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Ian Gillan sang Smoke on the Water at the Guitars on the Beach festival in Lyme Regis, UK, this Saturday, September 6. BBC reports that he was joined by 3,325 guitarists, which didn’t quite beat the world record of 6,546 (helped to set by Steve Morse in Poland 2009), but only a national one. Local […]
Read more »More details have emerged about Gillan’s involvement with the Guitars on the Beach festival to take place in Lyme Regis in September. Festival organizer Geoff Baker spoke to the local paper Bridgeport News: With thousands of guitarists involved, they need to follow the house band on the song and we need a stage for the […]
Read more »BBC Radio is conducting an online poll of greatest guitar riffs. Smoke on the Water and Long Live Rock’n’Roll are in the running. The latter is quite a bit of a strange choice, but that’s a matter of taste. Putting aside for the moment the meaningfulness of all such polls, online or offline, this one […]
Read more »Blackmore Vale Magazine (I kid you not) reports that Ian Gillan offered his services to perform at the Guitars On The Beach festival in his home town of Lyme Regis. The event is essentially a mass gathering of guitar players not unlike the ones that set the world record, albeit not on quite the scale: […]
Read more »It took only 42 years, but finally Smoke on the Water now has an official video. (watch inside)
Read more »Smoke on the Water is in the quarterfinals of the Ultimate Classic Rock’s March Riff Madness playoffs. It’s pitted against the Ace of Spades and so far is losing 2:1. Final whistle will blow on Sunday, March 16 at 11:59PM EDT. One can vote multiple times once an hour. You know what to do.
Read more »A first hand account of the infamous fire at the Casino de Montreux on December 4, 1971: I was heavily engrossed in the concert. Frank Zappa was playing again as the drum set had been fixed, and he had written a song about Switzerland, Swiss cheese and all that. Also, he had a large head […]
Read more »Twin sisters Camille and Kennerly Kitt, better knows as the Harp Twins, made their name by playing covers of rock tunes and music from the movies arranged for two harps. And being very easy on the eye doesn’t hurt either. 😉 Their latest instalment is Smoke on the Water: Frankly, this one leaves me a […]
Read more »In a recent interview to Russian newspaper Kommersant Ian Gillan mentioned, among the usual, that the band is contemplating a special tribute to Claude Nobs during their visit to Montreux (they perform at the Jazz Festival on July 19). One idea being touted is to skip Smoke on the Water from the setlist on the […]
Read more »Say Fender : For more than 40 years now, Blackmore’s famously forceful G minor blues riff in the 1972 Deep Purple classic “Smoke on the Water” has served as the quintessential heavy rock guitar riff and a metal-melody primer for burgeoning rock guitarists everywhere. Its place in rock history is as solid as the stature […]
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Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing