Chris had booked tickets on a bus from Bern to Montreux and we travelled in elegant sophistication in the front seat, upstairs arriving at the Lake Geneva shoreline just after midday. Again, the weather was perfect and Chris was enthralled by the picturesque vistas, making the most of capturing as many photos as she could. For the record, our trusty Canon camera stopped working during our visit and I switched to using my iPhone. (The Canon has subsequently been repaired.)
There isn’t really much to say in describing Montreux’s waterfront – it’s absolutely gorgeous. It was difficult to filter out the best images for this post but here is a representative few…
While Deep Purple’s association with Montreux is well known, Queen (and Freddie Mercury in particular) were frequent visitors. They recorded the album “Jazz” (1978) there in a recording studio constructed inside the casino rebuilt after the infamous fire described in Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”.
Called Mountain Studios, Queen loved the atmosphere and the music that it helped create and purchased it in 1979. The studio remained in their control until several years after Freddie Mercury’s death (in 1991) when it was sold. It has now been converted into a charity museum / exhibition “Queen: The Studio Experience”, with the Mercury Phoenix Trust being the beneficiary. You have to enter the casino to be able to view the exhibition. Aside from Queen (and individual projects by members of Queen), the studio also recorded albums for David Bowie, AC/DC, Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Chris Rea, Yes, Rick Wakeman and Emerson, Lake & Palmer and others.
The exhibition comprises many display cases with artefacts from Queen’s history with numerous video loops (complete with headphones) and lots of printed material. The studio control room has been left intact and (mostly) operational. The mixer console has been modified leaving ten active fader controls that allow real time mixing of four Queen tracks. Instructions via video screens are provided by Brian May and Roger Taylor, the latter who suggested that the drums really need to be pushed to 11.
I did my best at “Fat Bottom Girls”, the cheeky fantasy track from”Jazz” – and Roger was right – loud drums do sound really good. 🙂
Freddie Mercury had a chateau in Montreux and loved the privacy and seclusion it provided – away from the scrutiny of paparazzi and eager fans. During the final stages of his illness, Freddie lived in Montreux where, together with the other members of Queen, he worked on and recorded songs that would be assembled as their final album “Made in Heaven” released in 1995, several years after Freddie’s passing.
A life sized statue of Freddie in a characteristic pose stands on the shoreline looking out onto Lake Geneva.
We enjoyed a salad while sitting on some rocks looking out onto the lake. A few metres away a mountain stream terminated at the lake’s edge.
Montreux is famed for an annual Jazz Festival, which this year runs for two weeks from 28 June till 13 July, and as beautiful as Montreux is, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the place with the crowds this event is sure to attract.
For our return trip to Bern, we were Robin Hood’d * by the SBB (the Swiss Travel entity) with tickets costing more than four times that of the bus (AUD $124 vs. AUD $31). No wonder you see lots of pack packers waiting at bus stops! [* steal from the rich tourists and give to the poor Swiss]
I am pleased to report that our experiments into whether smoke and water are immiscible were successful. Our conclusion is that these components are not well fitted; one is a liquid and the other a gas. While it is possible for the gas to be dissolved into the water with the input of energy in the form of agitation, this was not the outcome of our experiment. Due to their disparate phases and difference in density, the smoke is observed to settle on top of the water.
Tomorrow, we leave for Lucerne – our second last stop before heading back home.