Part 1

An old friend and fellow musician of yours from the old days, Mick Griffith, said to me that like the rest of them you were passionate about your music but he doesn't remember you craving the big time or being any more ambitious than the others. Is that true?
Actually, I was pretty ambitious. I remember when I was a teenager, the epitome of success for us was Top of the Pops in those days, because we really had no idea. When I was 16 I said, "If I'm not on Top of the Pops by my next birthday, I'll go out and get a proper job" and then when I got to 17 and still hadn't been on Top of the Pops it was, " If I haven't been on Top of the Pops by the time I'm 18..." , one of those kind of things. So I don't know whether I had the kind of ambition that has taken me this far, but, I've always loved music, very simply, as a vehicle to express myself and that hasn't changed. I've always sensed opportunity and if it felt right, I've grabbed it. I think that opportunity happens to everyone in different areas and it's just having the awareness to grab hold of it and hang on tight.

Your old bandmate from the Fabulosa Brothers, Alan Fearnley, told me about some demos you recorded, one set at a home studio in Redcar and another at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. Do you have copies of these or any other old recordings from your pre-Purple days?
Those are the ones that got me the audition for Deep Purple. But, sadly, I don't have copies, no. There were so many tapes in the Purple office and the members of the band would just go to the office and get a huge stack each to take home and listen, and I think, I'm not sure, that Paicey actually got mine and called Ritchie and said, "Hey, this guy here, he's drunk but he seems to have a good tone." But I don't have any copies, I don't know where they vanished to. Please give my regards to Mike and Alan, by the way.

Where they original songs or covers?
Well Alan was a great writer and I was a writer so we did have some original stuff, but I think for the session we did our versions of Everybody's Talking, the old Nillson song and a version of the Bill Withers song, Lonely Town, Lonely Street. I remember going into Strawberry Studios in Stockport and asking the very unsympathetic engineer, "Have you got a microphone I can hold to sing?" because there was just this microphone hanging from the middle of the studio ceiling and he said, "No, no, you sing into this." And I said, "But I'm used to holding a mike stand" and he said "If you can't sing like this, you can't sing". So I reached for the Bulmers, a very strong cider that we'd carry in our guitar cases, being from the North!

What's your opinion about the recent release of the California Rehearsals?
I know hardcore fans will enjoy them, but these are not endorsed by the musicians. These are rehearsal tapes and it pains me to imagine people paying money for them. My feeling is that it's the former management scraping the barrel and compromising the legacy of Deep Purple. I always end up with a couple of extra songs, particularly this record, there are about 13 or something, and I'm going to start giving people free downloads. I can't endorse Napster because I'm a professional musician, but Napster did give me the idea that I can give something back to my supporters. Instead of these, illegitimate tapes that the management have put out. I've got a song called Oh No Not The Blues Again, and once you log on to the web site and sign up with the Fan Club, eventually we'll be able to let you download this song. It's a good little song, it was written for the record and never completely finished. It didn't fit in with the identity of the record, but, it's still a good little fun tune. Very early Whitesnake like Wine, Women and Song.

I don't know if you know this but quite a few fans like to do a tour of the places of your early days mentioned in Simon Robinson's Whitesnake Biography. It says in there that as a small child you lived at the Red Lodge Social Club in Saltburn. We know it closed down many years ago but where was it exactly?
It was on Marine Parade, but I'm surprised to hear that it's closed down because when I was up there in '92, when I was losing my Mam, it was still there. I actually walked in there and said hello to the ghosts. Maybe it's called something else now. But yes, it's on Marine Parade overlooking the North Sea, on the corner of Diamond Street.

When you got your big break with Deep Purple you had dropped out of college and were working in a boutique by day and singing in the clubs at night. Have you ever played the what if game and wondered where you might be today if you'd never seen that ad in Melody Maker?
No, I don't play the what-if game. I never wanted to be in a place where I would say, "If only I'd done this, if only I'd done that". With all the highs and lows I've had in my life, I wouldn't change anything. So no, I don't, this is what I'm supposed to be doing.

