A bronze Freddie Mercury stands on the Montreux waterfront with one fist raised toward Lake Geneva. Fans still leave flowers at his feet, then take a short walk along the shore to a building that surprises many of them. It is a casino. For more than a decade, Queen recorded inside it, in a studio that turned a quiet Swiss resort town into one of the most productive places the band ever worked.
The Fire That Built Mountain Studios
The story starts with a fire that had nothing to do with Queen. On 4 December 1971, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were playing the old Montreux Casino when someone in the crowd fired a flare gun into the ceiling. The building burned to the ground. Nobody died, but the venue that had hosted the Montreux Jazz Festival since its first edition was gone.
Deep Purple were in town to record in that same building. They watched the smoke drift across the lake from their hotel, and the scene became Smoke on the Water, one of the most recognisable riffs in rock.
When the casino was rebuilt in the mid-1970s, the plans included something new. Designer Tom Hidley fitted the complex with a recording studio called Mountain Studios, and for its first years it captured music from the jazz festival. Then a British band arrived to finish an album they had started in the South of France.
Recording Under the Casino’s Roof
That band was Queen. They came to Montreux in 1978 to complete Jazz, their seventh studio album, and a year later they bought the studio outright. For the next decade and a half, much of their recording life happened under the casino’s roof.
The building still houses a casino today. Swiss casinos need an extension to their licence to offer online games. The online casinos compared in the full guide on EUCasinoRank.com differ in licensing and payout speed.
Queen, however, came to Montreux for reasons unrelated to gambling. The town offered something London could not.
Why Montreux Suited a Shy Frontman
Freddie Mercury could hold a stadium in the palm of his hand, yet off stage he was a shy man who rarely gave interviews. Gigwise readers once voted him the best frontman of all time, and the distance between that public figure and the private one explains a lot about Montreux. In London, the band was recognised on every street. On the shore of Lake Geneva, locals mostly left them alone.
The town also gave them time. Mountain Studios belonged to Queen, so no clock was running on expensive booked hours. A track could sit untouched for days and get a fresh hearing later. Engineer David Richards, who had joined the studio in 1977, worked on many of their later records there and became one of their closest collaborators.
That privacy mattered most in the years when Mercury’s health began to fail.
Made in Heaven: Where Freddie Sang Last
By 1991, Mercury knew he was seriously ill, and Montreux became the place where he kept working. The band recorded whenever he felt strong enough, sometimes for only a few hours at a time. In May that year he recorded his vocal for Mother Love, which turned out to be his final studio performance. He died at his home in London that November.
The original Mountain Studios later moved, but its former rooms inside the casino were recreated for Queen: The Studio Experience. Visitors can see the preserved control room and stand where Freddie recorded his last song. Admission is free.
The Control Room Visitors Can Enter Today
Brian May and Roger Taylor opened Queen: The Studio Experience in December 2013, in the rooms that once housed Mountain Studios. Donations go to the Mercury Phoenix Trust, the charity the band’s members founded after Mercury’s death to fight HIV and AIDS.
Visitors come in through the casino’s main entrance on Rue du Théâtre. The control room has barely changed since the band’s sessions. Only the original mixing desk is gone, replaced by a reproduction on which fans can build their own remix of Queen tracks. Handwritten lyric sheets, instruments and stage costumes fill the rest of the space.
For a band that came to Montreux to disappear, the building now tells their story to strangers every day.
Montreux gave Queen something London never could. In this small town, they could work without being watched. Years after Gigwise readers named them the best band of the past 60 years, the casino on Rue du Théâtre is still the most unlikely stop on any Queen pilgrimage.
