Deep Purple’s Mark II line-up released many great songs, but none have echoed down the years like Smoke On The Water. Released in 1972, it’s one of the greatest rock songs of all time for at least two reasons. Firstly, it has that riff, one of the most memorable sequences of four notes ever arranged. Secondly, it deserves a prize from the Campaign For Plain English thanks to its helpfully literal lyrics, which detail the most iconic gig-gone-wrong in history.
The band – Ian Gillan (vocals), Ritchie Blackmore (guitar), Roger Glover (bass), Jon Lord (organ) and Ian Paice (drums) – had visited Montreux, near Lake Geneva in Switzerland (‘We all came down to Montreux, on the Lake Geneva shoreline’) in order to record a new album in a mobile studio without delay (‘To make records on a mobile, we didn’t have much time’). See? Add to this the immortal chorus line about a fire near the lake (‘Smo-o-oke on the water!’) and there really isn’t much room for misinterpretation.
As for that opening riff, it’s one of those patterns that you hear once and you never forget, largely because every guitar store in the world has someone playing it. Lord played the riff in unison with Blackmore on a Hammond organ through an overdriven guitar amp to make up Purple’s signature sound: together, the pair pretty much defined the tone of an entire genre of early-70s bombastic rock. Glover and Paice do what the best rhythm sections always do – play minimally and stay the hell out of the way – and it’s left to Gillan to deliver a typically belting vocal performance.
Latest Videos From Louder
As is so often the case with these epoch-shaping songs, neither Blackmore nor Lord had any inkling when they wrote Smoke On The Water that it would become such a huge hit and endure for decades to come. In fact, the song wasn’t intended to be a single at first, and only came out a year after the parent album, Machine Head, had become a hit in its own right in 1972. When the single appeared, it was significant that its B-side was an in-concert version of the same song, which had become a live favourite among Purple fans in the months since its appearance on the LP.
Smoke On The Water was born in the most unassuming manner, as Blackmore once said: “I was jamming with lan Paice at a soundcheck, because we often used to get to the shows early. I said to lan, ‘Give me a time or a measure that we haven’t played lately’, and he put down that particular beat, and I just went straight into that riff. It’s related to a medieval way of playing, because in those days they played a lot in parallel fourths. That riff wouldn’t sound the way it does if it wasn’t played in parallel fourths. But Paicey and I just went through it and it sounded like a backing track. I feel that we did things in Purple which were a lot better than that, that didn’t go anywhere.”
The song’s legacy is assured, believe us. For example, several attempts have been made to gather thousands of guitarists and have them play the main riff simultaneously, thus breaking a Guinness World Record. It also appears on more movie soundtracks than we can mention here, and has been covered by a plethora of groups from ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic to Black Sabbath – who played a heavier version of the song when Gillan joined them for the Born Again album in 1983.
Subsequent versions of Purple, both with and without Gillan and Blackmore, have also played the song endlessly. Whether you enjoy these later renditions or not is probably down to how much of a purist you are about bands whose line-ups change over the years.
Perhaps unusually, the song remains as popular with the band as if does with the fans. As Gillan once said, “The thing about Smoke On The Water is that I don’t know how many thousands of times I’ve sung it, but I’ve never once thought ‘Oh no, not tonight’. Every time it’s been fantastic. It’s a simple song, it has a simple structure, it’s got a narrative lyric, so it’s always a story which has its own value. Smoke On The Water tells a story, and I think it will have its own spirit, its own life.”
Enthusiasm for the song has spread across generations of musicians, Gillan also reported. “We once rehearsed with Joe Satriani in Japan, and Joe knew everything. When we were packing up to leave, he said, ‘Aren’t we gonna do Smoke On The Water? And we said, ‘Well… we assumed you knew it, but we can run through it if you like’. So he started playing, turned to me with a big smile and said, ‘I can’t believe I’m playing Smoke On The Water with Deep Purple!’”