Bernie Marsden – Here I Go Again (Solo Acoustic)

Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden sadly passed away a few days ago.

For several years, I have had a video uploaded to my personal YouTube channel of Bernie Marsden at The Boileroom in Guildford. It was from when I worked at Andertons and we hosted an event to promote PRS guitars with whom Bernie was affiliated.

Typically these events took the form of “an evening with” featuring talking, storytelling, Q&A, and a little live music, with an undercurrent of product promotion.

As the staff we’d usually take down a (cheapo) video camera and stills camera to show off that we’d had a star in our midst! However, in this case, I can only find two poor quality photos and the promo poster. The video, I believe, was actually taken by a punter and sent to us.

Sandwiched between Bernie’s humble interaction with the audience is an acoustic rendition of Here I Go Again; arguably one of the most famous pieces of popular music to have ever existed.

For some reason or other I must have stumbled upon it and uploaded it to my YouTube channel to preserve it, but I don’t really know why I didn’t publish it publicly until – just one month ago – I spotted it in my list of videos marked as “private”.

I then didn’t see any reason not to publish what I feel is quite a unique capture of the song in front of a sub-200 audience, sung with passion by the man who wrote it.

And co-incidentally it was only one month later when the music community were to mourn his passing. When I heard, I shared the video with my old boss who passed it on to his wide-reaching community and I’m now delighted to see that it has been seen by many more people as a result.

One particularly lovely moment in the video is where Bernie’s telling the audience that the song has been recorded in “all sorts of different ways”:

Now, I have to tell you, Tom Cruise has just recorded it … People say, “can he sing?” I said, “do I care?!”

Lee went on to do more events and interviews with Bernie and I gather thought him to be a genuine and lovely man which is echoed in the tributes and obituaries.