Former Whitesnake Guitarist Bernie Marsden has died at 72.

Whitesnake chief David Coverdale shared a tribute to his former bandmate and co-writer on social media. “I’ve simply woken as much as the terrible information that my outdated good friend and former Snake Bernie Marsden has handed,” he wrote. “My honest ideas and prayers to his beloved household, mates and followers. A genuinely humorous, gifted man, whom I used to be honored to know and share a stage with.”

Born on Might 7, 1951, in Buckingham, England, Marsden reduce his enamel enjoying with a number of British rock bands in his teenagers and early 20s. He linked up briefly with UFO and Cozy Powell’s Hammer within the early ‘70s earlier than becoming a member of Paice Ashton Lord, that includes Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice and keyboardist Jon Lord. Marsden appeared on the band’s solely studio album, 1977’s Malice in Wonderland.

The next yr, Marsden shaped Whitesnake with Coverdale, who was contemporary off a three-year stint in Deep Purple. He appeared on their first 5 studio albums, via 1982’s Saints & Sinners, together with the 1980 stay album Stay … within the Coronary heart of the Metropolis. Most notably, Marsden and Coverdale co-wrote Saints & Sinners’ “Right here I Go Once more,” which turned a chart-topping smash upon its rerelease in 1987.

Marsden left Whitesnake throughout the making of Saints & Sinners, as monetary, managerial and familial troubles prompted Coverdale to scrub home. He shaped the band Alaska and later reunited with ex-Whitesnake guitarist Micky Moody in each the Moody Marsden Band and the Snakes. Marsden additionally launched a gentle clip of solo albums and carried out on many different recordings through the years.

Marsden finally rekindled his relationship with Coverdale and featured him on a remake of Whitesnake’s “Bother” on his 2014 album Shine. The guitarist mirrored on Whitesnake’s stressed early days in a 2015 interview with UCR.

“Two albums a yr. I have a look at it now and assume, ‘How did we do this?’” he mentioned. “Ultimately, there comes a time the place you need to say, ‘We’ve acquired to take a break,’ and that was Saints & Sinners. The extra work they loaded onto us, as an alternative of bringing us tighter collectively at that time, it type of broke us aside. So what’s actually good for you may find yourself destroying you as properly. However by then, we’d had a fairly good time.”