Free Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage by Martin Popoff Page A

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