The Beethoven-inspired throwaway that become the most famous riff of all time: “We didn’t make a big deal out of it and it wasn’t being considered as a track for the album”

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Der der der, de de der der, der der der, duh duh…

We all know it. It’s the one every aspiring guitarist tries very soon after they first pick up the instrument, Smoke On The Water is among the most familiar, and famous riffs of all time.

The story is fairly famous too. The water, of course, is Lake Geneva. And the smoke was a fire at the Casino venue during a Frank Zappa gig at the Montreux Jazz Festival in December 1971. Deep Purple were in the venue, escaped from the fire to safety and wrote the song, which would appear on their Machine Head album the following year.

Last Monday (the 8th) Deep Purple returned to Montreux and at the 58th edition of the same festival, performed a set which included a specially presented version of the track.

As the iconic riff cranked up, a curtain was lifted at the back of the stage to reveal a glistening Lake Geneva bathed in smoke. Frontman Ian Gillan instructed the audience to sing the riff and the 5000-capacity crowd duly obliged, getting louder and louder before the drums crashed in. It was, apparently, quite something.

The man who came up with the riff – Ritchie Blackmore – wasn’t there, having left Deep Purple in the early 90s. Blackmore has claimed he was inspired by Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5, which also sports a simple four-note refrain, but it wasn’t something he came up with especially - it had been part of Purple’s closing live jam, Mandrake Root, for several years. Even before that the guitarist had been using the riff during his time in Screaming Lord Sutch and The Savages.

The title though came from bassist Roger Glover, who said that he had received it after he woke up from a dream a few days later: “I said it out to an empty room. And then I kind of really woke up and I said, 'What did I just say? Smoke on the water?'

"No idea what it meant. I mentioned it to Ian (Gillan, vocalist) and he said, 'Yeah, sounds like a drug song, we better not do that.’”

The fire itself had started during the Zappa show when somebody fired a flare gun into the ceiling (hence the line ‘some stupid with a flare gun’) which was covered in rattan. It quickly spread and although no one died in the ensuing inferno, from the distance of Purple’s hotel room it looked scary and hellish.

"It burned all afternoon, all evening, all through the night,” remembers Glover. “We went and looked at it the next morning and there it was, gone. It was a frightening thing.”

The band had come to Montreux with the Rolling Stones mobile studio in tow and the notion of recording their next album at the Casino itself. But with no venue left now, they switched to the Pavilion Theatre. When noise complaints from local residents forced them to leave they hot footed it to the Grand Hotel.

As a latecomer to Purple’s new pile of songs, Smoke On The Water wasn’t initially seen as a contender for the record. “It was just another riff, like Into The Fire,” remembered Ian Gillan in a MusicRadar interview in 2022. “We didn’t make a big deal out of it and it wasn’t being considered as a track for the album. It was a jam at the first soundcheck.

"We didn’t work on the arrangement – it was a jam. Smoke only made it onto the album as a filler track because we were short of time. On vinyl, 38 minutes was the optimum time if you wanted good quality – 19 minutes per side – and we were about seven minutes short with one day to go. So we dug out the jam and put vocals to it.”

Armed with Glover’s title, Gillan quickly jotted down some lyrics: “Being the last track, there was plenty to write about. It ended up being a biographical account of the making of the album Machine Head. ‘We all came out to Montreux…’ and so on!” Indeed one of the best things about Smoke On The Water is its matter-of-fact diary-like lyrics. There’s no deep or profound meaning to Gillan’s words: this is just what happened.

The Machine Head album would appear in April, just five months after the fire – music moved fast in those days – and was another big success for the band, reaching Number One in the UK and Seven in the US. But Smoke has surpassed its parent album to reach a level of recognition far beyond anything else Purple recorded.

It’s been covered many times, and was revived in 1989 by Rock Aid Armenia, a charity ensemble raising money for Armenian earthquake victims in that year. Arguably, alongside Satisfaction and Seven Nation Army, it’s the most famous guitar riff of all time.

Certainly, the man who came up with its title is aware of its enduring appeal. Roger Glover once remarked, in an interview with Metal Hammer: "I think 'Smoke On The Water' is the biggest song that Purple will ever have and there's always a pressure to play it.”

“It's not the greatest live song. It's a good song but you sort of plod through it. The excitement always comes from the audience.”