Dallas, TX – April 16, 2012. North American syndicated rock radio show InTheStudio: The Stories Behind History’s Greatest Rock Bands takes a look Deep Purple’s Machine Head album which, along with Led Zeppelin IV and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, is widely considered to be the Holy Trinity of British hard rock. Having successfully moved away from the more progressive sound of the late ‘60s into a heavy but melodic quintet creatively steered in large part by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, the recruitment of singer Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover would make DEEP PURPLE “Highway Stars” worldwide with the 1972 Machine Head album. But it is the story of the making of the album that is Rock’n’Roll legend. On its 40th anniversary, Ian Gillan tells show host Redbeard the real story behind “Smoke on the Water”.
“It was an inferno (the fire at the Casino in Montreux). The wind was coming down off the mountains and blowing the flames and the smoke over the lake. And the smoke was just like a stage show and it was hanging on the water, and I’ll never forget Roger (Glover) grabbed a napkin and wrote down on this napkin, “Smoke on the Water”.
The casino fire forced DEEP PURPLE to scramble to find an alternate place to record Machine Head . Two locations later they ended up taking over a hotel, as Roger Glover remembers,
“The whole thing was recorded under dire circumstances…a lot of Machine Head was written on the spot.”
InTheStudio is syndicated on over 50 radio stations across North America. The DEEP PURPLE Machine Head/ InTheStudio program will air this weekend.
Click to STREAM this interview online.
