Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  Adds Marsden on the Moody/Marsden chemistry, “I think we have a wonderful understanding of each other that a lot of guys, especially our contemporaries, envied. Phil Lynott used to come to gigs and see us and he would say, ‘Man, I wish my guys played with the same feeling that your guys do.’ Because there’s never really any of that, ‘Well, I’m really going to blow him away this night.’ We played together, in all senses of the word, yet we had totally different styles, really. But we just kind of come together and we have a very healthy respect for each other. We don’t slap each other’s back and say how great each other is, because you know how good you are, or whatever. You don’t have to go around telling people all the time. People can make their own minds up. We just happened to have a good relationship and it worked well in the studio and we wrote well together as well, which is an added bonus.”

  “Oh, we could do a whole interview about that,” sighs Marsden, when asked about his relationship with Phil Lynott. “I mean, Phil, I knew him a long time, right back to when we were kids together. I met Gary Moore (another one we’ve lost) when we were both 17. So, once you bonded as kids... and suddenly we’re all rock stars [laughs].

  “We would always sit together and say, ‘Well, we all made it.’ Yeah, but what did we make? We’re all sitting here complaining about this and complaining about that. But we’re all world-famous musicians. But Phil wasn’t like that. What was sad — that’s the word I would use — you could see that he had problems, because we were not that close as people, just as musicians. You want to say ‘Hey, is anybody looking out for him?’ And there didn’t seem to be. At the end of the day, you have to look out for yourself, but it seemed like he needed a bit of looking after. Towards the end of his life, I saw him a couple of times, and he wasn’t the guy that I had met at 22 years old. He was another person. But what a talent, what a great writer, what a great musician.”

  Did you ever get close to making music with him?

  “No, no, we talked about it through many beers, we should do something, but that’s one of the things I never did. That’s why I was so knocked out to do the Jack Bruce thing, because in your wildest dreams, when I was 17, 18 years old, you know Jack Bruce! I didn’t think I’d ever make an album with him. I could say the same thing about Jon Lord and David Coverdale and Cozy Powell. When your heroes become your friends...” Sadly, Jack Bruce passed away in October 2014.

  “I think the re-master made it look pretty good,” muses Marsden, in a modern-day assessment of the Trouble album. “It would be great to find the masters for that and maybe go back in and remix the whole thing. But then again, that’s the essence of the early days. Birch was pretty much in control anyway. But there was a lot of energy involved, and I think that shows on the album. For example, ‘Don’t Mess With Me’ was a groove in the studio really; that’s how that came about. We just started playing. Really, Trouble and the EP should be one record, because we did it in the same place and it was just a continuation. So really, the first album should’ve been Trouble and the other four tracks. Or maybe in that case something like ‘Day Tripper’ wouldn’t have made the cut. But everything is relative. When you look back on it, it’s always easy to re-plan, isn’t it?”

  Put in context, Rainbow had, by this point, been accepted by the hardcore punters as a worthy enough replacement for the lapsed and collapsed Deep Purple. But given the size of the shoes to fill, there was always room for more pretenders, especially if they were pedigreed and from the same palette. Most splinter bands, thus far, had been hard to like, but Whitesnake, with Trouble, was proving to have enough fire to gain a degree of acceptance second only to that afforded Rainbow. In other words, Whitesnake was, with some difficulty, working its way into the hearts and minds of the Purple minions of millions.

  Over the page: David Coverdale fronting Deep Purple. A physical and sartorial make-over is in progress (Rich Galbraith)

  Above: Whitesnake circa 1978. L-R sitting: Pete Solley, Bernie Marsden, Dave Dowle, Neil Murray. Standing: David Coverdale and Micky Moody. Dowle is holding a clapperboard as a video was being made at the time. (Fin Costello/Staff)

  Above: An old-school bluesman tries to make it in a London gone post-punk. (Martin Popoff collection).

