![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/paice1.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/gillan2.jpg)
The public decide those things
The Guardian has a piece on the casino burning down and associated shenanigans as a part of their How we made series. With input from Roger Glover and Ian Paice.
RG:
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.
IP:
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.”
Read more in The Guardian.
Thanks to Georgius Novicianus for the heads-up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Deep darlings of the press …
August 19th, 2025 at 00:26