T
he provocatively titled Lovehunter was
the second full-length album from
Whitesnake, the bluesy hard rockers
formed in 1978 by David Coverdale
following the dissolution of Deep Purple. The
singer had laid the group’s foundation with
guitarists Bernie Marsden and Mick Moody, bassist
Neil Murray and drummer David ‘Duck’ Dowle
before his former Purple partner Jon Lord joined
them on keyboards during the recording of their
debut album, Trouble, the previous year.
Although Trouble had been a promising enough
introductory statement, a more consistent set
of songs aligned to escalating levels of internal
chemistry and propelled Lovehunter on to a whole
different plane.
Working at Clearwell
Castle, the 18th-century
estate in the Forest Of
Dean where Purple had
prepped for both Burn
and Stormbringer, the
band re-hired Purple’s
producer of choice,
Martin Birch, who had
also overseen Trouble, to
man the console of the
Rolling Stones Mobile.
Later nicknamed
‘Headmaster’ by Iron
Maiden, Birch was
a serious guy but not
without a sense of
humour. Clearwell was
said to be haunted, and
Birch derived great
amusement from piping
spooky sounds into the
band’s headphones as
the tapes rolled.
Some of the album’s
material, including Medicine Man, had been part-
written and rehearsed, while other songs were
composed in situ. Walking In The Shadow Of The
Blues, which presented a textbook fusion of blues,
hard rock and melody, was among those to fall into
the former category. It would become a pivotal
early Whitesnake song and a stage favourite for
many years to come.
“Yeah, Shadow Of The Blues was brand new at
Clearwell, which really pleased His Majesty no
end,” Marsden says, laughing, at the memory.
Marsden, who suggested the band should take
a stab at Leon Russell’s Help Me Through The Day,
had earmarked You And Me for inclusion on his
own solo album, About Time Too (released the sameyear), but was persuaded by Coverdale to rewrite it
for the group. Enhancing its overall charm, the
album ends with a short yet poignant sign-off,
We Wish You Well, which to this day still sends
concertgoers home with the audio equivalent of
a warm, manly hug.
Whitesnake’s forays into the singles chart with
the original versions of Fool For Your Loving and
Here I Go Again – both later reworked for an MTV-
generation reboot – were still in the future, and the
album’s main musical talking point was a salacious
title track that had been worked on and then
abandoned for Trouble. Lovehunter saw the frontman
barrel out his chest, proclaiming to be a ‘back-door
man’ who’d ‘taken everything I could, but I’ve given all
I can’ and promising to
‘give you all my loving, and
use my tail on you’.
Coverdale had already
inflamed the wrath of
the PC brigade with the
previous album’s love-
’em-and-leave-’em lyrics,
but Lovehunter – with
a front-cover image of
the rear view of a naked
woman straddling the
coils of a giant serpent- was about as subtle as
a flying mallet. The
image was drawn by the
noted fantasy artist Chris
Achilleos, whose work
had sometimes appeared
in Men Only.
“That’s where we
heard about him,”
Marsden says now,
smiling. “Somebody had
one of those magazines,
though I think he’d
drawn a dragon or something.”
Coverdale later admitted that the Lovehunter
sleeve was a knee-jerk response to those protesting
about such imagery, and was conceived “just to
piss them off even more”. It certainly did that.
The media campaign for Trouble had seen
Coverdale cross swords with several journalists,
including Robbi Millar of Sounds, on the subject
of sexism. This time Sounds despatched a male
writer, Phil Sutcliffe, although the outcome
remained the same.
Also a part of the interview, Marsden had felt
compelled to ponder: “The sleeve is sexist, I have
to admit that. Maybe we have done a wrong ’un.
I don’t know.”
David Coverdale: “What’s
wrong with being sexy?”“The [Lovehunter] sleeve
is sexist. Maybe we have
done a wrong ’un.”
Bernie Marsden
To this day, Coverdale and co are still often tagged as
an 80s band, but it all began with bluesy hard rock in
the 70s. Then along came 1979’s game-changer.WHITESNAKE
Words: Dave LingLOVEHUNTER
38 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM