"The best frontman I ever saw. Nobody else came close": The day David Lee Roth turned in the performance of a lifetime
By Paul Elliott( Classic Rock ) published yesterday
With a heavyweight line-up including Ozzy Osbourne, AC/DC, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe and more, Monsters Of Rock 1984 is still revered in festival folklore
In 1997, 10 years before David Lee Roth rejoined Van Halen, the singer recalled in his autobiography Crazy From The Heat a nasty little episode that occurred some time around the early 80s, when he overheard a conversation between Eddie Van Halen, his brother Alex and an unnamed music-business figure. Roth wrote of this in the bluntest of terms: “I once heard somebody say to the Van Halens: ‘You guys play the music; the Jew sells it.’ Well, you’re fucking right.”
Those words spoke volumes about the dynamic in the band during that era. And for British rock fans there was no greater exhibition of Roth’s showmanship than when Van Halen played at the Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park on August 18, 1984.
When video footage of this performance resurfaced online in the summer of 2023, VH diehards proclaimed it “the Holy Grail”. A pro shoot from side-stage, it includes the whole set, except for a few minor cuts, plus backstage scenes from before and after. It captures all the raw power of the band; the heated atmosphere generated in the 65,000-strong audience; the element of chaos as a small number of delirious fans made it onto the stage to make a grab at their heroes. Above all else, it captures the wise-cracking, high-kicking David Lee Roth at the very top of his game.
“As a frontman, Roth was untouchable that day,” says promoter Andy Copping, who saw the show as a 20-year-old, and has run the Download festival at Castle Donington for the past 20 years in his role as Executive President of UK Touring at Live Nation. “The way that Roth interacted with the audience was just brilliant. As the master of ceremonies, the orchestrator, he was the king.”
But on that beautiful summer’s day, as Roth ruled that stage, there was unrest behind the scenes. Within Van Halen’s inner circle there was a growing sense that a split with the singer was inevitable, and for photographer Ross Halfin, working for the band at Donington and privy to what was going on backstage, the signs were clear. “It was always a bit weird with Van Halen,” Halfin says. “Roth was sort of separate from the rest of them. I didn’t notice this on the first tours I did with them, but I certainly did by 1984.”
Van Halen had come a long way since they first toured in the UK in the late 70s, when Roth famously declared that Lewisham, in south London, was “the rock’n’roll capital of the world!”. But at Donington the party was coming to an end. A British audience was seeing Van Halen with David Lee Roth for the last time.
Forty years on, the Monsters Of Rock show of 1984 is still remembered as the best Monsters of them all. The bill was incredible, with AC/DC headlining over Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne and an impressive supporting bill featuring guitar hero Gary Moore, Californian rockers Y&T, German headbangers Accept, and, making their first appearance in the UK, the hottest new band out of Los Angeles, Mötley Crüe.
This was Monsters Of Rock in its classic form: one day, one stage, seven bands you had to see. At least that was the idea.
Most of those 65,000 people got there in time to see Mötley Crüe, and as Tim McMillan from Kettering remembers it: “The Crüe were loud, dumb, crude, with this snotty arrogance – everything that Kerrang! had promised!” But some people arrived late, this writer included. Eighteen at the time, I was en route from Guildford to Donington with my mate Graham and 50 other denim-clad rock fans on a double-decker bus, which got hit by a passing car on the M1. Fortunately no one was seriously injured, but our bus was stuck on the hard shoulder for an hour, maybe two. By the time we walked on the grassy slopes of Donington Park, the Crüe were long gone and Accept were on stage, banging out their homoerotic anthem London Leatherboys.
Andy Copping arrived even later. Having spent the early afternoon DJ-ing a rock set at a club named Lazers in his home town of Lincoln, he got to Donington just in time to see Y&T end their set with a hapless roadie dressed up as a sort of robotic knight in armour. “I was gutted to miss Mötley Crüe,” he says. “But there was no way I was going to miss Van Halen. I’d seen them in 1980 at Leicester De Montfort Hall, and it was completely life-changing for me.”
The 1984 Monsters Of Rock, more than any other before, had been hyped up as a battle of the guitar heroes – principally Gary Moore, Eddie Van Halen and Angus Young. As Copping recalls: “Gary Moore was on fire that day.” Moore threw down the gauntlet with a blistering rendition of White Knuckles, his answer to Eddie’s Eruption, and an epic version of his signature ballad Parisienne Walkways in which he held one high note that seemed to last an eternity.
The afternoon sky was a clear blue – save for the barrages of plastic beer bottles, most of them half-filled with piss, that flew overhead regularly as a form of entertainment between bands.
In sweltering heat, Ozzy Osbourne took to the stage. With a band that featured another emerging guitar hero, Jake E Lee, successor to the late Randy Rhoads, and a set that included Crazy Train, Bark At The Moon and Black Sabbath classics Iron Man and Paranoid, a shirtless and wild-eyed and clapping Ozzy overran his allotted time in what Copping describes as “a monumental performance”.
Ozzy was a hard act to follow, but Van Halen were not to be upstaged. They were on a high following their US No.1 hit Jump, and a multi-million-selling album, 1984, that would also have made it to the top were it not for what turned out to be the biggest-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, on which Eddie Van Halen had ripped it up with the solo in Beat It.
The Donington crowd was buzzing, heaving, as Van Halen’s set kicked off with an explosion of wild noise, Eddie bent over his ‘Frankenstein’ guitar, his fingers a blur, Alex Van Halen pounding the drums and Michael Anthony thumping his bass caveman-style. Eddie’s trousers were as loud as the noise – banana-yellow with black tiger stripes. But the real razzle-dazzle came from David Lee Roth as he danced out to centre stage wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a glittering coat over skintight gym-bunny pants and vest. Arms raised like a prize fighter stepping into the ring, Diamond Dave sparkled in the sunshine.
Eddie’s guitar tech Rudy Leiren delivered the high-volume introduction. “Alright, Donington! Are you ready? For the first time in five years, the mighty Van Halen!” In all this excitement, Leiren had his timing a year out. The band’s last UK tour was in 1980. But no matter. The heavyweight champions of American rock were here again at last. With Leiren’s voice still echoing, Eddie cranked out the riff to Unchained.
It was all too much for one young woman standing close to the stage beside Mark Blake, then a 19-year-old university student from London, now an author and Classic Rock contributor. He recalls watching as a teenage blonde was overwhelmed by the sheer force of David Lee Roth’s charisma. “She let out a scream and then just keeled over,” he says. “But she was back on her feet by the end of the song.”
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Originally Posted by Vinnie Velvet
