Montreux was then a very sleepy town populated mostly by old ladies who had tea in the afternoon.” And what we didn’t know is that the police were trying to get in and stop us because we were keeping the whole town awake. It was just a jam with a kind of rough arrangement to it. 'We were doing the first take of this song – well, it wasn’t a song yet. How about this? How about that? Let’s do a solo.’ And by the time we started recording it, it was midnight. I don’t know if he had the riff beforehand or whether he made it up on the spot, but it was a kind of mid-tempo, ploddy kind of riff. The band took a break for dinner and returned to the studio around 9 or 10 p.m. The band set up on the stage and ran cables out to the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio. So he arranged to have us move into a small theatre nearby the old casino – the ex-casino, I should say.” “The guy who was in charge of the casino and kind of looking after us, came to us,” Glover recalled, “and he put all his problems aside and was worried about us. This was during a performance by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

The story about the song’s creation somewhat mirrors that of Free's All Right Now and other classics written as toss-offs and in a hurry.ĭeep Purple were in the midst of recording their seminal 1972 album, Machine Head, at a casino in Montreux, Switzerland, when somebody set off a flare gun and the building burned to the ground. He had played around with that type of writing for a few years before stumbling upon what would become the iconic riff of Smoke On The Water. He wrote the riff in 'fourths,' which is a medieval style of writing. That may have been a joke given Blackmore’s sense of humour, but one thing isn’t. You turn it back, and play it back and forth, it’s actually Beethoven’s fifth. “I thought play backwards, put something to it,” he stated in a 2007 interview.

Deep purple smoke on the water singer