RETURN OF THE REAL VAN HALEN

When I was a young fella, the bad boys of rock`n`roll were bands like AC/DC, The Angels, Black Sabbath and Van Halen. 

Well at least until around 1986 anyway, it all went downhill from there in hard rock terms. After then, it was all Metallica and a myriad amount of wannabe Metallica bands which were truly mean and nasty and not just theatrical showmen like the bat eating Ozzy Osbourne.

Van Halen had been around for quite a long time before Metallica and thrash metal supposedly redefined heavy metal music. 

Their first album came out in 1978, a mixture of pugnacious punk and hard rock in the same vein as 70`s prototype metal band Montrose, whose original lead singer was Sammy Hagar, who ironically would eventually go on to become the second lead singer for Van Halen in 86.

Van Halen No 1 is just a brilliant livewire hard rock album, as close as any band ever came to making a 70`s album which incorporated stadium rock with good ol` fashioned rock`n`roll.

`Eruption`, the instrumental showstomper which made lead guitarist Eddie Van Halen famous, is most probably the best known song on the album besides the cover they done of `You Really Got Me` by the Kinks.

Of course I haven`t mentioned David Lee Roth yet, how could I do that? Dave Lee was the original lead singer for Van Halen and he will always be the best, Sammy Hagar who replaced him in 1986 was a better singer but his workmanlike songwriting was never a good match with the virtuoso and unstructured guitar playing you would expect from Eddie Van Halen. 

In theory, Van Halen should have rocked out heaps more with Sammy Hagar singing than with Roth, seeing that Hagar was a proficient guitar player as well as being a better songwriter than Roth. 

As it turned out, the Van Halen albums which featured Hagar, starting with 5150, were good albums but they lacked that magical spark that David Lee Roth brought to the band with his rather detached lyrical style which left some things to the imagination. 

My favourite tunes off Van Halen No. 1 are not the two i have already mentioned, but `Little Dreamer` and`Feel Your Love Tonight`. The whole album is full to the brim with David Lee Roth`s often hilarious shouting and adlib nonsense, and the Elvis impersonation he delivers at the end of the song `Ice Cream Man`, another cover of an old R&B tune, cracks me up to this day every time I listen to it. 

Van Halen went on and made five more albums with David Lee Roth as their singer, the best follow up to the first one to me always was `Fair Warning` which was their fourth album and it was released in 1981. 

Van Halen No. 2 was a happy go-lucky
album like their first one, but it just does not
have the epic feel of the original. 

Still, all the same, it actually went one better than No. 1 to showcase the backing vocal talents of the bassist Michael Anthony, who also happens to be probably the best bassist in the history of rock, hands down. 

Michael Anthony, who left Van Halen for good in around 2005, is a great bass guitarist because of one very simple reason, you can always hear him down in the mix, no matter who is playing lead guitar around him. 

The third album from Van Halen,`Women and Children First`, was never a favourite of mine, too dark for my liking and it really doesn`t sound cohesive like the other Van Halen albums before it. 

My favourite if I have one off the album is `Romeos Delight`. Fair Warning, the fourth album, is the most convincing follow up to the original. `Mean Street` and the classic `Unchained`, which Sammy Hagar later on in the piece criminally refused to perform live after Roth left the band, is arguably the best Van Halen song of them all, maybe only `Aint Talkin Bout Love`off the original is considered to be better by a lot of fans. 

That song to me is in their top five,
but personally its not my favourite. To me its
between `Unchained` and `Little Dreamer`
as to what is the best Van Halen song. 

After Fair Warning, the band went on to make the mainly covers album `Diver Down` and the commercial breakthrough `1984`, which of course features the synthesizer laden gem 'Jump' and the churning `Panama` which I am sure eludes to what can a boy and girl can do in a car when it is not moving. 

After 1984, it was all over red rover for Roth and Van Halen, he quit in 1985, thinking he had an indestructible solo career in front of him, but that only lasted for an album or two. 

It was great news to hear in about 2008 that
David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen were
burying the hatchet and putting aside twen-
ty years of acrimony, which admittingly had
always been exaggerated by the music press,
to reform and do a world tour. 

With Michael Anthony now a bassist for supergroup Chickenfoot, it necessitated that Eddie Van Halen draft his own teenage son Wolfgang Van Halen as the new bassist for the band. 

And because Wolfgang has had to finish school and graduate, his dad his saying this is the reason why the world tour has been so punctuated with many gaps in between scheduled concert dates.

Van Halen are definitely confirmed to be coming to Australia sometime in 2011, with David Lee Roth back on lead vocals where he always belonged, but without the eccentric and incredibly underated bassist Michael Anthony. 

Wolfgang Van Halen has big shoes to fill, only time will tell if he inherited his fathers guitar skills enough to be able to improvise and make up for the absence of Michael Anthony. 

Teenage exuberance will probably get him over the line. Oh yeah, and I had better mention Alex Van Halen, the bands drummer, who is said to have the biggest drum kit of them all.