Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  Digging deeper into the above citations, David has said that the band thought about self-producing this time, and that he had been pressurized by a deadline to deliver the record as far back as December 1981. He indicated that two weeks at Shepperton produced little more than one drum track before the band uprooted to Clearwell, where maybe another track got done, and then much more was accomplished at Britannia Row way back in January 1982. Essentially all of the vocals were recorded at Battery, in a compressed flurry of three weeks indicated by the above noted period for the mix, namely September and October of 1982. David has also said that Martin, who had been ill, had to perform quite a bit of magic at Battery on the backing tracks to bring them up to scratch, all of which caused further resentment from David to the band.

  Guy Bidmead, essentially co-producer on everything except the vocals, up to this point had been an engineer on numerous albums since the mid-1970s, and in fact would retain that designation for many albums since, rarely credited as producer, as is the usual career path. Previous to engineering, or “recording” Saints & Sinners, he had recently worked on Cozy Powell’s Tilt and Bernie’s Look At Me Now.

  “They decided to move away from Martin Birch, even for Saints & Sinners,” explains Murray. “We used a different sort of engineer, not really a producer, for all the recording of that, or most of it anyway. And then, I suppose, people weren’t totally satisfied with the sound we were getting, so Martin was brought in at the end of that project to finish it off.”

  Wobbly signals are sent from the album starting with its album cover, which features an oddly amateurish looking photograph of a sculpture, more of a trinket, really, underneath a plain white Whitesnake logo and the title text, and an ampersand where there should have been an “an’!” The back cover is what Bernie is referring to above, inexplicably consisting of the credits, song titles and a dodgy black and white live shot of David and David alone.

  Once inside, however, the album explodes with one of the band’s unheralded classics. “Young Blood” is a strident rocker, and boldly recorded at that. Moreover, Ian Paice seems to have his mojo back, propelling it with a rich groove and accentuating the marauding metal classic with his celebrated light touch and predilection to use snare more than most.

  “Rough An’ Ready” keeps up the record’s raucous factor, the band presenting a hard rock shuffle, this one credited to Coverdale and Moody, with neither Moody or Marsden getting as much of the song nods as generally was the case in the past. In fact, Micky was already one foot out of the door, as it were. “At the end of ‘81, I left the band, because it wasn’t really happening,” notes Moody. “It wasn’t going in the right direction, and financially it wasn’t really happening, and people weren’t particularly happy with the way things were going. So the band kind of disintegrated. And in ‘82, David asked me to come back and help finish off the Saints & Sinners album. In a nutshell, there were business problems and money issues — the usual things that creep into a band. The first band had broken up at the end of ‘81. David wanted to try something different, so he got away from the old management company. I left because it wasn’t really fun anymore and, like I say, we weren’t generating the kind of money we wanted too. I won’t go into that, but in ‘82, I was doing a few gigs with Bernie and that’s when David asked me if I wanted to come back and finish off the album. By then, he had gotten in with Mel Galley because of the Glenn Hughes connection with Trapeze. He wanted to put the band back together with him, Cozy Powell and myself. To be quite honest, there was no magic there, in that particular band.”

  “If you want my honest opinion, the management was not good to us, no,” adds Moody. “That’s just my opinion without going into details. You know, they did put us on the right track, etc. etc., got the press, we got the record deal. But beyond that, I won’t even go into what I think of the management. Because that’s something I really don’t want to think about. I don’t think it was the right management, personally.”

  Moving forward through the tracks, “Bloody Luxury” seems nothing more than a reprise of “Wine, Women An’ Song,” a pop boogie number, with Jon throwing a dated keyboard sound towards a mimic of the unimaginative riff. Notes Bernie, “‘Bloody Luxury’ was called something else; I can’t remember what it was called but it had several titles. In general, though, they were just songs around that David had come up with.”

  “Victim Of Love,” however, is a moderately inventive rocker, pulsating along to a sturdy Neil Murray bass line. Structurally, with its thump and its pregnant pauses, there’s a subtle eye to the future — this feels very much like a Slide It In track, although not something that could have survived on any record past Slide It In.

