![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/morse4.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/airey3.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“Signs by the lake read No smoking on the water..” thats hilarious!!
August 19th, 2025 at 12:56that song title must be the best known song title in the world..I know people who never liked Deep Purle and dont listen
to that kind of music but they do know that song with the title “Smoke on the water.”
You don’t have a rock’n’roll heart if you dislike SOTW. That riff will forever epitomize adolescent crypto-sexual penetrative guitar macho rock.
And that’s a good thing as we can hopefully all agree on.
To this day I believe that Uncle Ted, that undisputed godfather of cock rock, had SOTW on his mind when he wrote this here:
https://youtu.be/q_i1YSa9xww
August 19th, 2025 at 15:06By the way, today is Gillan’s 80th birthday!
August 19th, 2025 at 18:13Happy birthday Ian, and I’m only listening to Gillan LPs these days.
I wish you a loooong life and many more studio records.
Carramba!
I swear that sooner or later I will make a pilgrimage to Montreux!
August 19th, 2025 at 21:32The story of the chef in Italy is true! I was the guitar player with Paicey that night back in 2016. The chef came to the table and started reminiscing about the Montreaux mess with IP. It was an emotional moment.
August 19th, 2025 at 22:12There is a quick note about this on an Italian newspaper here https://liberta.it/news/ian-paice-dei-deep-purple-allelfo-non-fate-musica-per-far-soldi/55039
@4
“I wish you a loooong life and many more studio records.”
– ohhh yes DerGerd! Many many more records.
August 20th, 2025 at 08:30It’s ok (-ish) if he don’t wanna do concerts anymore, but PLEASE grace the world with some more lovely songs!
#6 Matteo Filippini:
I remember you, it’s been a long time since I saw your band with Little Ian as guest, good luck with everything, rocker!
August 20th, 2025 at 19:13