Slash praises the late Eddie Van Halen: “Nobody after that really ever came close to playing that style”

Van Halen guitarist Eddie Van Halen, who once revolutionised guitar playing, passed away in October last year, after losing a long battle with cancer. Van Halen left his mark on the music world and inspired many of his contemporaries and future guitarists.

Now Slash, guitarist for Guns N’ Roses, has paid tribute to the late guitar hero. Slash appeared on a recent episode of the ‘Southern Accents Radio With Dave Cobb’ podcast, and said the following:

“By and large, I really don’t come from this sort of eighties shredding school of guitar playing at all. But when I first heard, along with everybody else, in 1978 and first heard the Van Halen debut record, it really fucked me. That was a heavy fucking record. I mean, that was the moment that the Seventies just changed, that particular record. And as a guitar player, I was just a kid, I was just picking up the guitar at that time. I hadn’t even started at that moment. I started like the following year, but when I started getting into guitar playing, everybody was trying to emulate Eddie and they were all sort of focusing on the obvious techniques and the fucking finger tapping and the harmonics and the tremolo bar stuff and all these really fucking great techniques that Eddie had.”

“But the way that he did it was such a part of his personality and it was such a part of his melodic sensibility that it had this really sort of musical fluidity that nobody after that really ever came close to playing that style of guitar playing. And so I always loved Eddie. And in between any of his very specific techniques, he also just had great fucking rock and roll lyrics, just really cool, bluesy, fucking rock lyrics. So, yeah, [I] loved Eddie.”