Sat 13 December 2025 19:30, UK
Some acts don’t necessarily have the influences that you might expect them to, and in the case of Van Halen, it wasn’t exactly the progenitors of heavy metal that spurred on the two brothers in the band to take the course they did.
With Eddie Van Halen’s technical mastery of the guitar and the attacking style that he used to wrangle the instrument, you’d have thought that a steady diet of Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi would have been the main catalyst for him becoming the showboating performer he was known for being. While he would certainly have taken some inspiration from these players, it was elsewhere that his attention was focused.
Similarly, his brother Alex wasn’t quite as transfixed on the hard rock and heavy metal drummers of the generation before the band’s emergence, and was seemingly more interested in pop music, which was what ended up drawing the siblings together to pursue a career in music.
Having both begun as classical musicians, the brothers were convinced to cease their formal musical education in order to pursue something that would be more commercially successful as a result of their exposure to The Beatles. According to the Dutch-born siblings, moving to the US and watching the band’s A Hard Day’s Night film was what persuaded them to take this alternative direction, and according to Eddie he stopped playing piano when he realised guitars were the way forward.
“I never really doubted I’d be in a band, and I never doubted it would be with my brother. But we didn’t know what kind of music we’d play until the British Invasion made it clear,” Alex later reflected in his autobiography, Brothers. They’d become completely smitten with the four lads from Liverpool, and were determined to make music that sounded exactly like what they were newly being exposed to.
Somewhere along the way, there would have been a moment where they were drawn towards something heavier, hence the metal tag that the band were often labelled with, but the earliest influences were far more pop-adjacent than one might expect from a band such as Van Halen.
Aside from The Beatles, however, there was one other band of a similar ilk that they became completely obsessed with, and Alex went on to argue in his book that they were almost just as influential to their decision to pursue rock and pop music as their path. “We wanted to rock ’n’ roll like our idols: the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five,” he continued, adding, “You may never have heard of that second band, but back then they were neck and neck with the Beatles, I’m telling you.”
He continued by praising them for songs like ‘Glad All Over’, which was a major hit for the group on both sides of the Atlantic in 1964. “We were hooked on that grungy saxophone. It was an instrument we already knew how to play, so we could imitate their sound. We were excited by the wildness and the rebellion of rock.”
While it’s hard to imagine Van Halen ever diving into a cover ‘Bits and Pieces’, it’s still fascinating to think that this was their gateway into contemporary music, and had they never been exposed to bands like the Dave Clark Five, then there wouldn’t be hits like ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’, even if it is a significant stylistic leap.
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