  “Well, there are some good songs,” defends Coverdale, when I’d asked him about this star-crossed record back in 2001. “I mean, there are always good songs on my stuff. I’m a song guy. But it was definitely a jigsaw puzzle of a record. A lot of the performances were lacklustre, but, as I say, some decent songs. It’s interesting for me, because since I’ve started this davidcoverdale.com, I get direct information from the source. It’s very hard for me to bump into members of my audience. You know, I would arrive at the show, do the show and I would be gone, so to have this direct contact with them and them with me. Some of the songs that resonate or connect with them over the years blow my mind. I’ve gone on there and said, ‘Well, I don’t think this is a particularly good album’ and suddenly I’m nailed by a thousand people saying, ‘That’s my favourite fucking album!’ You know, what do I fucking know?! All you have to know about me is that I do my best. Whether it’s good enough at that particular moment, whatever, that’s the best I could do at the time, health, professional, distractions, whatever.”

  Speaking to UK metal press legend Dante Bonutto upon release of the record, David had put on a brave face, even though much of the extensive chat with Dante had been about blowing up the band and reconstituting it for its next assault on the charts.

  “I would say it’s the best thing we’ve done; certainly my singing has never been better. ‘Victim Of Love’ is a great little rock ‘n’ roller, ‘Bloody Luxury’ I like very much — I can see that going well in concert — and ‘Crying In The Rain,’ from what a few people have told me, could well be the new ‘Mistreated,’ and it’s time for a change anyway. If I didn’t think this album was up to standard, I’d have burnt the masters, though I’d probably have ended up floating in a river in Hull. It’s a fine testament to the power of ‘de Snakes, but the next one will be even more powerful, that’s for sure!”

  As for singing after an uncharacteristic number of months away from the mic... “It’s not like riding a bike. Initially, I just did backing vocals to try and ease myself in, but the first lead vocal I did was ‘Love An’ Affection,’ and that was a straight take. And then I went on to ‘Saints An’ Sinners,’ and that was straight through too. I was singing like a dream; perhaps the layoff did me good — there are some real severe notes in ‘Victim Of Love.’”

  Said David at the time to Chris Tetley, on bolstering the vocal end of things, “I used Mel Galley, singing, doing the backing vocals with Micky and myself to try to get the vocal identity of the new band across. Which is very good, because Mel’s got a great strong voice, and can fight with me for centre stage. It’s going to be even better, obviously, because these are songs which I wrote with the idea of Bernie and Micky singing with me, but of course with Mel now, we can go a lot further vocally.”

  Closing side one of the original vinyl is the aforementioned and immense “Crying In The Rain,” of course, re-re-recorded by Whitesnake 2.0 and turned into a gargantuan hit.

  “‘Crying In The Rain’ was a big old blues opus,” explains Coverdale. “That was written after the breakup of my first marriage, written in Portugal, for a contractual album I had to do to get out of my management deal. When I got out of Deep Purple, I had inherited these couple of managers because of extraordinarily long-term contracts and I was led t
o believe at that time I had to make a choice between one or the other of the Purple managers. And the one I picked I never felt comfortable trusting but I was never given any choice.

  “I’ll tell you exactly what it was. My daughter, who fortunately is incredibly talented musically, went through a period in her early formative years, 4 or 5 years old of getting hit with bacterial meningitis, Kawasaki syndrome, all of these horrendous killer illnesses, and after that I realized, with all the unhappiness that I had professionally, and disappointment, that that was absolutely no reason to have my head in my hands with that ‘What am I going to do?’ scenario. When you see a helpless child ill, really all you have is the talent of the doctors and prayers to God for her recovery. I came out of her illness with the balls to turn around and say, ‘This means nothing to me; I want out.’ And at that time I was in the middle of a record and nobody knew how to finish it, other than myself. So that was the only ace I held in able to get out of those contracts.”