  Above: A persuasive, NWOBHM-styled sell-job for the Snakebite EP. (Martin Popoff collection)

  Above: Bernie Marsden and Micky Moody demonstrating to the punters the proper way to trade blues licks, at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1981. (Andrew King)

  Above: Ian Paice, ex-Purple and the backbone of the classic Whitesnake line-up, weaves his magic at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1981. (Andrew King)

  Above: Were you at either of these Hammy Odeon gigs? (Martin Popoff collection)

  Above: Whitesnake circa 1983: L-R: Colin Hodgkinson, Mel Galley, Cozy Powell, Jon Lord, David Coverdale, Mick Moody. A fleeting line-up that was shattered by American interests and an interest in America. (AF Archive/Alamy)

  Above: The consummate and storied Neil Murray in 1984 at the Veterans Memorial, Columbus, Ohio. The rest of Rod Dysinger's photos are from the same gig too. (Rod Dysinger)

  Above: The one and only Cozy Powell. (Rod Dysinger)

  Over the page: David Coverdale and John Sykes rocking out in 1984. "If you're lookin' for trouble…" (Rod Dysinger)

  -5-

  Lovehunter – “It’s Not Shakespeare”

  Lovehunter, issued October 1979, was, like Trouble, a further step in the “right” direction for Whitesnake, or the direction of an audience anyway, on its way to various forms of straight rock and then stadium rock, but still with one foot in disorienting diversity.

  Not so the album cover. What was written on the tin, in this case a dramatic Chris Achilleos illustration of a buxom naked girl straddling a snake, screamed heavy metal. Indeed the artwork caused hoots of derision, which didn’t stop it from getting stolen in the 1980s (as well being reproduced in exquisite and skilled ballpoint pen detail by the author on his Grade 11 math book, as I’ve proudly trumpeted now for a second time). A huge fantasy and sci-fi-related career ahead of him, Achilleos vowed he would stay away from album covers henceforth, his only other famed piece being a similarly fantastical and sexy set-piece for Uriah Heep’s Fallen Angel, along with by-default album art for the Heavy Metal movie and a later offering for Gary Hughes.

  Marsden, however, doesn’t remember much complaint. “No, not really. The one that got more trouble was Come An’ Get It. That one was sanitized in America. We don’t need to get into why, but if you looked at the cover, you probably realize why. But it’s not to be taken seriously. But at the time, there were some journalists with axes to grind, who were treating the lyrics seriously, and we weren’t taking ourselves seriously. It was all a bit of fun. ‘Lie down, I love you;’ it’s not Shakespeare. You know, if somebody’s going to say that, it’s like, seriously, what do you think? No, of course I’m not being serious.”

  Back to Lovehunter though, and “Long Way From Home” is a strident, accessible rocker, not too blues and not too heavy metal, more like confident, relaxed stadium rock. Its commercial push forward was so effortless that the song was issued as the album’s first single, achieving a middling No. 55 in the British charts, with its b-side, “Walking In The Shadow Of The Blues” becoming much more of a Whitesnake classic over time.

  “That was David’s song,” says Marsden of “Long Way From Home.” “That came in as pretty much a finished item, and I just dubbed the guitar parts on it, and I was pretty much done. David always did very good demos. Well, him and I did most of the demos between us, and that was one of them he had done, more or less on his own. The first time I heard that was a couple days before we recorded it. Good song, very good song.”

  Amusingly, even though the chorus finds David singing “long, long way from home,” the title of the track contained just one “long,” to avoid confusion with the anthemic heavy rocker from Foreigner’s self-titled smash issued in 1977.

  Lovehunter was recorded in Apri
l and May of 1979 at Clearwell Castle, Gloucestershire, using the tiny Rolling Stones Mobile (nicknamed Café Mobile), with mixing done at Central Recorders. “Yeah, only how cold it was,” laughs Marsden, when prompted for a memory of Clearwell, famous for hosting Sabbath, Purple, Bad Company, Sweet and Led Zeppelin. “But it was a great place to work. Because it was a bit cold and little bit soulless, it made you work harder. It made you drink harder as well. The banquets in the evening tended to take a bit of a toll on you. But again the work was done, and we did that with the Rolling Stones mobile, which is great, an interesting process.”

