‘It's like having a button that makes the audience go nuts': Deep Purple on Smoke on the Water

The Guardian

18 hours ago

We wanted a more exciting sound than we had been getting in conventional recording studios, so hired the Rolling Stones' mobile studio for three weeks to record in the Montreux casino. It was 1971 and the night before we were due to begin, we went to see Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention play in the casino as part of the Montreux jazz festival, but – as the song puts it – 'some stupid with a flare gun' fired into the ceiling.
Sparks came down and everyone had to get out. I became separated from the band so went back inside to find them. The place was empty, but just as I came out something exploded and whoosh – the whole building went up in flames.
We sat in the bar of our hotel a couple of blocks away and watched the plume of black smoke as the beautiful old casino was reduced to charred wood. A couple of mornings later I was aware that I'd said the phrase 'smoke on the water' loudly into the room as I woke up. Later, after guitarist Ritchie Blackmore had come up with a mid-tempo riff, I suggested Smoke on the Water as the title of a song about what had happened to us.
There's a great photograph of singer Ian Gillan with his notebook open and the first two verses written. I'm sat opposite him listening to Ritchie's guitar through headphones. Ian and I were throwing lyrical ideas to each other and we had the song within maybe 15 minutes. It came out as if we were writing in a journal, beginning: 'We all came out to Montreux, on the Lake Geneva shoreline'. 'Funky Claude' is Claude Nobs, the jazz festival founder, a lovely man who was running round 'pulling kids out' as his world went up in flames.
Montreux has always been special to us because of what happened. The last time we were there, signs by the lake read 'No smoking on the water' and four jets released smoke over the water as we played. That felt very emotional, but I never get tired of playing the song. Someone once said it's like having a button that you press to make the audience go nuts.
Before it had any lyrics, Smoke on the Water was known as 'the der-der-der song' because of Ritchie's riff. After the casino burned down, Claude found us a place called the Pavillon ballroom, where we started playing around with it. Jon Lord doubled up the riff on organ, but with inversions to the chords. Roger's bass playing was really solid and that gave me room to flash around, so the drums build up in a crescendo. We had just started recording when there were flashing lights outside and the police arrived. The roadies managed to hold the doors shut until we'd finished the take. Then a police officer said: 'You must stop! You are too loud!'
Claude suggested we continue at the closed Grand Hotel, by which time Ritchie decided he didn't want the slow song When a Blind Man Cries on the Machine Head album. That left us a track short, but our engineer Martin Birch reminded us of 'that first thing we did in the Pavillon'. Once Ian Gillan and Roger started telling the story in the lyrics, it started to become Smoke on the Water.
We finished recording it on the ground floor corridor of the hotel, having raided the rooms and used mattresses to block any sound leaking, hence the line 'a few red lights and a few old beds'. At that point it was just another album track. We had no idea it would become really important, but the public decide those things.
Warner Bros in Los Angeles loved it but said it was too long for the radio, so unbeknown to us one of their engineers cut it down to four minutes. The rest is history, as they say. On the Made in Japan live version we'd been playing it for a year and had found all these little nooks and crannies to explore, so it's different. The audience did the hand claps in time with the riff. Ian had trouble hearing through the monitors that night in Osaka so at the end he says that wonderful line: 'I want everything louder than everything else!' A good 40 years after we recorded it, I was playing with one of my little pickup bands in a restaurant in Italy and someone said the chef wanted to say hello. He came up to me and said: 'I was the chef in the casino when it burned down.'
Deep Purple's Made in Japan (50th Anniversary Edition) is out now