Funky Claude's Bar

Harry’s Bar, born in Venice

The hotel bar was called Harry’s New York Bar. The idea came from Alfred Frei, then director of the Palace: on a business trip to Venice, he had missed his boat and taken refuge in the city’s Harry’s New York Bar, whose atmosphere charmed him so much that he wanted the same in Montreux. The bar opened on 2 November 1984, in the place of a former shop.

The haunt of the festival’s stars

Harry’s Bar became the haunt of the artists passing through, some of whom gave impromptu concerts there: Stevie Wonder, Prince, Carlos Santana, Simply Red, Chaka Khan, Jamiroquai and Michel Petrucciani. Quincy Jones was a regular, so much so that the menu carried a dish named after him, the « poussin Quincy », a spicy young chicken he was fond of.

Queen between midnight and one in the morning

Tania Gauger, who ran Harry’s Bar from 1984 to 1994 (she died in 2019), recalled in an interview of 20 May 2007 published by Montreux Celebration ↗: “Freddie, Brian, Roger and a few technicians often came for a drink after recording at Mountain Studios. They always arrived between midnight and one in the morning.” She placed those visits around 1988.

They came there, she said, because she “controlled all the comings and goings” and because “it was the only place where the celebrities were not disturbed.” And she added: “They were all very well brought up, polite, endearing, normal and uncomplicated people.”

She remembered a “cocktail of horror”, invented one evening on a dare from Julian Lennon, then in town and staying at the Lake House: a mix of gin, vodka, Williamine, grenadine and orange juice, out of which two antennae, then a very much alive shrimp, suddenly emerged. When Julian brought it back for Freddie, Brian and Roger to try, Freddie burst out laughing at the sight of the creature.

The nights sometimes carried on at her place. Roger Taylor would call her at four in the morning to ask for her spaghetti, and the whole gang would turn up: Roger, Brian, Freddie, sometimes David Richards and John Deacon, and even Erdal Kızılçay, David Bowie’s bassist. Brian May adored her tomato sauce; asked what went into it, Roger Taylor answered that she “put in just about everything except the sink”. Of them all, she said, Freddie was the calmest, shy and polite.

2014: the Funky Claude’s Bar

Harry’s Bar closed on 4 August 2014, for works that connected it from the inside to the brand-new Montreux Jazz Café that had just opened next door. It then took the name Funky Claude’s Bar, after Claude Nobs’s nickname in “Smoke on the Water” (“Funky Claude was running in and out”).