate the story behind the song was, so I tracked down Claude to ask him about his own memories of the evening. "Just listen to the song!" he said. "That's exactly what happened! Deep Purple describe it exactly word-for-word. They were there, Frank Zappa was playing, someone threw a flare in the ceiling and I had to get everybody out. Then I found them a place so they could do their recording". That place was the Rolling Stones mobile recording studio. I asked him if the incident was as dramatic & dangerous as the song suggests. "Oh yes", he replied. "I was the last one to come out of the building and, luckily enough, no-one was killed or hurt." Deep Purple dedicated the song to Claude and he says he was very touched by it. You can hear the emotion & excitement in Claude's voice as he recounts even today what happened all those years ago. It was, of course, just one night in a career in music spanning well over four decades. Claude claims that Montreux was "a boring little place" when he was a young man working in a tourist office there, so he decided to liven things up a bit by staging a festival. In fact, Montreux still is a very quiet & understated place that is transformed into a hive of musical activity for three weeks every summer. This year sees the town host the festival for the 41st time, with Claude still very much at the helm, and with the future of the event looking as healthy & positive as ever. He says the Montreux has a special bond with musicians, who always seem to wanto play there, usually for a much lower fee than they would expect to receive elsewhere in Europe & worldwide, and the live recordings made there are enjoyed by music fans around the planet, "so it is something very special". In fact, Claude has helped many musicians such as Keith Richards and Van Morrison to set up home there, be it a house, a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher for their kids, whatever they wanted, so the relationships often continue outside of the festival itself. Anticipating my next question, Claude shares some of his favourite memories... "Well, we had Mountain Studio, which was where David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and, of course, Queen who recorded their albums there... In fact, it belonged to them. And one night I had Bowie and all of Queen at my house for dinner, and at midnight I suggested they all go to the studio and do something. They said, "What do you mean?", and I said, "Just go, do something, do a song together". So off they went and recorded "Under Pressure".

Today Claude still lives in Montreux, the place of his birth, in a beautiful chalet high up in the mountains. The drive there takes you up a steep, narrow, twisting road, covered with snow & ice on this cold January day, set amongst the fir trees, surrounded by neighbouring peaks, and overlooking a magnificent view of the town and Lake Geneva beyond.

Written by competition winner - Howie Saunders

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