discography deep purple smoke on the water

4, 1971, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were playing a gig at the Montreux casino. The lakeside Swiss town of Montreux was in the news this week as the host of nuclear talks between Iran and six world powers.īut for rockers of a certain age, Montreux will always be best known for its rich musical history - including the roaring casino fire that inspired the English rock band Deep Purple's classic 'Smoke on the Water.' The casino caught fire during a Frank Zappa concert.

So, how people can see different things into it, I don’t know.The British rock band Deep Purple, shown here in 1971, wrote the hit song 'Smoke on the Water,' after watching the casino in Montreux, Switzerland, go up in flames later that year. “The lyrics are so real, and conversational - there’s no exaggeration,” Glover says, laughing. Once, a radio DJ asked him if it was true that Deep Purple had “set fire to an island.” Somehow, though, despite the track’s many direct references to that December day, not everyone has been able to follow the narrative of “Smoke on the Water,” Roger Glover admits. Glover came up with the song’s memorable title, based on the image of smoke rolling across Lake Geneva during the incident. “Smoke on the Water” details a 1971 incident in which a fire swept through the Montreux Casino during a Frank Zappa concert, destroying the entire complex and forcing Deep Purple to move its nearby recording studio elsewhere to finish Machine Head. It wasn’t a story about love or anything, it was just a story about something that happened to us. We thought it was just a mid-tempo, boring song. “In fact, it almost got left off the album. “Certainly, we didn’t see it coming,” Deep Purple’s Roger Glover later rememebered.

To think, the track almost didn’t make the final running order for the band’s subsequent album, 1972’s Machine Head. Deep Purple has become inextricably linked to the song “Smoke on the Water” since the song was inspired by a Decemblaze.

Discography deep purple smoke on the water