How did you look upon your voice at that time, the power and range of it? Did you see it as a God-given talent or take it for granted?
I'm actually starting to realize, just in the last three years, that it is a gift and I have abused it on occasions and never fully explored it, which you will hear me doing infinitely more on the Into The Light record. I've been blessed with a voice that goes from a whisper to a scream and a lot of the time I've only used the scream. It's nice to know that I can still do it and there's still the odd wolf howl on the record but I want to be able to explore it more. My voice is an instrument. The music dictates to me what approach I should take. For instance, when I started working with Pagey, I said to him, "I don't want to scream anymore." And he said "Fine, I love your mid-range voice". But when we started actually putting the songs together it was just screamingly obvious what I had to do. And it was great, I loved it, and the fact is that I can still do it, at my ripe old age!!

How did David Coverdale, the working class lad from Redcar transform himself into David Coverdale, the entertainer. Was it a conscious reinvention or a natural progression?
I think one of the things that we all do from the time we're kids is to develop disguises and masks that we wear in front of people and illusions about ourselves which is how we want people to see us. What anybody else thinks about you is really of no consequence. It's what you think of yourself. In the last couple of years I've been facing down a lot of the demons of the past and trying to find out, who I am, It's something I think I'll be doing for the rest of my life. I think we have two very important missions in life. One is to find out who we really are and the other one is to taste as much of life and experience as much of life as we can. So there are a lot of reinventions. I said for many years that we have three hearts, one you show the world, one you show your family and one you keep to yourself. The third heart is where the demons lurk, the bitterness, the resentments, the jealousies, and I've been getting rid of them for years. I don't want them. With my songs I can exorcise a lot of them. My wife said to me on the '97 tour, "I feel you're more yourself in the company of strangers when you're on stage than when you're off stage". And it went very deep into me. I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I did realize that she was right. I've never been uncomfortable putting my heart on display, my feelings on display, certainly with an audience. But why was I carrying so many self-defense mechanisms? It's all to avoid getting hurt, and that starts, I think, as a child. I've been working on myself for over three years now and loving the journey. Everything that happens to you, you keep somewhere inside. I'm convinced the human mind has more memory than the most powerful computers. We don't forget anything, we just suppress it, push it down further and further. Eventually it will manifest as an ache here or a nerve-ending there. You've got to get rid of it. Acknowledge it and let it go. It's emotional excess baggage, you don't need it.

Of the three albums from your time in Deep Purple, which do you prefer and why?
Oh, I don't really listen to them much anymore. I don't know. The Burn album probably because that was my first-ever record. I probably listen to Burn more than any of them, because it was so new me, so novel. To see my name on an actual record was such an incredible feeling.

Tommy Bolin once talked about jamming in clubs in Australia with Jon Lord during the Australian tour in Nov. 75. Did you ever take part in these jams and if so do you remember what songs were played?
I can't remember a lot about that time, those were very reckless days. I was a fully paid member of the C.R.A.F.T. Club-Can't Remember A Fucking Thing!

What was your general impression of touring with Bolin. Did he play up to par most nights or was it all as disappointing as the ending in England?
There was a lot of disappointment for me. I think that was probably my most overweight time, which is always an indication of me being unhappy. I love Tommy and I just saw him hurt himself so much. It was very strange for Tommy. He had an air of resentment about him. He was a beautiful boy when I first met him. He'd replaced Joe Walsh in the James Gang and he told me when he was playing with them, people were shouting "Where's Joe Walsh?", and of course to replace the legendary Ritchie Blackmore was an even bigger problem. He would hear all of the shouts for Ritchie and it was sad. Once Ritchie left we had a meeting, in Munich, and it was discussed that we should change the name, The Deeps, Purple or Good Company, who knows, I think it would have been far more appropriate to have changed the name. We could still have played the music, or elements of the music, but I think it would have been much more of a service to the legacy of Deep Purple. That's one of the reasons I left. I had too much respect to drag the name down. I saw what Purple meant to people and I still hear it now when I'm in Europe. I'm always shocked that I'm still asked about Purple because it was such a long time ago. The respect and love still continues, even with the horrendous scraping of the barrel releases that I'm seeing currently.

While you were working on your first solo album, back in 1977, you and Roger Glover were reputed to have written a track for Playboy pinup Barbie Benton. How did this come about?
Roger Glover played her a demo of mine and she liked it and lifted it! I've never lost any sleep over it.

Part 3

Part 4