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David Coverdale (born 22 September 1951) is an English singer and songwriter. He is best known as the founder and lead singer of the hard rock band Whitesnake. He was also the lead singer of Deep Purple from 1973 to 1976, and he has had a solo career.
Coverdale founded Whitesnake in 1978. Whitesnake gained significant popularity in the UK, Europe, and Asia. In 1987, the band released the Whitesnake album. Featuring the hit singles "Here I Go Again" and "Is This Love", the album went multi-platinum and made the band popular in North America. During Whitesnake's first hiatus from 1990 to 1993, Coverdale collaborated with Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page on the album Coverdale–Page, which went platinum.
In 2016, Coverdale was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Deep Purple. Coverdale is known for his powerful, blues-tinged voice. He has sold a cumulative 40 million records throughout his career.
From the beginning, Coverdale showed singing talent; he "discovered that he could project" and had a "gut voice".
In February 1974, Deep Purple released their first album with Coverdale and Hughes. Entitled Burn, the album was certified gold in the United States on 20 March 1974. In April 1974, Coverdale and Deep Purple performed to over 200,000 fans on his first trip to the United States at the California Jam. In December 1974, Burn was followed-up by Stormbringer. The funk and soul influences of the previous record were even more prominent on Stormbringer; for this reason and others, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore left the band in June 1975."Deep Purple: History and Hits" DVD.
Coverdale was instrumental in persuading the band to continue with American guitarist Tommy Bolin (of Billy Cobham and James Gang fame). As Jon Lord put it, "David Coverdale came up to me and said, 'Please keep the band together.' David played me the album that Tommy did with Billy Cobham. We liked his playing on it and invited Tommy to audition.'" The band released one studio album with Bolin, 1975's Come Taste the Band, which was less commercially successful than its previous records. The supporting tour proved difficult, with both Hughes and Bolin having drug problems. In March 1976, at the end of a concert, Coverdale walked off in tears and handed in his resignation. He was told there was no band left to quit, as Lord and Ian Paice had already decided to break up the band. The band's breakup was made public in July 1976. Coverdale said in an interview: "I was frightened to leave the band. Purple was my life, Purple gave me my break, but all the same I wanted out."
In 1978, Coverdale released his second studio album Northwinds. Its "blues- and R&B-influenced hard rock" style was received much better than the previous album,Bret Adams, , Allmusic, retrieved 13 November 2023. and in 2021 Classic Rock considered it "a remarkably mature album that can still send shivers down the spine 30 years after it was recorded" and the "antithesis of Whitesnake's super-slick 1987". Before the album's release, he had already formed a new band.
In 1985, Sykes and Coverdale started working on new songs for the next album, but Coverdale soon contracted a serious Sinusitis that made recording close to impossible for much of 1986 and which had doctors thinking he might never sing again. Coverdale eventually recovered, and recordings were continued. Before their upcoming album was fully recorded and released, Coverdale had dismissed Sykes from the band. In many period interviews, Coverdale stated that the next album was a make-or-break album for Whitesnake, and if not successful he would disband Whitesnake altogether. In 1987 and 1988, North America was finally won over with the multi-platinum self-titled Whitesnake album. Propelled by hit singles such as "Here I Go Again" and "Is This Love", as well as MTV airing of "Still of the Night", it finally made Whitesnake a "bona fide arena headliner" in North America.
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, caught in the "Glam metal" era, Coverdale kept Whitesnake going with great success despite changing line-ups. In 1989, Coverdale recruited Vandenberg to record a new album, Slip of the Tongue. Vandenberg co-wrote the entire album with Coverdale, but a wrist injury sidelined him from contributing the lead guitar work. Steve Vai was recruited, re-recording most of Vandenberg's existing parts and finishing the album. Upon release, it also was a success in Europe and the US, but it "was a considerable disappointment after the across-the-board success of Whitesnake".S. T. Erlewine and G. Prato, , Allmusic, retrieved 27 September 2010.
