Classic Rock Revisited recently caught up with DEEP PURPLE's Roger Glover to discuss the band's new DVD, They All Came Down To Montreux: Live at Montreux 2006. The following is an excerpt from the interview:

CRR: Do you remember much from the show recorded for the DVD release?

Roger: "Well, Monteaux ... obviously, we're connected with Montreaux at the hip in a way, mainly because the song 'Smoke On the Water' was written there. But apart from that, Montreaux has always been the home of the jazz festival and also the home for a very big European television awards ceremony — the European equivalent of your Emmies I guess. It's called the Golden Rose of Montreaux, so it's a well-known place anyway. But I think the song 'Smoke On The Water' put it much more on the map on an international level, and back in those days, it really was a jazz festival, but it kind of opened up a little bit and allowed blues in and of course, now and then a little of everything. It's not really a jazz festival; it's just a festival of music. And we've done it three times. I haven't heard the recording. I remember that particular night we were in the middle of three or four gigs in a row, and we were all exhausted, and it was very hot, very hot night — there's no air in the thing. And I remember ... coming off stage I said to one of the guys working there, I said, 'How come you built this lovely building, but you didn't put air conditioning in?' 'Cause you know that's so American. That's stupid. Anyway, it was a hot night, and I can't remember much about the gig, to be honest.

CRR: Why did you want to record Machine Head in Montreaux?

Roger: "It was available. At that time, we were all British, and we all came from that part of the world, and taxes were incredibly high back in the early '70s, and we had an accountant that figured out that if we wrote and recorded songs outside the country, we wouldn't have to pay British tax, which is certainly fair enough. So, we looked around the continent to see where we could go, and we'd played Montreaux several times before that — it was a regular fixture on any European tour — and the actual casino, of course, was not just a casino; it was a gig. It was like a 3,000-seat hall or something like that, and restaurants and bars and discos ... a huge complex. I don't know who it was that got us the place. Our management must have spread the net around saying, 'What's available?' Because, obviously, getting a hall available for three or four weeks is pretty tough. There's always something going on. Anyway, it's toward the end of that year — I think it was November or December — the Montreux Casino gig was empty for three or four weeks, something like that. So that's why we went there. Cold months ... in the song, 'When A Blind Man Cries', that's as much about that recording as 'Smoke On The Water' is in many ways. 'In a cold month/In that room/Found a reason for the things we had to do' — you know?

CRR: What were your thoughts as you watched the fire engulf casino?

Roger: "Well, shock .... I mean it was probably the biggest fire I'd ever seen up to that point — and probably ever seen in my life, actually. It was a huge building. I remember there was very little panic getting out, because it didn't seem to be much of a fire at first. But, as a precaution, everyone went out, and, of course, the fire was in the trunking of the building, so no one could see it. But, when it caught, it went up like a fireworks display. We were staying in a hotel on the coast of [Lake Geneva] and watched it, and there was some concern that it might spread, because there was a big, high-rise building not far from it ... a residential building I believe. There was some concern about that, but nothing else was destroyed, just the casino. And the thought was, 'Well, what are we going to do now?' You know, a band goes on with the idea of recording here. But Claude, bless him ... his whole future was going up in smoke, but he concerned himself with us more than his own [problems]. And he said, "We've got to find you somewhere else," and in the next few days, we actually moved into somewhere else, but then couldn't. We did one track there, which was eventually going to be 'Smoke On the Water', and the police stopped us 'cause we were making too much noise. It kind of highlights the sort of dire situation we were in ... in a small, sleepy town with all our gear, how do you find a place where a band can make a lot of loud rock music any time of day or night? Pretty difficult. But, that's how we ended up at the Grand Hotel, which was closed. We made it work. We put soundproofing in. I mean, we were running out of time now. After the fire, we didn't actually start really working on the record for about a week and a week in a three-week period is a third of it."

Go to this location for the complete interview.