Answer the following questions:

Have you ever heard of the band Deep Purple?
Do you know any of their songs? If the answer is yes, what’s your favourite?
What kind of music did Deep Purple play?Did the line-up remain the same over the years? How many albums have they sold? What other famous bands are mentioned? Where is the information in the text taken from?

Deep Purple
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deep Purple are an English rock band formed in Hertford in 1968.[1] They are considered to be among the pioneers of heavy metal and modern hard rock,[2][3] although their musical approach changed over the years.[4] Originally formed as a progressive rock band, the band's sound shifted to hard rock in 1970. Deep Purple, together with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, have been referred to as the "unholy trinity of British hard rock and heavy metal in the early to mid-Seventies".[5] They have sold over 100 million albums worldwide.
The band has gone through many line-up changes and an eight-year interruption (1976–1984). The 1968–1976 line-ups are commonly labelled Mark I, II, III and IV.[13][14] Their second and most commercially successful line-up featured Ian Gillan (vocals), Jon Lord (organ), Roger Glover (bass), Ian Paice (drums), and Ritchie Blackmore (guitar). This line-up was active from 1969 to 1973, and was revived from 1984 to 1989, and again from 1992 to 1993. 

Answer the following questions:

Have you ever heard of the band Deep Purple? Do you know any of their songs? If the answer is yes, what’s your favourite?
What kind of music did Deep Purple play? Did the line-up remain the same over the years? How many albums have they sold? What other famous bands are mentioned?

Ask and answer these questions with a partner (half each) and answer without reading.

Read and answer the following questions:

What does the expression ‘smoke on the water’ in the song refer to?
And the word ‘mobile’ ?
What was the ‘gambling house’?
Where is Montreux?
Who is Claude Nobs?
What did he do during the fire?
Is Wikipedia reliable source (in your opinion)?

Ask and answer these questions with a partner (half each) and answer without reading.

History of Smoke on the Water

The lyrics of the song tell a true story: on 4 December 1971 Deep Purple had gone to Montreux, Switzerland to record an album using a mobile recording studio (rented from the Rolling Stones and known as the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio—referred to as the "Rolling truck Stones thing" and "the mobile" in the song lyrics) at the entertainment complex that was part of the Montreux Casino (referred to as "the gambling house" in the song lyric). On the eve of the recording session a Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention concert was held in the casino's theatre. In the middle of Don Preston's synthesizer solo on "King Kong", the place suddenly caught fire when somebody in the audience fired a flare gun into the rattan covered ceiling, as mentioned in the "some stupid with a flare gun" line.[9][10] The resulting fire destroyed the entire casino complex, along with all the Mothers' equipment. The "smoke on the water" that became the title of the song (credited to bass guitarist Roger Glover, who related how the title occurred to him when he suddenly woke from a dream a few days later) referred to the smoke from the fire spreading over Lake Geneva from the burning casino as the members of Deep Purple watched the fire from their hotel. The "Funky Claude" running in and out is referring to Claude Nobs, the director of the Montreux Jazz Festival who helped some of the audience escape the fire.
Left with an expensive mobile recording unit and no place to record, the band was forced to search  the town for another place. One promising place  was a local theatre called The Pavilion, but soon after the band had unpacked and started working/recording, the nearby neighbours took offence at the noise, and the band was only able to lay down backing tracks for one song (based on Blackmore's riff and temporarily named Title n°1), before the local police shut them down.
Finally, after about a week of searching, the band rented the nearly-empty Montreux Grand Hotel and converted its hallways and stairwells into a makeshift recording studio, where they laid down most of the tracks for what became their most commercially successful album, Machine Head.

The only song from Machine Head not recorded entirely in the Grand Hotel was "Smoke on the Water" itself, which had been partly recorded during the abortive Pavilion session. The lyrics of "Smoke on the Water", they’re most famous song, were composed later, and the vocals were recorded in the Grand Hotel.