On 26 September 1990, after the last show on the Slip of the Tongue tour in Tokyo, Coverdale disbanded Whitesnake indefinitely. Tired of the business in general, the rigors of touring and troubled by his separation and later divorce from Tawny Kitaen, Coverdale wanted to find other values in life and took "private time to reflect" and re-assess his career direction.
At that point Coverdale had grown uncomfortable with the entity he believed Whitesnake had become, and admitted that he got "caught up in it". In a 1993 interview with Robert Hilburn, he commented that he "had to stop everything, this whole circus. I had never gone into (music) for the image thing at all, and I really couldn't do it anymore". In another interview from the 90s, Coverdale recalled "it got louder and louder, and so did I, to the point now where I have to get dressed up like a "girly man" and tease one's questionable bangs or hair and it's all becoming a bit ... boring".
In 1997 Coverdale returned and released Restless Heart (with Vandenberg on guitar). The album was originally supposed to be Coverdale's solo album, but in the end the record company forced it, to be released under the moniker "David Coverdale & Whitesnake". The tour was billed as Whitesnake's farewell tour, during which Coverdale and Vandenberg played two unplugged shows, one in Japan and the other for VH1. The Japanese show was released the next year under the title Starkers in Tokyo. After the tour in support of Restless Heart ended, Coverdale once again folded Whitesnake and took another short break from music.
In April 2008, the band released its first new studio album in over 11 years titled Good to Be Bad to great reviews. On 11 August 2009 Whitesnake played a show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado when Coverdale suffered a vocal injury. After seeing a specialist, it was announced the following day, that Coverdale had been suffering from severe vocal fold edema and a left vocal fold vascular lesion. The remainder of the tour with Judas Priest was cancelled so that the injury would not worsen. In March 2011 the band released their 11th studio album, Forevermore.
In May 2015, the band released their 12th The Purple Album, featuring cover versions of the songs that Coverdale had originally sang on with Deep Purple. It was followed by a supporting tour. In May 2019, the band released their 13th studio album titled Flesh & Blood.
In May 2022, the band began their COVID-19 delayed farewell tour, with European dates beginning in Dublin on 10 May, but were only able to continue, until their show in Croatia on 2 July 2022. After cancelling the last 11 dates of the European leg of the tour due to health problems affecting various band members including Reb Beach, Tommy Aldridge and Coverdale himself, Whitesnake subsequently cancelled the entire 2022 North American leg of its Farewell Tour as Coverdale was forced to deal with ongoing respiratory health issues.
In 2024, a compilation album, , was released, containing new mixes and remasters, of all of Coverdale's solo albums under the Whitesnake name.
In 2003, PopMatters proclaimed him as the "crown prince of '70s rock. Not even Robert Plant, definitely not Bad Company's Paul Rodgers, or anyone else can touch Coverdale at this moment in time when it comes to rock icons from that era — it's just a shame that hardly anyone comes to see it". In 2015, Dave Everley of Classic Rock considered that "Whitesnake are one of the great British bands of the past 40 years, and Coverdale is one of the finest blue-eyed soul singers, full-stop". William Pinfold in Record Collector's review of Martin Popoff's 2015 biography on Whitesnake commented that both the band and Coverdale "have been consistently taken seriously" but "are underrated compared with the plaudits given to their 70s/80s peers", considering Coverdale "outrageously talented, charismatic and in equal parts lordly and humble, he's a hugely likeable figure".
In 2016, Coverdale was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a member of Deep Purple.
On 1 March 2007, Coverdale became a US citizen, in a ceremony in Reno, Nevada, and now holds dual citizenship UK citizenship and US. For many years in the 1980s, he lived in hotels, including the Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles. Since 1988, he has lived on an almost 10,000 sq ft estate in Incline Village, Nevada on Lake Tahoe where he built a luxurious house. In 2019, he decided to sell it, and in 2021, it was reportedly sold for $6.8 million.
A more spiritual than religious person, since the late 1960s, Coverdale regularly practises meditation, and considers it "the most incredible accessory, or tool, that I've found in my life".
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