Ian
“Smoke on the Water.” It seemed like
such a mystical place.
ground. And with the wind from the
mountains coming down and blowing
the smoke, it was like a film set — it
was simultaneously awesome and terrifying.
And Roger wrote down
‘Smoke on the water’ on a napkin, and
we then got shifted to the Grand Hotel,
and we spent a very short time there
recording the album. And on the last
day, the engineer Martin Birch said,
“Hey, guys — we’re seven minutes
short of an album.” So somebody came
up with the idea of “Well, what about
Deep Purple, 1974
IG: It IS a mystical place, on Lake
Geneva. And it was an amazing story.
We were due to record in the casino in
Montreux, and we had The Rolling
Stones’ mobile recording truck parked
outside. And we went out to see the
Frank Zappa show, and it was the last
show of the season, then we were
gonna take over as everyone moved on
and they closed down for the winter.
And a guy came in and fired a flare
gun into the ceiling and the place
caught fire. It was a wooden building,
and that’s where the drama of that
song took place. We evacuated to Eden
Au Lac, a hotel just down the lake, and
we watched the casino burn to the
09•2020
the soundcheck we did on the first
day?” Which was the famous riff that
became that song. And it was seven
minutes long. So we wrote a song,
Roger and I, a biographical account of
the making of the record — “We all
came out to Montreux, blah, blah,
blah.” So that filled the seven minutes
on Side B. And we thought no more
about it, and we went on the road, and
it was a year later when somebody
from Warner Brothers came to see a
show and saw the reaction of the
crowd to “Smoke on the Water,” and
he realized what was going on. So he
went back, did an edit and cut the
thing down to half-size, 3:15, and then
suddenly, it got played on the radio.
And after that, it got played a lot.
IE: Given the lunar references on
Whoosh!, do you do most of your
writing at night?
IG: I write at night a lot. My most treasured
possession is my Panasonic electric
pencil sharpener — I’ve got one in
England and one at my place in
Portugal. And I go to bed with sharpened
pencils and my current notebook,
or composition book, at my bedside.
But I carry it with me everywhere, so I
write day and night. But I write a lot in
the night, particularly when I’m
inspired — there are times when you
go out and sit under the stars, and
watch the moon rise and think, “My
God — this is uplifting me just like it
does the oceans.” It’s amazing.
IE: What’s your affinity with
Armenia?
IG: Well, I went there as a tourist first.
They brought me into the Soviet Union
at the end of the USSR and the cold
war, just as it dissolved. And I was
playing Georgia and Chechnya — I
was the first Western artist to do such a
tour, and I stopped and did three
nights in Armenia. And I didn’t even
know about this, but I met a man who
said, “Would you like to visit the site of
the earthquake?” So I went and I was
12 illinoisentertainer.com september 2020