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Sun 1 February 2026 18:00, UK
The guitar skills of Eddie Van Halen were so astounding and assured that classic rock heroes quickly became dethroned idols as he burst onto the scene and rose swiftly to the top.
To him, Jimi Hendrix was “too sloppy”, Rick Derringer was a rip-off who he chastised by demanding that he stop playing “my melody”, and “contemporary music” was something he quit listening to a long time before even the hair metal explosion rose up around him. But there was one fellow who he did revere: Eric Clapton.
Of course, he’s not alone in this regard. Hendrix went so far as to hail Clapton as “just too much” in the best possible way, BB King listed him among the greats, and half of London called him “God” for a period in the 1960s. However, of all the plaudits that the Cream guitarist received, those asserted by the fuzzy-haired force behind ‘Eruption’ were perhaps the most glowing.
Like Lou Reed, EVH was more likely to dish out a slap around the chops than a compliment. With his signature sound cut-up and copied by a coterie of incapable cling-ons in the era of tired, second-hand showiness, he was perhaps justified to feel so aggrieved. Although maybe he took things a little too far when he bought a bloody tank.
Yet, he was all too happy to go all doe-eyed and revisit the halcyon days of his youth when he would jam along to Clapton records. It seemed the ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ strummer brought out a rare sentimental side in EVH. After moving over to Pasadena, California, from the Netherlands with his family when he was seven, the sound of Clapton was the first pulse of rock ‘n’ roll that he heard, and it set his imagination racing.
Suddenly, a new life in new lands stretched out ahead, and he had one hero guiding the way. “Clapton was it,” he told Guitar World. “I knew every note he played. That’s what I was known for around home. Me, Alex, and another bass player called ourselves Mammoth and we were the junior Cream.”
This intimacy with Clapton’s work from such a young age makes EVH’s appraisal of it all the more noteworthy. So, when he told Guitar Player about the two stand-out moments in Clapton’s discography, it essentially represented the apprentice hailing the master’s finest work at a point in 1978 when they had emerged as the one and two in the whole classic rock cannon.
Eric Clapton’s greatest solos, according to Eddie Van Halen:
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