Terry ... is Terry around?
As he's not around let me say this:
No one can explain to me why Coverdale's voice sounds sometimes youthfully spot-on and then again hoarse and broken during
one performance of one song in one key on one night. Unless the voice comes from two different sources. Nuff said (or sung and played back). Coverdale could never sing Still of the Night well live, even in the late eighties, it was a one-off studio high performance shortly after his successful throat operation (his voice hasn't been the same live since then). Jon Lord - who played with Coverdale for nearly a decade all in all (Deep Purple and Whitesnake) and soothed a then still shy and nervous David Coverdale at his first audition with da Purps in 1973 by playing piano ballads to him and inviting him to sing along - once winced when hearing the Coverdale/Page album: "David has this rich baritone voice like nobody else in the business yet insists on pushing his voice into Robert Plant stratosphere - it pains me just to listen to it. He should realize that he is David Coverdale, not Robert Plant."
Turner having witnessed it and saying what he says gives credibility to the whole thing. Turner has no axe to grind with Coverdale, he always said nice and complimentary things about him (unlike about Ian Gillan). And while Turner can act like a real Bozo, his pipes still work live. He's technically a very good singer and hardly ever botches a note, tough luck that he will always have to live with the comparison to what Lou Gramm once was.
To be fair, Whitesnake aren't the first band to have a lead voice via tape live. The last Steve Perry-wannabe with Journey (not the new cute little Asian guy they found via youtube, who sings great live) performed with tapes on an English open air some years ago too.
"There's a line here that cuts real deep - well, at least down to the scalp...".
Coverdale's comment about not performing with a wig is a (cheap) swipe at Turner who has to live with the rumour/truth of actually wearing one live during the last ten years or so.
