Similarly baffling was the finger-clicking swing-jazz version by the now-disgraced Australian entertainer Rolf Harris for his LP “Rolf Rules OK”, on which he employed his usual jaunty singing style, even while uttering the words, “Watch it burn”. In the latter was Pat Boone’s deeply peculiar samba/big band treatment for 1997’s In a Metal Mood, an album of rock covers that seemed to have been made with the sole intention of showing that this white-bread singer had a sense of humour. In the former category was a charity recording to help victims of the 1988 Armenian earthquake that featured an all-male roll-call of top rockers including Bruce Dickinson, Bryan Adams, Tony Iommi, Brian May and Keith Emerson, and dialled up the rock histrionics to seismic effect. Over the years “Smoke on the Water” has yielded cover versions ranging from the decent to the inexplicable. His response was that they should listen to the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The guitarist would have to defend the riff against sniffy interviewers who suggested his use of just four notes made it too basic to be any good. Appearing on their sixth album, 1972’s Machine Head, “Smoke on the Water” was released as a single a year later and, thanks in part to the infectious simplicity of Blackmore’s riff, is now held up as a classic rock anthem. But when Nobs heard it he said: “You’re crazy. Initially, the band had no plans to include “Smoke on the Water” on their as-yet-unrecorded album, not least because Gillan was worried the title made it sound like a drug song. It’s thanks to “Funky Claude” that the song saw the light of day.
Singer Ian Gillan took charge of the lyrics, writing a scene-by-scene account of what had taken place, from “some stupid” shooting the flare gun into the air to “Funky Claude”, aka Claude Nobs, the Casino’s owner (and founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival), “running in and out pulling kids out of the ground”.
It was bassist Roger Glover who came up with the name “Smoke on the Water” - the working title had been “Durh Durh Durh” on account of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s riff. The members of Deep Purple watched the fire from their hotel across the lake and quickly set about writing a song. Within hours, the building had burnt to the ground. Zappa stopped the music and directed fans to the exits. Midway through the show a fan fired a flare gun into the wooden rafters, which swiftly caught fire.
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