  Over to side two, and there’s the other rock anthem that would help make Whitesnake a pop culture phenomenon for a stratospheric flash in time for a few brief years at the end of the 1980s.

  “‘Here I Go Again’ I wrote many, many years ago, again, in Portugal, before people in America heard it in ‘87 or whatever, and it was actually about the breakup of my first marriage,” explains Coverdale. “And I wrote that in 1980, ‘81, so that’s pretty old. It’s interesting. That turned into a huge anthem, fist punching the air stuff, which is interesting because it isn’t that kind of theme. But whatever. I’ve had enough people talk to me or write to me and say how helpful or beneficial the song was to them in a particular crisis in their lives. And that to me, as a writer, is success, when you can connect like that. And that was a problem I had with Whitesnake. A lot of the stuff was becoming so overtly pompous, catering to big rock stadium scenarios. You’d get the sentiment of the song in the beginning and then the group would explode in and I was just riding the gods of electricity, let alone trying to put any sort of emotional content into it.”

  The version of “Here I Go Again” on Saints & Sinners isn’t radically less produced or less hair metal than the one (or two!) known the world o’er from Whitesnake years later. Still, there are choice nuances to behold, one being Murray’s tight yet inventive bass line, perfect for Ian Paice’s straight delivery; Ian, in essence, stepping aside so that Neil can shine.

  “Nonetheless,” says Murray, “Saints & Sinners was still pretty much the same sound and line-up, though we seemed to be getting a bit tired. There was a rather complacent attitude because we’d had reasonable success. Maybe not the States, but in Europe and Japan we’d been doing pretty well by that time. It’s the usual thing. When you have a bit of success, you just stop feeling that you have to… The hunger slightly goes. And you know, if two or three guys in the band want to sit and watch a football game on TV rather than be in the studio, there’s not much you can do about it. Unless you are the one paying the bills, and you tell them, ‘Right, get down there or you’re fired.’ So it’s tricky. And I’m not saying it’s a bad record. But you know, in some ways, for me, I found it a bit predictable, some of the things that people came up with.”

  “So, the morale in the band was sinking down a bit,” continues Murray. “And we were taking some things for granted. Like I say, also the songs and the style of the band was becoming a little bit predictable. You would find the same chord sequences and the same kind of riffs cropping up again. So in some ways, Saints & Sinners wasn’t as satisfying as it should’ve been, in various departments. Whereas Come An’ Get It, everybody was really kind of coasting along but in a good way, sort of knowing that we’d proved ourselves and had our sound and our style. It was just that by the time it got to Saints & Sinners, the songs started to be the same. Nobody was really putting quite enough effort into making them different.

  “Also, there was an issue with Ian Paice when we were making Saints & Sinners where, for some reason, he really got into a knot with his playing. He had a real kind of mental block at that time, a sort of crisis of confidence in his playing. And I don’t know quite what the cause of that was. He kind of lost his enthusiasm or his adventurousness or the style he’d had with Deep Purple. The thing is, he was wanting everything to be absolutely perfectly in time and he started playing less and less and it was just a temporary thing. It contributed to the feeling on the album sessions, that things weren’t the same as they used to be.”

  “Now, going alongside all of this is the business side of it,” continues Murray, “where possibly Whitesnake wouldn’t have gotten going in the first place if it wasn’t for one of Deep Purple’s managers, John Coletta, who had taken us on board. But when we signed to him in ‘78 he was not only the manager, he was also the publisher and the record company, and that was not a good thing for us in terms of knowing where the money was going. So yeah, although he’d been half of Purple’s management in the ‘70s, under the contract with Whitesnake, he also had, as well as the management, the publishing and the record company, in Britain, which was then licensed to other labels and stuff. So tons of money would be coming in, but we wouldn’t really see very much of it.”

  “It took a year or two to probably get into profit and start getting somewhere, but I think as we became successful and from then on — particularly as David, Jon and Ian had been in this massive band Deep Purple at the height of their success — they’re going, ‘Hang on, we should be seeing a lot more money than we are getting.’

