08-29-2004 – The Daily Telegraph – Freddie’s Rhapsody
When Queen recorded their albums in Montreux, the band’s lead singer was so taken with the Swiss town, he made it his home, says Christopher Middleton.
What could Freddie Mercury and Charlie Chaplin possibly have had in common? One the flamboyant rock star, the other a self-effacing little man with the moustache and bowler hat?
The answer is Montreux, the little Swiss town famous for its jazz festival, its comedy award (the Golden Rose, now moved to Lucerne), and for the way in which, over the past two centuries, it has served as a lakeside hideaway for the famous. “If you want peace for your soul, go to Montreux,” Mercury apparently told the singer Montserrat Caballe, at the Barcelona Olympics. Meanwhile Chaplin spoke of being “in the midst of happiness” when he sat on the terrace of his home at nearby Vevey, where he spent the last 25 years of his life. The two men’s affection for this part of the Swiss riviera has been reciprocated; statues of both of them now stand looking out over the tranquil waters of Lake Geneva – Mercury in characteristically defiant pose, Chaplin unassumingly twiddling his cane.
Mercury and Chaplin are not the only two stars to have made Montreux their home. Look back further, and the list of luminaries takes in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hans Christian Andersen, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene and AJ Cronin. Plus, of course, Lord Byron, who in 1816 wrote an overwrought but hugely popular poem called The Prisoner of Chillon, in which he put himself in the shoes and leg irons of a Geneva patriot called Bonivard, who had spent four years chained to a pillar in Montreux’s beautiful Chillon Castle (thick walls, but lovely views across the lake).
With typical self-promotional zeal, Byron scratched his own name (still visible) on the pillar where Bonivard had been bound, and to this day the Montreux tradition of “leaving your mark” is upheld by the hundreds of rock fans who come to scrawl their tributes on the doors of Mountain Studios. This – in case you’re not up on your rock history – is where Mercury’s band Queen recorded most of their albums, making it hallowed ground for the visiting faithful. “Freddie – Have A Good Time With Angels”, writes one well-wisher on the studios’ outside wall. “Thank You My Fairy King”, writes another.
Messages duly left, it’s a short step for Freddie Mercury’s fans to Bazar Suisse, the novelty emporium which is the town’s official Queen souvenir shop, as well as the starting point for the annual Freddie Mercury Memorial Day celebrations held every second or third Saturday in September. Last year, 250 fans paid pounds 65 per head for a boat trip past Freddie’s lakeside apartment block (Les Tourelles, at Territet), a lunch chosen by his former personal assistant, a concert by a Queen tribute group and a tour of Mountain Studios with owner David Richards.
“It was a great experience talking to all the fans at the memorial day,” says Richards, who was Queen’s recording engineer in the glory years, and who bought Mountain Studios after Mercury’s death. “Between us, we knew every bar of the music – and of course they all wanted to know what it was like making Freddie’s last-ever recording [Mother Love]. I explained how we had to do it in the mixing room because Freddie (suffering from an AIDS-related illness) was getting very tired by then, and couldn’t keep going up and down the stairs to the studio below.”
For Richards, the decision to stay in Montreux has worked out well both professionally (the Rolling Stones and many others have recorded at his studios) and personally. “I see myself as someone who’s now Swiss but who happened to grow up in England,” says the Mountain man, who gets round the town by bike. “Not only is this a really beautiful place, but it’s also very safe.”
A view shared by Bernard Brack, manager of the Royal Plaza Hotel. “When I managed a hotel in Venezuela, there used to be 80 or 90 murders every weekend in Caracas alone,” says Brack. “People would stop you at the traffic lights and shoot you for your wallet. Here, that sort of thing is unthinkable.”
Queen used to stay at the Royal Plaza’s big rival, the Montreux Palace – a vast, white wedding cake of a building festooned with yellow blinds, chandeliers and art deco frescoes. By contrast, the Royal Plaza has a more functional exterior, but a sensational lobby- cum-bar, where you can lounge in low-slung tan and mint-green leather sofas, admiring lake-and-mountain vistas through the windows – and your own reflection in the copper-coloured ceiling overhead.
And if you think that sounds overpowering, try the town’s newly re-opened casino. A frantically glitzy glass structure, with thick red carpets and twisted fluorescent-tube lighting, its ground floor is not some hushed, dark haven for roulette high-rollers, but a mini- Las Vegas with 300 fruit machines and a big silver car parked on a plinth above them.
By contrast, Vevey – just a 10-minute trolleybus-ride away – is altogether more quaint and understated. It has old cobbled streets, a teeming Saturday market (sausages, sunflowers and six different types of mushroom), plus a handsomely housed food museum, where the rather staid tone is undermined by a gloriously graphic 3-D film exploring the wonders of the digestive process. There is also the Poyet Confiserie, in the Rue du Theatre, whose speciality is a circular silver box in the shape of a film canister, containing 32 little chocolate Charlie Chaplin tramp’s shoes ( pounds 16).
That, however, is about as close to a Chaplin tourist industry as you get; in death, as in life, it seems, the comedian’s privacy is respected by the locals. Only with a lot of scouring of the Corsier district can you find the Chaplin grave in the Chemin de Meruz cemetery, alongside that of his wife Oona. And only by making enquiries at the old wooden Cafe de la Place can you locate the outlying Rue de Fenil, where gigantic trees have almost swallowed up the spectacular old Chaplin mansion. Don’t look for signposts, either – a nearby bus stop provides the only confirmation that this is the once world-famous Manoir de Ban, the neo-classical dream house that Chaplin himself created. The house is occupied and a message warns you that it’s not open to the public, a message reinforced by a vicious guard dog.
Not surprisingly, no one likes to mention the fact that in 1978, two crooks dug up the comedian’s body and tried to extract a ransom from the family for its return. There again, the very grubbiness of that act is totally out of keeping with a part of the world where the lake water is so clean that the resident fish (some rather tasty perch) haven’t got enough plankton to feed on. This is not to say the place is as pristine and sterile as Switzerland is sometimes painted. There’s no shortage of graffiti, and, through an exhaustive policy of battery-stealing, the local vandals have managed to immobilise most of the town’s “talking benches”, each one designed to quote (in three languages) the works of famous literary visitors.
The fact is, Montreux is a place which – through the sheer magnificence of mountains and the magical glassiness of its lake waters – pretty much offers you its natural beauties and invites you to get on with it. Take the mountain train up to Rochers-de-Naye, for example, and the sole attraction waiting for you at 6,400 feet above sea level is a spartan little cafe, plus a windblown enclosure called Marmot Paradise – “home to seven different species of marmot” . Any plans to upgrade this, er, attraction? “One day,” sighs the director of the railway, with a wistful gleam in his eye “We would like to have all 14 species of marmot up there.”
Ah well, a man can always dream, can’t he?
essentials
Getting there
Royal Plaza Holidays (020 7795 4919; www.royalplazaholidays.com) has seven nights in Montreux, staying at the Royal Plaza, Grand-Rue 97 (0041 21 962 5050; www.royalplaza.ch) , from pounds 695 per person for a standard room with mountain view, and from pounds 895 for a standard room with lake view. For information on the area, contact Montreux-Vevey Tourism (962 8484; www.
montreux-vevey.com). This year’s Freddie Mercury Memorial Day is on September 4. For details, contact Norbert Muller at Bazar Suisse, Grand-Rue 24 (963 3274; www.montreux.ch/queen).