Anita Kerr

Anita Kerr (1927-2022), American singer, arranger and composer, a figure of the “Nashville Sound” and a multiple Grammy winner, founded in 1975 with her husband Alex Grob the Mountain Studios of Montreux — one of the most important recording studios in the history of rock.

Anita Kerr: the founder of Mountain Studios

1975: a studio inside the Casino

In 1975, Anita Kerr and her husband Alex Grob set up Mountain Studios inside the Casino de Montreux. Coming from Nashville, where she had arranged hundreds of records and led the Anita Kerr Singers, the American gave Montreux a state-of-the-art tool: a control room by Tom Hidley, a Neve console, and one of the first 48-track set-ups in the world.

The studio soon recorded every concert of the Montreux Jazz Festival: without it, a large part of Montreux’s recorded memory would not exist.

From Queen to the museum

On 15 July 1979, Queen bought Mountain Studios; the young British sound engineer David Richards took the controls and would become the band’s associate producer. The studio became a legendary place: David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Led Zeppelin and Phil Collins all came to record there.

Owned by Queen and then by David Richards until 2013, the studio is today the museum Queen: The Studio Experience, for the benefit of the Mercury Phoenix Trust. All of it grew from Anita Kerr’s initiative, ten years before the arrival of Freddie Mercury.