Their last album before MTV changed everything, it marked the end of an era for the band.
Whitesnake entered 1984 on a high, having headlined the Monsters Of Rock Festival at Castle Donington the previous summer, where their backstage area was decked out in the style of M*A*S*H, complete with barbed wire, sandbags, and security staff wearing army khaki. The band – David Coverdale’s so-called ‘Whitesnake Commandos’ – were leaving blues rock behind, and their sixth studio album, Slide It In, introduced some new faces in former Trapeze guitarist Mel Galley, bassist Colin ‘Bomber’ Hodgkinson and drummer Cozy Powell.
By the time Slide It In was released in the UK in January ’84, Neil Murray, Whitesnake bassist 1978 to 1982, had replaced Hodgkinson. At Donington, Murray had been discreetly sounded out over his availability after Coverdale witnessed him playing with Gary Moore and wondered, as the singer told Sounds magazine: “Bloody hell, why did I let him go?”
Coverdale had set his sights on the US market, and Slide It In, tougher, leaner and more focused than its mediocre predecessor Saints &Sinners, represented a significant milestone on that path. However, almost none of the personnel that recorded it would remain for the album that finally smashed down the doors: 1987.
Coverdale considered Slide It In to be a positive step up because, he said, “the egos of people like Powell and Galley have been captured on tape”.
“It was a very powerful line-up,” Neil Murray says now. “With Saints &Sinners the band had
been losing its momentum, so Slide It In was an effective bridging point between the ‘old’ Whitesnake and the heavier, more Americansounding period.”
Behind the scenes, guitarist Micky Moody had grown frustrated by the escalating importance of John Kalodner, the ambitious A&R director of the band’s US label, Geffen Records. Moody had played on the album but quit before its release, lamenting that five or six years earlier Coverdale had been his best friend, but “now he acted like I wasn’t there”. It begs the question: could Whitesnake be a cold workplace?
“You must consider that things changed a lot since the band started, when everyone was kind of equal,” Murray says. “Very slowly over the next five years, things became much less democratic. By 1981/82, when we hadn’t cracked America, David was put in a position where he had to be more hard-headed and ruthless, instead of ‘Let’s just have a laugh’. By Saints &Sinners it was starting to feel like the band had slightly run its course. David was under a lot of pressure from all sides.”
