By Martin Popoff
Whitesnakers Bernie Marsden, Mick Moody and Neil Murray have struck back at those who considered this a Whitesnake cover band, Burst The Bubble (www.companyofsnakes.com) introducing a new vocalist (Stefan Berggren) and a new set of originals that is blues-powered and classic rock at once.
Legendary six-string journeyman Bernie Marsden elegantly concurs. "I think it's what I would like to call a classic British rock album. It's got overtones of pretty much everything we've always done, and yet we haven't tried to come into, shall I say, the Nickelback area. But we also haven't tried to stay exactly as we were before. I can only write a certain way because that's the way I write songs, but I've tried to include some of the feelings that people would have today. But at the end of the day I've always been a bit of a songsmith in that I'm always interested in how good a song is, rather than how good you can make a song with production. We've tried to work that way. There's not many of what we would call unnatural overdubs on the album. It's basically the guitar solos, which we work out, and we try to reproduce those on stage. The last thing in the world you want to do, as far as I'm concerned, is make a fantastic studio sound you can't take on the road with you. So I like to think that we are in our own way, a traditional British rock outfit."
I asked Bernie what other line entries on his long resume might have influenced the Burst The Bubble album, one that to my mind sounds like an amalgam of Bad Company's two distinct eras, and very little Whitesnake, jazz, blues or hair era included.
COMPANY OF SNAKES - Willing An' Ready Page 2