Van Halen Plan UK Tour

Van Halen are finally planning to return to the UK and Europe, says frontman David Lee Roth.

Their last visit, in 1998, included just a handful of appearances in Finland and Germany with Extreme singer Gary Cherone at the helm. They haven’t toured the UK since a set of shows with Sammy Hagar in 1995, and their last trip to Britain with Roth was the Monsters Of Rock tour of 1984.

But now the singer believes fans will finally get their chance to see them within the next nine months.

He tells the Opie & Anthony radio show: “We’re going to be playing Europe – probably 50, 60 shows starting at the end of this year.”

And he vows the decades-long wait will prove worthwhile, saying: “Van Halen is very pure and uncut music. It’s a little like getting drunk on shots of really good Kentucky bourbon. It’s lead, bass, drums and howling at the moon. You’ll have a great night… but you probably won’t want to see us again for three years. You won’t want to see that bottle.”

The band’s only US appearances this year were booked at short notice, says Roth. “I’m frankly surprised that these happened now,” he admits. “I think probably they had designs on somebody else, and somebody got sick. These are big shows, like, 50-70,000 person shows. They’re coming together fast, which says, probably, somebody else bowed out.”

The frontman recently admitted he’d love to see Michael Anthony return to complete the original lineup. Meanwhile, his replacement, Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang, has said they’re at work on material for a follow-up to last year’s A Different Kind Of Truth.