The Jesus And Mary Chain guitarist William Reid has said Eddie Van Halen “ruined rock guitar”, labelling him one of “the worst guitar players in the world”.
Reid criticised the late musician during a new interview with Stereogum, where his brother and bandmate Jim Reid was asked about a new generation of bands being influenced by shoegaze music.
“Shoegaze, I’ve got a problem with that just because it doesn’t actually exist. ‘Cause it was some clown at the NME made that up,” he responded.
Jim went on to discuss his own guitar style and his instinctive approach to making music. “Not having a lot of equipment actually forces you to be more inventive,” he explained.
“I can play guitar, but only just. It’s kinda deliberate. I play guitar to the level that I need to play guitar. And sometimes knowing too much about making music gets in the way, and it ends up back to Eddie Van Halen again, do you know what I mean?”
William then weighed in: “I think guitar players should never learn scales. I think the worst guitar players in the world, like Eddie Van Halen… I can’t stand Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing.”
Elaborating on his dislike of Van Halen, he continued: “I think he ruined rock guitar all through the ’80s and ’90s ’cause so many people copied him.
“And I just couldn’t get any of that playing as fast as you fucking can and cramming as many notes in one second as you could. And I listen to Peter Hook‘s bass riffs, and I think that’s a thousand times better than anything Eddie Van Halen could ever conjure up.”
This August will see The Jesus And Mary Chain support Hollywood Vampires on their UK headline tour. Shows are scheduled for The O2 in London, the OVO Hydro in Glasgow, the AO Arena in Manchester, and the Utilita Arena in Birmingham. Find any remaining tickets here.
The Scottish group’s eighth and latest studio album, ‘Glasgow Eyes’, was released in March 2024.
Speaking to NME ahead of releasing the record, Jim Reid discussed whether he saw the influence of the Mary Chain in current music.
“I like to hear other people say it really,” he told us. “It’s not like I sit there checking out new bands going, ‘They’ve been listening to us’. It’s nice when you get name-checked, it’s always nice, it always has been. That was the point of the Mary Chain at the beginning.”
Last year, Slayer’s Kerry King listed Eddie Van Halen among who he believed to be the best guitarists. Following the latter’s death in 2020, aged 65, NME hailed the musician as “a fire-fingered colossus”.
“Famed for popularising the ‘tapping’ technique that revolutionised heavy metal and credited with placing the genre at the heart of the American mainstream thanks to the 80 million album sales of his band Van Halen, he was considered amongst the greatest guitarists in history, the man who turned the fine art of the guitar solo into a firework display,” the obituary continued.