Bernie Marsden, the much loved former Whitesnake guitarist and solo artist, has died at the age of 72. Responding on Twitter, David Coverdale referred to his “old friend” as “a genuinely funny and gifted man, whom I was honoured to know and share a stage with”.
Marsden’s publicist had broken the sad news on behalf of the guitarist’s family, revealing: “Bernie died peacefully on Thursday evening [August 24] with his wife, Fran, and daughters, Charlotte and Olivia, by his side.” It added: “Bernie never lost his passion for music, writing and recording new songs until the end.”
Marsden may have been best known as a member of Whitesnake, the band he co-founded with singer Coverdale and guitarist Micky Moody in 1978, but he spent a lifetime in rock’n’roll, playing with Wild Turkey, Cozy Powell’s Hammer, UFO, Babe Ruth, Paice Ashton & Lord, MGM, Alaska, Company Of Snakes, The Moody-Marsden Band and more.
Born into a working-class family in Buckinghamshire on May 7, 1951, Bernard John Marsden began playing music with a second-hand Spanish guitar. He saved his pocket money for an electric instrument, and started out in the local club scene in the late 1960s, inspired, like so many others, by the boom in blues music.
“I loved Hank Marvin in The Shadows as a kid,” he told Classic Rock in 2020. “But Eric Clapton was the first guitar player I really adored, because I was old enough to relate to it. George Harrison comes into this as well, and then it was Peter Green. I saw Fleetwood Mac on so many occasions.”
