Celebrating Deep Purple and 50 years of 'Smoke on the Water' classic

It's a guitar riff for the ages. When you hear "dunh dunh dunhhh, duhn duhn duh-dunhhh..." you are immediately swept into the hard-rock song "Smoke On The Water" whether that's your taste in music or not. You might even be moved to try your hand at some air-guitar moves of your own.

The Deep Purple classic goes back more than 50 years, and lead singer Ian Gillan recently took some time out to reminisce about it and remark that in reality, at the time it wasn't that big of a deal.

"It was a filler track," the 78-year-old told dpa about the song, recorded at a tumultuous session in Montreux, Switzerland in 1971. "We were short of time on the album."

The album was titled "Machine Head" and "Smoke On The Water" was one of the songs. Today, what was Deep Purple's sixth studio album is considered an absolute classic in the history of rock.

To mark its 50th anniversary, "Machine Head" is being re-released on a grand scale after a slight delay. The "Anniversary Deluxe Edition" with new mixes and added bonus material is set for release on March 29.

Gillan, over a cup of tea in a London recording studio, is still amazed about the durability of the album. "You know, it's quite a shock, really, because, of course we do some of those songs. It's still alive for us. It has been over the years with 'Pictures of Home' and 'Highway Star' and 'Lazy' and 'Smoke On The Water', of course, that we perform live. So the album, in essence, has never faded. It's never gone away. It's got a vibrancy about it." The "Smoke" number is the one the band saves for the final encore.

Originally, Deep Purple was planning to record the album in a mobile record studio in a concert hall in the Montreux Casino, where the band had already performed. But before the recording session could take place, catastrophe struck at the Casino during a concert of Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention when a member of the audience started a fire. "Some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground. We ended up at the Grand Hotel," Gillan sang in "Smoke On The Water".

For several weeks, Gillan and his colleagues at the time from the so-called Mark II line-up - bassist Roger Glover, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, organist Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice - stayed at the Grand Hotel, which was closed for the winter. It was there that they set up the "Rolling Stones Mobile Studio", which had once belonged to Mick Jagger and Co. The plan was to capture the live atmosphere better than in a traditional recording studio.

"We always got excited when we were writing songs, and the best songs are written quickly", Gillan said. "Child In Time was written in 20 minutes, and Smoke On The Water was written very, very quickly. So in that sense, yes, it's got spontaneity to it, which is always a good sign."

But nobody then thought that with "Machine Head" they were establishing a career milestone. "Did we know that it would become so important? No! Did we enjoy it? Yes, it was fantastic!" Gillan said. Never again would the band work so harmoniously together. "The difficulties really didn't start until later when we made (the album) 'Who Do We Think We Are'."

At seven minutes, the now iconic rock song was not really suitable for a single. "I won't say we didn't think highly of it, because I think we all enjoyed it very much. And when we went on the road, it was very much part of the set, but it was seven minutes long, and so no one played it on the radio," Gillan said.

"And therefore, although our fans at the live shows liked it, the wider public never got to hear it. If they hadn't bought the album, they certainly wouldn't hear it on the radio until we were performing in Los Angeles, probably at Anaheim or something like that."

The song's breakthrough to the single charts was the doing of a representative of the record company who noticed the enthusiastic reaction to it by a concert audience in the United States. He cut the song down to a radio-friendly three minutes.

"Boom! It got played non-stop on the radio because it fitted radio format at that time," Gillan said. "So just a stroke of luck, really, that he was there that night and made that decision. Otherwise no one would have heard of it. Apart from in concert."

"Machine Head - Deluxe Anniversary Edition" contains a completely new mix of the album, for which Dweezil Zappa, son of Frank Zappa, who died in 1993, was responsible. It was the record company's idea. "When I heard it, I thought: Oh yes, what a great idea!" says an amused Gillan. The greying singer says the new mix sounds "totally different ... I don't understand much about it, but I have absolute respect for it."

The box with LP, three CDs, Blu-Ray, booklet and various memorabilia also includes a remastered version of the original mix, a 1972 concert recording from London and a previously unreleased recording from 1971 made at the Casino Montreux which later burned down. It was included, despite its limited sound quality, "because of its historical relevance" according to the notes on the back of the box. In fact, the rough recording makes for an exciting contemporary testimony well worth listening to.

Despite all the nostalgia and entertaining stories from the past, Ian Gillan is looking ahead again. He has been at work on the next studio album - number 23 - with his long-time band mates Roger Glover and Ian Paice, keyboardist Don Airey, who joined later, and new guitarist Simon McBride. The next tour is also being planned, kicking off April 23 in Australia.