Still of the Night (song)

"Still of the Night"
Single by Whitesnake
from the album Whitesnake
B-side "Here I Go Again" and "You're Gonna Break My Heart Again"
Released 21 March 1987 (UK)
9 March 1987 (US)
Format
  • Vinyl LP
  • cassette
  • CD
Recorded 1986
Genre Heavy metal, hard rock, blues rock, glam metal
Length 6:41 (album version)
3:58 (single version)
Label Geffen, EMI
Songwriter(s) David Coverdale
John Sykes
Producer(s) Mike Stone
Keith Olsen
Whitesnake singles chronology
"Slow an' Easy"
(1984)		 "Still of the Night"
(1987)		 "Crying in the Rain '87"
(1987)

"Slow an' Easy"
(1984)		 "Still of the Night"
(1987)		 "Crying in the Rain '87"
(1987)
Audio sample
  • file
  • help

"Still of the Night" is a song by the English band Whitesnake. It was released as the first single from their self titled 1987 album. It reached #16 in the U.K.,[1] #18 on the U.S. Mainstream Rock Tracks and #79 on the Billboard Hot 100[2] when it was released on 9 March 1987. In 2009, the track was named the 27th best hard rock song of all time by VH1.[3]

The song was written by lead singer David Coverdale and guitarist John Sykes, and proved to be one of the band's most popular songs. It combines the blues origins of the band with the more distorted, harder sound driving the song, making for a powerful hard rock song. Both the current Whitesnake lineup and John Sykes play the song as their live encore.

Background

In 2009, in an interview with Metal Hammer, Coverdale commented on the origins of the song:

"When my mother died I was going through the stuff at her house and found some early demo cassettes. One of them was a song that Ritchie Blackmore and I had been working on which was the basic premise of what would become "Still of the Night". It was totally unrecognizable, so Ritchie doesn't have anything to worry about... neither do I! Ha ha ha! I took it as far as I could then I gave it to Sykesy when we were in the south of France, and he put the big guitar hero stuff on there. John hated blues so I had to work within those parameters. I manipulated to be electric blues, but how he performed it was fabulous for his time and relatively unique because of the songs. There were a lot of people doing that widdly stuff but they didn't have the quality of those songs."

Music video

The video for the song, starring Coverdale's future wife Tawny Kitaen, was MTV's most requested in its first week of release. Kitaen's role had been promised to the pre-fame Claudia Schiffer.[4]

Whitesnake withheld licensing of "Still of the Night" for use in the video game Rock Revolution; a cover version of the song was subsequently featured in the game. The studio version later appeared as Rock Band DLC in 2012.

Moreover, the song is played in 2011 movie Bad Teacher.

The Finnish symphonic metal singer Tarja Turunen covered the song for her album What Lies Beneath. The American band, Halestorm, also covered the song for the album Reanimate 3.0; the song peaked at #20 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart in 2017.[5] Static-X covered the song as a bonus track for their album Cult of Static.

Track listing

  1. "Still of the Night" – 6:38
  2. "Here I Go Again" – 4:33
  3. "You're Gonna Break My Heart Again" – 4:11

Personnel

References

  1. ↑ "Whitesnake chart stats". Archived from the original on 2012-05-25.
  2. ↑ "Allmusic (Whitesnake charts and awards) Billboard singles".
  3. ↑ "spreadit.org music". Archived from the original on 4 January 2009. Retrieved 7 February 2009.
  4. ↑ Hotten, Jon (June 2001). "Year of the snake". Classic Rock #28. p. 28.
  5. ↑ "Halestorm Mainstream Rock chart peaks". Billboard magazine. Retrieved November 11, 2017.
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