WHITESNAKE: New Audio Interview With DOUG ALDRICH Available

A 14-minute audio interview with WHITESNAKE guitarist Doug Aldrich conducted earlier in the month by Vassil Varbanov of Bulgaria's Tangra Mega Rock is available for download at this location (MP3, 3.3 MB). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Tangra Mega Rock: Well, this ["Good to be Bad"] is the first studio album of WHITESNAKE for 11 years. Why did it take so long. OK, we know that you, Doug, joined only in 2002, but still, did you ask David [Coverdale] about this?

Doug: Well, you know, we didn't want to rush anything. We were concentrating on live shows for the first two years. David's always writing songs. I'm always writing songs. We are always working on ideas. We'd be backstage sometimes or in a hotel room and we have ideas and we just started to working on ideas and eventually in the end of 2006 we got together and really kind of started to get serious about writing. It was just very natural, you know? We have never had this thought: "OK, we have to do a record!" What we did was we just started writing some ideas and songs and turned them into a record. It may be was eleven years, but since WHITESNAKE reformed, we've really busy, you know, touring and getting our show to be really great and now it was natural for us to start writing and we recorded this record. It took about a year to write it and to record it.

Tangra Mega Rock: Basically this album has been completely co-written by David and you. Is there any particular song on this album that you are particularly proud of?

Doug: Each song has got its own personality. One of my absolute favourites is the last song on the record "Till The End Of Time". For me it's a really beautiful song and it really shows David's voice. It sounds different. Maybe WHITESNAKE hasn't had a song like that on a record. I really like "Till The End Of Time" and also "Lay Down Your Love". I feel it's a great combination of classic WHITESNAKE and also it has got a new flavor too, but it's very bluesy and it's heavy and David sounds amazing on it. Those two songs, I would say.

Tangra Mega Rock: There have been some amazing guitarists playing in this band for this long period before you joined them. What particular one you were admiring through the years?

Doug: I love all those guys, you know? I love the bluesy mood of Bernie Marsden and I love the slide playing of Micky Moody, the aggression and metal that John Sykes added to the band and of course I even love the DEEP PURPLE guitar player, Ritchie Blackmore, but you know, my style is Some of my bigger influences are Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix and then later on I really loved Randy Rhoads and Gary Moore. There are some of them in my style. I'm a fan of WHITESNAKE as well as a band member of WHITESNAKE. I had all those things put together, I guess.

Tangra Mega Rock: It's interesting, because your show in Bulgaria will be on July the 4th and we can see that Whitesnake started as all-British band, but now it's like all-American band. Where do you see the difference if you compare the early days of WHITESNAKE as a listener and nowadays?

Doug: I agree with you that it started as a British band. Then later, in the '80s, WHITESNAKE looked a little more like the American-sounding band, because of MTV and all that stuff, but still whenever you've got David Coverdale singing a song, it sounds more British to me. Anyway, but this new record has a real British flavor to it, or a European flavor, I should say, too. It's mixed in with the parts of American sound of WHITESNAKE in 1987. Mostly European guitar players, except for Randy Rhoads influenced me. I love the British sound, I love the European guitar players. But I agree with you. It started off British, then it got a little more Americanized, but now we've got a good balance, I feel.

Read the entire interview at www.radiotangra.com.