Freddie Mercury Would Have Turned 80 Today. The Party Is in a Casino That Burned Down in 1971. — Woody Magazine, Sept. 5, 2026

-
Freddie Mercury Would Have Turned 80 Today. The Party Is in a Casino That Burned Down in 1971. — Woody Magazine
Woody Magazine
We write the things that aren't news
Sept. 5, 2026 (Sat.)
Culture

Freddie Mercury Would Have Turned 80 Today. The Party Is in a Casino That Burned Down in 1971.

Montreux, Switzerland
In Three Lines
  1. Freddie Mercury was born eighty years ago today. The fans marking it are not in London. They are on a lakefront in Switzerland.
  2. Queen first came to that town in the summer of 1978, because a tax bill made staying in Britain impossible.
  3. Waiting there was one of the best-equipped studios in Europe — a room that existed only because a casino had burned down seven years earlier.

The lakefront square in Montreux is crowded this weekend. Freddie Days, a memorial festival that began on Sept. 2, runs through tomorrow: concerts, a photography exhibition, boat rides narrated by Peter Freestone, Mercury's personal assistant for more than a decade. None of it costs anything. There are no tickets and no reservations. Tonight the town's casino hosts the official birthday party, a separate event run by the Mercury Phoenix Trust, the charity his bandmates founded in his memory.

Mercury was born on Sept. 5, 1946. Today would have been his eightieth birthday.

He was a Londoner. He lived in a house in Kensington and died there in 1991. He was born in Zanzibar, an island off the East African coast. Switzerland is neither of those places.

"Because he loved the lake"

Almost everything written about Mercury and Montreux starts in the same place. The water is calm, the Alps stand behind it, and a man exhausted by fame came looking for quiet.

That version is true as far as it goes. He did love the lake, and he told the soprano Montserrat Caballé that anyone wanting peace of mind should come to Montreux. He spent much of his last years there. That is where most versions of the story stop.

But the day he first stood on that shore, the choice was not really his. That summer, Queen could not be in Britain at all.

A tax bill, June 1978

The band was hit with a large tax demand that June. The figure has never been made public. The consequence is not in dispute: Brian May had to be out of the country by July 2, weeks after the birth of his first child.

Britain's top rate of income tax at the time was 83 percent on earned income. Someone in that bracket kept 17 pounds of the next 100 they earned. The rate had been set in 1974 and stayed there for five years.

83%
Britain's top rate on earned income, 1974–1979. With the investment income surcharge, unearned income was taxed at up to 98 percent.

British musicians left. The Rolling Stones decamped to France in 1971 and titled the resulting album Exile on Main St. David Bowie kept a Swiss address while making records in Berlin. They were called tax exiles, and for most of that decade the label fit a good share of Britain's biggest acts.

Queen joined the exodus. They started rehearsing near Nice; May, who had gone to Canada, flew in to meet them.

Why that town, of all towns

Having to leave Britain was no reason to end up in Montreux. A tax exile in 1978 had a long list of countries to pick from. That summer the town was closer to a hotel room booked in a hurry.

In late July the band went to look in on the Montreux Jazz Festival, which is thought to have given the album Jazz its title. They also ran into Bowie, who told them about a studio in town called Mountain.

A lakeside town of a few tens of thousands should not have had one of the best rooms in Europe. Most accounts skip past it, and fair enough — nobody plays a record and wonders what room it was cut in. But that room is the answer.

Dec. 4, 1971, 4:15 p.m.

Frank Zappa and his band were playing the Montreux casino that afternoon. By most accounts the hall had a wooden ceiling hung with tropical decorations. The chairs had been cleared out, so the audience sat on the floor. Accounts of the crowd put it somewhere between two and three thousand people.

Between 4:15 and 4:20 the ceiling caught fire. Most witnesses blamed a flare fired from the crowd, though fire engineers who reconstructed the blaze decades later concluded the cause has never been settled.

One detail from their account explains how fast it got away from everyone. Someone dragged over a fire hose, and the jet barely reached two meters. Water pressure in the building had been turned down so the coffee machine would not blow.

Everyone got out. Zappa took the microphone and told the room to walk, not run, and with no chairs in the way nobody was trapped in a row. People near the stage tore down the curtains, broke the floor-to-ceiling windows and dropped about three meters onto grass. Nobody died. Three went to the hospital.

The building did not survive. Damage was put at the time at 12 to 15 million francs.

Deep Purple watched it burn. Their song about it came out the following year. The smoke on the water was not a metaphor; it was what settled over Lake Geneva that afternoon.

What went up in the empty lot

Rebuilding took four years. When the new casino opened in 1975 it contained something the old one never had: a recording studio.

The American singer Anita Kerr and her husband, the Swiss businessman Alex Grob, built it, hiring the studio designer Tom Hidley. It could lock two 24-track machines together and run 48 channels of sound at once, which almost no other studio could do. They called it Mountain Studios.

The gear was only half the appeal. The other half was the address. For a British musician who had to be out of Britain, one room in Switzerland solved the tax problem and the equipment problem at once. The Rolling Stones came. So did Yes and Rick Wakeman.

A fire cleared the space. A tax code supplied the customers.

From client to landlord

Queen began work on Jazz there in the summer of 1978, finishing the overdubs and the mix in the south of France. The room was smaller than the British studios they were used to, and they had their piano shipped in. They stayed anyway, for a plain reason. Nobody was waiting outside the door.

The next year, in 1979, they bought the place. The band that had been renting the room now owned it outright. The hotel booked in a hurry had been bought, with one difference: this room existed because somebody else had lost everything on the spot.

David Richards, the young British engineer running the desk, stayed on and became Queen's producer. The band held the studio until 1993.

The plaque in the floor

Mercury kept coming back. The vocals he cut in May 1991 were his last. A gold plaque is set into the floor where he stood. He died that November.

After Queen sold up, the equipment eventually moved to another town. In December 2013 the same room reopened as an exhibition, run by the Mercury Phoenix Trust, free to enter. It is inside the casino where tonight's party is being held.

Down on the promenade stands a three-meter bronze, unveiled in November 1996 and sculpted by the Czech artist Irena Sedlecká. It is a short walk from the exhibition. It is never without flowers.

We tend to assume places like this are chosen. Someone loved a town, kept going back, and stayed. Put that way the story is tidy. In Montreux the order ran backward. A tax code pushed the band out, a fire had left a room empty, and the affection came afterward. The room booked in a hurry became home.

The Last Word

Montreux did not draw Queen in. Britain pushed them out. Where they landed, a studio happened to be standing, and it stood there only because a casino had burned. The shrine is a leftover.

Related
Sources
Woody Magazine is edited and published by Woody. Claude AI is used as a tool in the editorial process, and all editorial judgment and final responsibility rest with the editorial desk. Readers are encouraged to verify independently.

댓글

댓글 쓰기