There are guitar riffs, and then there’s that riff. You know the one. The very first thing millions of people learn when they pick up a guitar for the first time. I recently travelled to Montreux, Switzerland, to trace the extraordinary chain of events that produced one of the most iconic moments in hard rock history — and what I found was even more remarkable than I expected.
Why Deep Purple Came to Montreux
It was December 1971, and Deep Purple were on the hunt for somewhere to record their next album. Traditional recording studios, by the band’s own account, were pretty horrible in those days. They wanted something with more life, more energy — a space where they could capture a rawer, more spontaneous sound.
The Montreux Casino seemed perfect. The Montreux Jazz Festival had established the venue as a destination for serious musicians — Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and Frank Zappa had all graced its stage. Better still, the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording studio could be parked right outside. The casino was free, it was available, and it looked like a great place to set up and make a record.
The Night Someone Pulled Out a Flare Gun
When Deep Purple arrived in town, Frank Zappa was performing at the casino and they naturally went along to catch Zappa’s show. The concert was in full swing when someone in the audience — for reasons that remain baffling to this day — decided to fire a flare gun into the ceiling of the venue.
The casino went up in flames almost immediately.
When I visited Montreux, I sat down with journalist François Barras of 24 Heures, who has spent years documenting this story. He painted a vivid picture of the chaos that unfolded that night — an enormous fire that destroyed the entire building in a matter of minutes, with Deep Purple watching helplessly from outside as their recording venue burned to the ground and smoke drifted out across the still waters of Lake Geneva.
It’s that image — the smoke rolling over the water — that became the central visual of one of rock’s greatest songs.
Claude Nobs and the Pavilion
The unsung hero of this story is Claude Nobs, the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival. Rather than leaving the band stranded, he acted immediately — within two days, Deep Purple had been relocated to Le Pavilion, a stunning Art Nouveau theatre right in the heart of town.
And it was here, during a soundcheck to test the acoustics, that Ritchie Blackmore first played the riff.
It wasn’t a composed piece. It wasn’t a deliberate creative act. It was a jam — an idea Blackmore had while testing the sound in the room. The band fell in around it and something extraordinary started to take shape. Then the neighbours called the police.
As the squad cars pulled up outside, the roadies physically barricaded the doors to buy the band enough time to finish the take. They didn’t quite make it — the police eventually got in, the session was shut down, and Deep Purple were on the move again.
Machine Head: Recorded in a Hotel Corridor
Their next — and final — stop was the Grand Hotel. With mattresses lining the corridors for makeshift acoustic treatment and the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio parked outside, Deep Purple improvised one of the most legendary recording setups in rock history. The only way to listen back to what they’d recorded was to climb over a balcony and make their way to the mobile unit outside.
From that balcony, incidentally, you could see the exact spot where the casino had burned — smoke drifting over the water.
It was in the Grand Hotel that they recorded the core of Machine Head: Highway Star, Lazy, Pictures of Home, and more. The album that would define the sound of hard rock.
Seven Minutes Short — and a Lucky Tape
With one day left in Montreux, the band realised they were seven minutes short of a complete album. Then someone remembered the soundcheck tape from Le Pavilion — the one with the riff, the jam, the near-arrest.
They pulled out the 24-track tape and listened back. Blackmore and vocalist Ian Gillan sat together and talked through everything that had happened to them over those mad few weeks: the casino fire, Claude Nobs rushing around trying to help, the police barricading, the hotel corridor recording studio. They decided to simply write it all down as a song — to tell the story of how they’d made the album.
The result was Smoke on the Water.
It’s one of the most autobiographical songs in rock history, and one of the most accidental. A flare gun, a burning casino, a helpful festival founder, a police raid, and a riff that almost never made it to tape — all of it colliding in a single moment to produce something timeless.
Playing the Riff Where It All Happened
I had the privilege of playing that riff on stage at the Stravinsky Auditorium in Montreux — the very venue that grew out of those extraordinary events. Standing there, in the room where so much of this history unfolded, it’s impossible not to feel the weight of what happened here in December 1971.
That riff isn’t just a guitar exercise. It’s a document. A piece of music that carries an entire story inside it — of chaos, creativity, and the strange accidents that sometimes produce something that lasts forever.
