WHITESNAKE frontman David Coverdale has told the Rock 100.5 WNNX radio station that he is no longer allowed to discuss the possibility of retirement.
“My wife has ordered me to stop using that word, because it comes back to haunt me every time,” he said.
I’ve retired more times than Frank Sinatra. So I’m just gonna go until my body goes… Actually, my body was telling me in 2016… I didn’t go public until recently that I’d been suffering, in my knees, for about 10 years with degenerative arthritis.
“When I see people have trouble getting up out of a chair in a restaurant or in the street, just my heart aches for them immediately, because it was miserable for me,” Coverdale admitted.
“And, basically, for 10 years, we’d been covering it up with shots, injections and stuff for tours, pain-killing ointments, and I was fine on stage until I had some shots in South America, and they were hurting me through the show. Now, when I go on stage, I go into the zone. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
My job is just to have fun with the audience and encourage them to have fun. I totally trust my band to kick ass, ’cause that’s the driving force behind me, and the energy from the crowd, which is an intense power crowds have, how the evening’s gonna go, and channel that energy back to them — constant refueling from the audience and sending it back. But to be pulled out of the zone by insane bone-on-bone pain was ‘ouch.’
And that happened in South America. And, fortunately, it was near the end of my tour cycle. There was no question — had I not gone in to have knee replacement surgery for both knees, I would have certainly been in a wheelchair, and I could not see myself within that picture.”