Concert review: Whitesnake at Wolverhampton Civic Hall

The voice may not be quite what it once was but David Coverdale can still screech with the best of them and proved at the Civic last night that the latest incarnation of Whitesnake still has plenty of bite.

Whitesnake

Wolverhampton Civic Hall

Concert review by Ian Harvey

Tanned, his hair perfectly coiffured and with a pure California smile, Coverdale was all end-of-the-pier dirty jokes and lascivious humour, a strutting heavy rock peacock.

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Coverdale knows all the moves - for goodness sake, he invented half of them - and had the audience, particularly the rather large female contingent, eating out of his hands throughout the near two-hour show.

Five songs were aired from the band's latest album, Forevermore, while the rest of the show was pretty much a greatest hits set. And, as Coverdale might have said (but didn't), what a marvelous set of hits!

Early outings for Love Ain't No Stranger and Is This Love? had the Wolverhampton contingent of the Whitesnake choir singing in full voice.

Although Coverdale went for and hit plenty of his famous high notes it's noticeable that his voice has lost much of the soulful quality of his youth. During the acoustic song Fare Thee Well he really seemed to be in trouble at times.

But the astonishing salvo of Fool For Your Loving, Here I Go Again and Still Of The Night, as well as Whitesnake's landmark cover of Bobby Bland's Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City helped end the night on a high.

The only sour notes were struck by the ridiculously long guitar and drum solos. Doug Aldrich, Reb Beach and Brian Tichy are all hugely talented musicians but did they really need to spend nigh on 20 minutes convincing us of the fact? There were many in the audience who would have preferred that space filled with four extra songs.