My aunt Carol, an enthusiastic traveller and music lover, was driving back to the UK from the Algarve in her veteran campervan when she decided, on a whim, to swing right near Lyon and make for the Montreux jazz festival on the shores of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman).
This was 1987 and travel was still analogue. She hadn’t phoned with any indication of her whereabouts but, one day in July, Carol’s campervan suddenly appeared in my folks’ driveway in the south London suburbs. Out she jumped, with cassette tapes of all the gigs she’d been to spilling from the driver’s door behind her. I was immediately fascinated by her tales of this Belle Époque town and its association with musicians as diverse as Nina Simone, Deep Purple and Freddie Mercury.
I think of her enjoying the incredible view as my son Matt and I stroll around Montreux’s flower-spangled lakefront, among those villas facing snowy peaks. We’re actually here on a day trip. We’re visiting another festival a few miles to the west, in one of the area’s vineyard villages: CullyJazz is a mid-size musical jamboree mostly featuring up-and-coming bands from Europe. Whereas Cully welcomes about 60,000 visitors each year to its gigs, the Montreux jazz festival, being held from Friday (until 15 July) and featuring Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop and Norah Jones, pulls in 250,000.
A walking tour with Lucien Muller of Freddie Tours proves revealing. Freddie Mercury, who lived in lakeside apartments here in the late 1980s until a few weeks before his death in 1991, hated Montreux to start with, apparently complaining that the recording studio should have been plonked at the bottom of the lake. But he came to enjoy life in the town, telling his opera singer friend Montserrat Caballé: “If you want peace of mind come to Montreux.” Mercury appreciated the discretion of the locals and lack of fuss made over celebrity.
But then Montreux has been welcoming brilliant international musicians of all genres for decades. It was in 1967 when local tourist office director Claude Nobs, then just 31, co-founded the festival (which initially only held jazz gigs), immediately attracting stars such as Keith Jarrett, Charles Lloyd and Ella Fitzgerald. Nobs went on to get his own line in Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water:
Funky Claude was running in and out
He was pulling kids out the ground now
The song was inspired by the 1971 fire at the Montreux casino, during which Nobs helped several concertgoers to safety. Deep Purple had been in town to record their album Machine Head and watched the near-catastrophe from their hotel. Lucien explains how the fire brigade had been busy attending an emergency elsewhere when, halfway through a Frank Zappa concert, an audience member started a blaze. (But some stupid with a flare gun/Burned the place to the ground, as Deep Purple put it.)
The Freddie Tour ends at the Queen Studio Experience (free), a museum/re-creation of Mountain Studios in the rebuilt Casino Barrière. I’m intrigued to learn from Lucien that Eugene Chaplin, one of Charlie’s sons, who lived in a mansion up the road above Vevey, was among the studio’s early sound engineers, recording the Rolling Stones and David Bowie there. The mansion itself is now a fabulous museum, Chaplin’s World.
We meet Lucien’s dad, Norbert, in his merchandise shop Bazar Suisse, close to the casino. A Queen devotee, he is also a jazz fan and regales me with stories of Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis and Weather Report performing at the festival – and of famous rock stars popping into his store.
Outside the casino, at the Studio Experience’s fans’ wall, I bump into Sue from Berkshire. She is wearing a painted-on Freddie moustache and clutching a fake microphone. “We’ve just seen the statue on the lakefront and we can’t wait to see inside the studio,” she says. She’s amazed when I tell her I first saw Queen on Top of the Pops singing Seven Seas of Rhye in 1974. I then realise Sue may not even have been born when Freddie died in 1991, and I’m amazed.
If you want to explore the area beyond the music scene, the Lac Léman train and bus network – which is free to use with a Lavaux travel card offered by most local hotels – allows Montreux or Cully festivalgoers to take in the vineyards and local attractions without missing any gigs. Besides the pretty countryside, there are sites such as the medieval Chillon Castle and the recently opened Chillon Fort, a second world war bunker set into the mountainside.
Unluckily for us, the day we’ve set aside for a six-mile valleyside walk dawns cool and grey; the mountains obscured by low cloud and drizzle. Our route through the Unesco world heritage site vineyards starts at Epesses station and finishes at Chardonne on the edge of Vevey, just up the road from Montreux. We join the affable umbrella-equipped mountain leader Matthew Richards to tread the labyrinth of stone paths through 1,000-year-old terraced vineyards.
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The absence of the usual view across the lake and down the Rhône valley to the peaks of the Dents du Midi, helps us to focus on what’s close to hand: waterfalls, stone hamlets clustered almost vertically below us, tiny cogwheel railways built for workers to negotiate the steep slopes, black kites gliding through the heavy, moist air. “There aren’t so many interesting birds here,” Matthew says, just as a black redstart, a robin-size bird you’ll hardly ever see in England, hops on to a wall behind him.
At Rivaz, we walk high above Lavaux Vinorama, a focal point for wine producers where bottles from the whole valleyside are sold. The trains linking these lakeside villages to Lausanne and Montreux makes life easier for those who fancy a tipple.
Near Saint-Saphorin, another ancient huddle of stone adorned by flowers growing from ancient walls, we spot a large wine fridge with a contactless payment device attached. At £20 a bottle, there’s a lot of trust involved here.
The difficulty of working on these slopes makes the wine expensive to produce, but it’s worth it. Every glass we try in the local caveaux (wine bars) ranks among the most delicate and refreshing whites I’ve tasted. We head to the Hôtel du Léman for an lunch, where a stylish interior with stained glass features – and a panoramic but drizzly view – awaits us.
The next day – after enjoying UK-based neo soul singer Summer Pearl at CullyJazz – we take the train up the mountainside above Montreux. At Haut de Caux village, one of Claude Nobs’ favourite haunts, we bump into two English women who had got off the train at the wrong station and decided that an apricot sundae at the handsome chalet-style Le Cou Cou restaurant would improve their day.
“It’s my 80th birthday next week,” one of the women tells me, gazing out at the lake thousands of feet below. “It’s lovely” she says, “but we’re here for Freddie. Every year we say ‘this is the last time’ but we keep coming back.” My aunt Carol was more a Nina Simone than a Queen fan but she would definitely have recognised the sentiment.
Excursions, accommodation (at Hotel Lavaux, Epesses) and guide were provided by Montreux-Vevey Tourisme. The Montreux jazz festival runs from 30 June to 15 July. CullyJazz runs from 5-14 April 2024. Montreux can be reached in 90 minutes by train from Geneva