They All Came Out to Montreux, BBC4 — how one man built a legendary festival

In 1967, an enterprising Swiss tourism officer called Claude Nobs decided that if he built a first-rate music festival, the world’s greatest musicians would come.

Three-part documentary They All Came Out to Montreux recounts how Nobs turned his culturally prosaic but picturesque Swiss lakeside town into an annual Mitteleuropean Woodstock, where legendary artists from Aretha Franklin to ZZ Top performed. This is a rare thing: a story where lofty ambition and a quick rise is not a precursor to a fall but to sustained success and enduring legacy. Any jeopardy — whether the venue-destroying fire immortalised in Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” or tensions with the starchy “elders of Montreux” — is shortlived and resiliently handled.

The tone of the show is one of celebration. Over nearly three hours, former colleagues and musicians including Keith Richards, Carlos Santana and Herbie Hancock wax lyrical about Nobs’s all-consuming love of music, his commitment to racial and artistic inclusivity, and his vision and determination. Only in the third episode is there a touch of melancholy, as we hear how Nobs became worn down by the increasingly cold corporatism of the modern music industry.

Nobs died in 2013 yet he appears here in old interviews which supplement the effusive tributes with first-hand reflections. But what really makes the documentary a must-watch is its access to the 5,000 hours of concert footage in the Montreux Jazz Festival archive (which is Unesco-registered). Intimate and immersive, these remarkable clips transport us to that cramped, humid room as Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, Carole King, David Bowie and countless others sing, sweat and smile. The visible glee is a stirring testament to what Nobs achieved.

★★★★☆

On BBC4 on June 16 at 10.15pm and on iPlayer thereafter

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