  “A lot of stuff went on at Clearwell,” notes Marsden, when asked about any shenanigans that took place during the band’s multiple ensconcements at the castle over the years. “We put a big board at the front desk, saying the castle is closed for the next month, because John Travolta is making a new film here. This was just after Grease. Of course, the locals went mad. They were trying to get in all the time. It was just crazy stuff like that. But you do these things. We’d play in the local pub. People, to this day, come to gigs and say, ‘I was in the local pub in Clearwell that night, when you played.’ We played on a cold November night. It was either Jon or Ian wasn’t there, but it was five of us out of the six. And I think Jon wasn’t there; I think there was a local keyboard player or we played as a five-piece. We were the local band that night in the pub. A recording of that would’ve been worth having [laughs].”

  “We did the first EP there,” recalls Marsden, when asked about Central. “The first Whitesnake sessions ever, that was out of Central. And then we did Trouble there as well. But Lovehunter, I don’t remember that! It’s listed in the credits, is it? Maybe we did mix something there. Possibly a couple of overdubs. As I say, we recorded with the mobile, out at Clearwell, so maybe there were a couple things left to do. But I didn’t know that. It’s good to find out new things 30 years later! [laughs].”

  There are no stories of Plant or Page watching on at the castle, unfortunately, but, as Marsden recalls, “I know that Billy Connolly came down when we were at Clearwell Castle. He came down, not to see us, but we happened to be there, and there was some private function in the grounds. I bumped into him. I knew him then, and he said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ ‘We’re making an album.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I wish I was with you.’ He really didn’t want to be there.”

  If Status Quo had perfected a post-blues boom boogie gallop, “Walking In The Shadow Of The Blues” found Whitesnake crafting something closer to a heavy metal gallop. With this track, the band were now in a zone that would find them entangled with the idea of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal — for better or worse.

  “‘Shadow Of The Blues,’ I still think is one of the best songs we ever wrote together,” figures Marsden. But when asked about it and the band’s nearing association with heavy metal, he says, “We didn’t get caught up in that. Because we’d already been there. And because of the Deep Purple connection, we were never going to be an addition to that new wave thing. No, I don’t think we were ever really aware of it. You know, Whitesnake, I’ve said it before, we were really a closed shop. We were pretty tight between us, and we were always very reverent about other musicians, other people we liked, and stuff like that, and never stepped on their toes or said anything negative.

  “But not many people got inside the Whitesnake office, shall we say. So that whole thing, in the press about new wave... in fact, punk to me was like a Clint Eastwood movie, you know, ‘Well, tell me, punk.’ That’s what I thought a punk was, when I was living in Munich at the time. I didn’t even know what a punk was. I thought, oh, that’s really nice, play on stage, and the audience spits all over you. I don’t think I want to do that anyway.”

  “No, not at all,” says Moody, seconding the curious vibe of Marsden and Coverdale — and the likes of Ian Gillan and Rick Parfitt when I ask them about this — on whether there was a cognizance or even a pondering of the concept of a NWOBHM. “No, when Whitesnake started, it was the punk era going on. Probably the worst thing to do was to try put together a hard rock band. But David was the catalyst of course. He wanted to do this, and he wanted me to be involved. I didn’t think about it. We were just doing what came naturally.

  “We wanted to go out and rock and have some fun. The kind of bands I would listen to were more like Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, nice rock ‘n’ roll bands with a good live show. I wasn’t listening to anything heavy or heavier than that, really. So we just went out and rocked and had a good time. Simple as that. We didn’t even know if we would last, to be quite honest. I just enjoyed it. We were partying and had a lot of good times. I thought I would keep on doing this until it either happens or it doesn’t.”

  Moving past “Walking In The Shadow Of The Blues”— ersatz anchor to the record, the love hunter itself, things lighten up considerably, throwing the listener back to the early Whitesnake material. “Help Me Thro’ The Day” is a blues cover, albeit a modern one from Leon Russell, and its sombre groove would have made it a perfect fit to Stormbringer, something Coverdale and Glenn Hughes might have proposed much to the chagrin of rocking Ritchie.

