Bernie Marsden talks to Jason Barnard about partnership with David Coverdale and Whitesnake.
It was in the Paice Ashton Lord period that you first met David Coverdale.
Yeah, we were recording the second album in Munich and he lived about an hour from Munich at the time. I think he just basically came down to see Jon and say hello. That’s when we met and we got on really well. We had the same influences. We were single children. We never had any brothers or sisters and we bonded quite well very early.
It was your idea to do a remake of ‘Ain’t No Love In The Heart of the City’.
I’d always loved the song and I knew that David would sing it fantastically. So it was me who took it into the studio, that first session.
A different version to the Bobby Bland original.
I didn’t want to do a straight copy of it. And David heard it as a blues, so we slowed it down and came up with a couple of different ideas. We put that opening riff onto it. It was Micky Moody who did that. It was just an opening riff and it stuck and the people loved it from day one.
And it was the idea of writing for BB King that sparked off ‘Fool For Your Loving’.
‘Fool For Your Loving’ was written for BB King. I’ve heard a few interviews where David says “I wrote ‘Fool For Your Loving’ for BB King”. Well, that’s not correct. “We”, the word “we” should be used a little bit more often. But it was the idea. Once we got into it we were saying, “This would be great”. BB King had done an album called Midnight Believer at the time. It was kind of funky. It was a different version. I do have a version of what Whitesnake would have done in the can actually, which I’ve never put out. With Geraint Watkins playing keyboards on funnily enough. That’s in the can somewhere. It’s a good version.
That’s a song that took off live and became a bit of a live anthem.
Absolutely. That broke us in this country, and pretty much in Europe as well. To this day it’s really popular. It’s not the biggest Whitesnake song of course, but it’s one of the big ones.
And it was management and contractual issues that kind of contributed to things…
Not kind of, totally. We were poorly managed Jason. We got to a point where it was like, what’s going on, is there any point in carrying this on? We’re not making any money, basically. We didn’t break up with a row or a fight or anything. I wish we had in a way, it would have been more dramatic. But we just drifted apart really. That was how it was to be. That was how it happened. It’s a shame though.
Such potential because towards the end of that period when you were in the original Whitesnake, you’ve got things like ‘Here I Go Again’, which showed the potential of what the band could have become.
Yes, I believe that. The potential was completely taken away from us, because we would have broken through. We would have done another record. I don’t think it would have been ‘Slide It In’. ‘Slide It In’ for me is a very disappointing record. I think until they did the 87 album, as a Whitesnake album, there wasn’t much going on really. I look back on it now. There’s two different Whitesnakes. It’s like the Fleetwood Mac thing. Fleetwood Mac with Peter, and there’s a Fleetwood Mac with Lindsey and Stevie Nicks. But equal in their parts, as important as each other, but very different.
