“There were three hundred people there, and two hundred of those sang along to it, even though they’d never heard it before”: How a pre-fame Whitesnake made an overlooked R&B song their own – and finally got the blessing of the cult soul icon who wrote it

Whitensake posing for a photograph in the late 1970s.

Bernie Marsden knew Whitesnake were on to a winner with their cover of Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City the very first time they played it. It was 1978, and the guitarist and his bandmates had just laid down the slow-burning version of R&B singer Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland’s four-year-old single that would appear on their debut Snakebite EP. Now they were debuting it in public.

“There were three hundred or four hundred people there, and two hundred of those sang along to it, even though they’d never heard it before,” the late Marsden said of the show, speaking to Classic Rock in 2012, “People immediately accepted it.”