Format Vinyl LP
Cassette
CD | Recorded 1986 | |
B-side "Here I Go Again" and "You're Gonna Break My Heart Again" Released 21 March 1987 (UK)
9 March 1987 (US) Genre Heavy metal, blues rock, glam metal Length 6:41(album version), 3:58 (single version) | ||
"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., #18 on the U.S. Mainstream Rock Tracks and #79 on the Billboard Hot 100 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.
Contents
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 both 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
A music video, featuring Coverdale's then future wife Tawny Kitaen, was shot for the song, and it was MTV's most requested video in its first week of release.
In popular culture
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.
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.
Track listing
- "Still of the Night" - 6:38
- "Here I Go Again" - 4:33
- "You're Gonna Break My Heart Again" - 4:11