  “The feeling was that the label that we were on, a subsidiary of Atlantic, really didn’t have the clout to make the band happen in America and, coupled with that, there was the dissatisfaction with our management. The other three of us, myself, Bernie and Micky, we were slightly in the dark about all the financial side of it. We were sort of taken advantage of, really, but it got to the point where after doing the bulk of Saints & Sinners, David basically wanted to get away from Mr. Coletta and start again with a new record deal and management and everything else. So, this started to set in motion David basically paying the management a lot of money to get away from all the contracts. So, in the spring of ‘82, that’s when the big change was made.”

  “And also, it seemed to be a good idea in his mind to make changes within the band because he just felt that the attitude wasn’t the same,” continues Murray. “As I say, dissatisfaction was starting to build in the band. There wasn’t the same sort of fire and enthusiasm and excitement that there had been before. When we were trying to make it, it was great to be part of something where you’re playing tiny little clubs, and a year later you’re playing Hammersmith Odeon and a year later you’re playing arenas. It was really quite a fast trajectory to the band becoming successful in Britain, Europe and Japan.”

  The very nature of Whitesnake’s music — let’s face it, party rock played and sung good — well, that was also part of the problem, especially as it pertained to the ex-Purple members of the band.

  “For Ian and Jon,” explains Murray, “Whitesnake was fun music to play but it didn’t show them off in the way that Deep Purple did. I mean, Deep Purple, you had three virtuosos and you know, a bass player and a singer [laughs]. However good they were, you still had these amazing players, absolutely top of their game. And in Whitesnake, it’s still the case, but with two other guitarists and a different kind of music, it wasn’t quite so easy for them to, I don’t know, maybe even just play what they wanted to play or to stretch out. There wasn’t that opportunity for them, playing-wise.”

  Still, very little of this strife can be heard in the record at hand. Arguably, Saints & Sinners is an even more lively and fiery record than the last — the band’s Flick Of The Switch as it were, compared to Back In Black and For Those About To Rock to draw an AC/DC analogy. Side two is illustrative of this roustabout gang feel, with “Love An’ Affection” roundhouse rocking, and “Rock An’ Roll Angels” stirring up a textured vibe and feel in the orbit of Mott and the Ston
es.

  But it’s “Dancing Girls” that brings back the metal, and brings it strong. Like “Young Blood,” this one’s a steamroller, even if Jon Lord throws up top a cool Stevie Wonder rhythm and sound, which gives way for a traditional Hammond solo come break time.

  “‘Dancing Girls’ had this kind of Sly Stone vibe about it,” recalls Marsden. “Boom lacka-lacka, boom lacka-lacka. But I can’t remember that much about it. When you weren’t involved in the writing of something, you don’t take a great deal of notice of them until you play them. And then once we recorded them in the studio, my bit for that song that was written by somebody else... it was done, kind of thing. So you leave it for them to get on with it. I guess that’s how Ian must’ve felt about stuff. Once he’d done his thing, he’d be gone. He didn’t have to hang around the studio for the next six weeks like we did.”

  A title track closes the album, and strangely — yet at the same time adding a sense of cohesion — the song is a bruising circular blues metal, a variation on the approach used for the faster “Love An’ Affection” and the slower “Crying In The Rain.” Great tune, and a catchy, catch it to go phrase-riddled holler-along that frankly could have been brought forward successfully the same way “Crying In The Rain” and “Here I Go Again” would be, given the lifts in energy, the twists and turns to the riffing, the Guns N’ Roses swagger to the damn thing.

  As a post-mortem comment from Marsden, he figures, “Come An’ Get It is a natural follow-up to Ready An’ Willing, with the live album in the middle. But Saints & Sinners is a strange album, because it’s kind of the breakup album. And yet recently, I had to do some liner notes for a box set, so I revisited it, and it’s a great record. I was amazed, I was amazed! The stuff was as strong as anything we’d done, and well of course, the biggie of all-time was on there — ‘Here I Go Again’ was on it. You know, how bad was it to go out on that album? That would do me just fine, you know? [laughs].”