KING EDWARD

40 years ago this month, Van Halen had their first and only US number one single with Jump.

- 

Oddly, for a band built around the greatest rock guitarist of his generation, it was a song powered by a synthesizer riff. Equally notable was the fact the band’s album 1984 would also have made it to the top were it not for Michael Jackson’s Thriller – on which Eddie Van Halen had played the stinging solo for Beat It. But elsewhere on 1984 there was plenty of Eddie’s customary guitar pyrotechnics in songs such as Panama, Hot For Teacher, Drop Dead Legs, Girl Gone Bad and House Of Pain – the latter originally written and r