![]() ![]() Van Halen’s secret weapon: Ain’t Talkin’ About Love and Eruption might be the album’s marquee tracks, but Atomic Punk is its best. Killer harmonies too – something VH have never got their due credit for. And no song on Van Halen strutted like Jamie’s Cryin’, a song about the aftermath of a one-night stand that’s surprisingly sympathetic. Van Halen sounded like they were strutting, even when they weren’t. ![]() The doo-wop breakdown that crashed the party near the end was the roadmap to Dave Lee Roth’s entire career. ![]() Like most of the tracks on Van Halen, it was cut live, without overdubs – Ted Templeman rightly clocked that would be the only way to bottle the band’s relentless energy. The oldest song on the record dated back to 1974, when it was called Show Your Love, but it didn’t show its age. Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love was everything that was fantastic about Van Halen wrapped up in three and a half minutes: the jagged guitar that sounds like it would knife you in a heartbeat, the vocal squeals and showboating from Roth, the weird shit like the sitar that doubles up the guitar solo. Producer Ted Templeman certainly thought so – this was the song that persuaded him to work with the band.Įddie Van Halen once claimed he wrote his band’s early signature song as a pastiche of punk: “A stupid thing to us, just two chords.” The result was far from dumb. One of dozens of covers they’d throw in their sets back in the days when they were called Mammoth, it took the original’s Jurassic riff and Van Halenized it to glorious effect. If The Kinks really did invent heavy metal with You Got Me, then this was Van Halen paying them back. ![]()
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