PRESS RELEASE: National Treasure, Bernie Marsden reveals a fascinating insight into the motivation, method and creation of his new album, CHESS in this 12 minute ‘The Making Of Chess’ video documentary.

‘CHESS’ is another successful collaboration between Conquest Music and Bernie Marsden’s own Little House Music.  The new album is out on 26th November 2021: available on all digital platforms, along with a Special Limited-Edition Digipak CD accompanied by a 16-page booklet.

Recently, Bernie talked to Rockpages.gr about the new album. He said about the importance of Chess Records: “looking back after the best part of 50 years it’s been incredibly important, because they were the guys that recorded all of the artists I’ve already talked about. They were the ones that came over to Europe quite early in the ‘60s. Sometimes you could see these people, not very often but occasionally they would appear on television and you’d say “oh, that’s the guy! That’s Howlin’ Wolf, that’s Muddy Waters”. And they were very well received, especially over in the UK and I think that in Germany they were very big… the “blues packages”. There used to be a thing called “The American Blues Package” and that was a very big tour of very big theaters in those days. Even in the early days it was very successful thing. Of course, the American artists they were treated very well in Europe and they loved coming back, because they’ve been treated very well comparing to what they’ve been treated in America. The Chess guys were important, because they were the ones that put it all together. They put all those guys under one label, which made it easy for people in the rest of the world to listen to”.

The album was an idea that was born after a talk with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons: “Billy and I know each other for ten years pretty well, maybe more and we were listening to that record that he made with the guy from The Fabulous Thunderbirds and I said “this sounds like all the records that I grew up with” and he said “yeah, me too” and he kind of said “wouldn’t it be great if we all make a record with the stuff that we grew up with?” And I thought about it and found it was a good idea, so that’s what I did”.

He might not be sure which was the first Chess record he bought, but he is about the impact it had on him: “I think it was an EP with “The First Time I Met The Blues” by Buddy Guy. That was the first thing that was playing out by then, so Buddy Guy’s guitar sound really really hit me as something very very special.