Deep Purple reveal “hostile” incident with Swiss police when recording of ‘Smoke on the Water’
A handful of past and present members of Deep Purple, have looked back on a tense experience with the Swiss police while recording their signature song, ‘Smoke on the Water’, which appeared on 1972’s Machine Head.
Speaking to Classic Rock Magazine (via Music News), original member and drummer Ian Paice recalled that as Deep Purple were jamming the track in Switzerland, they endured a “pretty hostile” incident with local police in 1971. The group jammed the track and fleshed it out in a mobile unit after the Montreux Casino accidentally burned down due to a fan with a flare gun during a Frank Zappa show. Famously, a recording of the fire’s outbreak and Zappa’s announcement can be found on the bootleg album Swiss Cheese/Fire!
According to Paice, the police rapped on their door as they were making “a hell of a racket!”. The band’s ex-guitarist Ritchie Blackmore continued: “We did ‘Smoke On The Water’ there, and the riff I made up in the spur of the moment. I just threw it together with lan Paice.”
Bassist Roger Glover detailed more about the incident: “We went outside to the mobile unit and were listening back to one of the takes, and there was some hammering on the door. It was the local police, and they were trying to stop the whole thing because it was so loud. We knew that they were coming to close everything down. We said to Martin Birch, our engineer: ‘Let’s see if we have a take.’ So they were outside hammering and taking out their guns… It was getting pretty hostile.”
The interviewees then revealed that they had to lock their doors to keep the police at bay until they managed to record an acceptable take and finish proceedings for the night.
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