David Coverdale Says ‘Coverdale-Page’ Box Set Is in Limbo
David Coverdale has been teasing a box set celebrating his collaboration with Jimmy Page for several years, but the project now seems to be in limbo.
The Whitesnake vocalist paired up with the Led Zeppelin guitarist in 1993 for Coverdale-Page, finding success at rock radio with rootsy tracks like "Pride and Joy" and "Shake My Tree."
Though the union only lasted for one album and a short run of tour dates, Coverdale revealed in recent years that there were at least four unreleased tracks he wanted to finish. Additionally, he suggested that both he and Page could prepare fresh mixes of the album.
He also hoped that it might spawn some new songwriting between the two. "Since we reconnected, I've been messing around, writing at home," Coverdale told Eddie Trunk in 2021. "I have two ideas which could make really fun tracks, just to throw at him … 'See what you can do with this.' The way we did it before. We wrote really very potent music together."
But Coverdale now says the pandemic has put a spoke in the plans. "COVID didn't do us any favors," he tells UCR. "I'm really lucky — I have a studio within 10 minutes of my primary home. My guy at the time was a cancer survivor, so we were ultra-locked down. Jimmy, of course, where he lived, didn't have a studio. By the time we came out of COVID, I never had time to do it, with that kind of commitment."
Listen to David Coverdale and Jimmy Page's 'Shake My Tree'
The singer already has enough on his plate aside from a prospective Coverdale-Page reissue. "You know, I've got a very significant agenda, which also, in that time, was a two-year farewell tour after an astonishing 50-year career. There was just no time," he explains. "It breaks my heart not to do it, it really does. Because it's a super, super record. But yeah, that was the plan and I was very excited."
The vocalist now says he's in a quandary over how to move forward. "I really don't know what to do. Within five years, they're phasing out CDs. Last year, as you well know, vinyl outsold CDs. I don't know who [to give this project to]," he laments. "But I pray that Jimmy — I think he has potentially exhausted the Led Zeppelin catalog — that he would take something like this on if he was enthused. There's a couple of tracks that we never got on there, [including] one called 'Saccharin,' which is to die for."
Fortunately, they've got the multi-track recordings of the sessions, which was not a given. Coverdale learned that the analog copies had burned in the 2008 Universal Music Group fire. "The actual analog tapes went up in [that fire]," he says. "That was one of the things [that was lost], so thank God for digital. I have all of the assets for that."
In the meantime, Coverdale continues to revisit his catalog, with Whitesnake's 2008 album Good to Be Bad currently under the microscope. A forthcoming four-CD/Blu-ray box set titled Still Good to Be Bad will present a fresh remix of the album, plus session outtakes, demos and new recordings. The collection will be available on April 28.