Instantly recognisable and yet nothing like anything else.
But it’s got a hint of Eastern mysticism in it, just by the semitone lift. "What Beethoven does with just very few notes, that riff does it with very few notes, too. And I know, Ritchie himself has said it’s like Beethoven in a way – Beethoven’s fifth. The riff is so simple and yet so different to anything else. "It was first of all some DJs, and then the public at large turned it into the song it’s become. But it wasn’t us that chose Smoke On The Water. We thought that was going to be the single. We thought, ‘Mid-tempo, slightly boring.’ We put all our efforts into another song on the album called Never Before. “We never thought for a minute it was going to have the kind of future it was gonna have,” adds Glover. And I thought, ‘Did I just say something out loud? What was it?’ ‘Smoke on the water.’” “I said it half asleep as I was waking up, I realised I just said something out loud in the hotel room – to no one. “I came up with the title a day or two after the fire,” Glover recalled. We said, ‘Right, well let’s write some lyrics.’ And we wrote them quite as conversationally as I’m talking to you. "And Ian and I sat down and we listened to the song. "‘Let’s write a song about the adventure of actually coming to try and record, and the place burning down and ending up doing it in a hotel corridor. ‘Well what about that one jam we did at that other place?’ ‘Yeah, ok. And we finished all those and we were still short of a song. "We did Highway Star and Lazy and Pictures Of Home and all those. We threw some mattresses against the windows, brought a couple of industrial heaters to heat the place before we arrived there during the day. We arranged to have a carpenter put a couple of walls up. A cold sort of place, I mean it was freezing cold, after all November, December time. “So we came across the Grand Hotel,” Glover recalled, “which was then closed for the winter. There weren’t many options, and it took a few days to find a suitable space. So now the band had to find yet another place to record in this small, idyllic, quiet town. Montreux was then a very sleepy town populated mostly by old ladies who had tea in the afternoon.” And what we didn’t know is that the police were trying to get in and stop us because we were keeping the whole town awake. It was just a jam with a kind of rough arrangement to it. "We were doing the first take of this song – well, it wasn’t a song yet. How about this? How about that? Let’s do a solo.’ And by the time we started recording it, it was midnight. I don’t know if he had the riff beforehand or whether he made it up on the spot, but it was a kind of mid-tempo, ploddy kind of riff. The band took a break for dinner and returned to the studio around 9 or 10 p.m. The band set up on the stage and ran cables out to the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio. So he arranged to have us move into a small theatre nearby the old casino – the ex-casino, I should say.”
“The guy who was in charge of the casino and kind of looking after us, came to us,” Glover recalled, “and he put all his problems aside and was worried about us. This was during a performance by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The story about the song’s creation somewhat mirrors that of Free's All Right Now and other classics written as toss-offs and in a hurry.ĭeep Purple were in the midst of recording their seminal 1972 album, Machine Head, at a casino in Montreux, Switzerland, when somebody set off a flare gun and the building burned to the ground. He had played around with that type of writing for a few years before stumbling upon what would become the iconic riff of Smoke On The Water. He wrote the riff in 'fourths,' which is a medieval style of writing. That may have been a joke given Blackmore’s sense of humour, but one thing isn’t. You turn it back, and play it back and forth, it’s actually Beethoven’s fifth. “I thought play backwards, put something to it,” he stated in a 2007 interview.
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