  “‘Help Me Thro’ The Day,’ that was a transition thing,” says Marsden. “That was a follow-up to ‘Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City,’ really, which is a song I always wanted to do. I was the one who said, ‘Hey, “Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City,” Dave, you could sing this great,’ because I was a big Bobby Bland fan; still am. And the next thing is, I suppose, I was always a big follower of Leon Russell as a writer, also as a performer, but especially as a writer. But always loved ‘Help Me Thro’ The Day,’ and I said, ‘Look, what we did in “Ain’t No Love;” I think we could do to this.’ And I think everybody agreed, and I think it’s one of the best versions ever. It’s good to think out-of-the-box sometimes, and I think it’s just great that we did that.”

  “Medicine Man” was another strident rocker on the album, full up with Coverdale swagger and rich tones of Purple. No surprise, given that the esteemed Martin Birch was on board producing, re-generating the great guitar and keys alloy he had helped bring to fruition along with Jon and Ritchie.

  “Back in the day, you took those things for granted,” reflects Marsden. “We were all young men, and Martin did my And About Time Too solo album with me as well in that same year; he was producer, and one of the greatest engineers. Funny, the other day, I was listening to a reissue of a Jeff Beck album, and Martin engineered it: Beck-Ola. I was always enamoured with Martin because of his connection with Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac, so anytime I was in the studio, I would say, ‘Well, what would Peter do here?’ And he was very canny, he was quite clever, and he said, ‘He’d probably do something like this.’ And then he would go, ‘Well, what would you do?’ I’d try to talk about Peter Green, he wanted to hear Bernie Marsden. He was great like that. Great producer. Doesn’t do much these days; hasn’t bothered for a long time. Since his relationship with Iron Maiden, I think, he hasn’t done much. But he’s got a record that is second to none. He’s on some of the great guitar tracks of all time. But yeah, ‘Medicine Man’ I think is a really cool track.”

  “Martin is great, a really strong character,” seconds Moody, on Birch. “I mean, really positive. Martin was an engineer who became a producer, and he was a great engineer. Latter part of the ‘60s, recorded with the early Peter Green Fleetwood Mac. He came from being a great engineer, and he said, ‘Well, I can produce as well.’ He could see the qualities in each person in the band and he could bring the best out. Of course, he got me the best sound you could ever get. Very, very positive man, Martin. A bit of a man’s man. Very strong character, someone you could rely on, someone who was very, very together. And, the fact that he produced so many top-quality bands, I’ve got nothing but praise for Martin.”

  Adds Murray: “He was very much in the background. He’s very much a laid-back kind of guy. His thing was to be encouraging and not let any kind o
f real bad mistakes go by. But mostly to get really good sounds, so that you were inspired to play. I mean, I know that on Trouble, we recorded five backing tracks in one day, which is pretty unusual. I mean, Okay, we’re in a small studio, small budget, and at that time, obviously we had the fire in our bellies and we weren’t sitting around analyzing it trying to be absolutely perfect. I know I can hear a wrong note on the bass in ‘Day Tripper,’ [laughs] where I go to the wrong chord. Nowadays you would never let that go past, but back then it was kind of, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’”

  Closing side two of the original vinyl album is a boogie-woogie rave called “You ‘n’ Me,” standard for Whitesnake, blessed with a certain Come An’ Get It or Saints & Sinners vibe. Explains Marsden: “There’s a bonus track on the reissue of And About Time Too [his first solo offering] called ‘You And Me,’ which was actually on Lovehunter as well, and we just developed that later on. David had said, ‘Yeah, the band should do that.’ And I said, ‘Okay, so that’s why there’s two versions of it, different writers [laughs].’ It’s just the usual kind of rhythm and blues, girl meets boy, girl loses boy, man loses girl, kind of thing. Nothing too deep, really.”

  Why on earth was Bernie making a solo album, at the same time Whitesnake were crafting Lovehunter? “I was approached by the Japanese record company after the Whitesnake tour of Japan, and they got straight onto my management people at the time, and they said they wanted to do an album with me. That was the reason. Sounds most unlikely to me, but there you go.”