David Lee Roth

It’s unusual, of course, for the lead singer in any rock band to be unable to lay claim to being the biggest personality in the group - especially in terms of hard rock and heavy metal, where macho posturing, especially during the seventies and eighties, was positively de rigeur, but it’s perhaps the case where David Lee Roth is concerned, given that he was perhaps second in prominence to Eddie Van Halen when the band Van Halen were going through their heyday during those two decades. It’s testament to Roth’s legacy, then, that he’s been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in his own right, and that he would ultimately return to the band that he made his name with in 2006 after a long spell away; Eddie or no Eddie, they simply weren’t the same without him. In the interim, after leaving Van Halen in the mid-eighties due to musical differences, he enjoyed solo success with tracks like ‘Yankee Rose’ and ‘Just Like Paradise’, but would eventually go onto rejoin his band full-time in 2006; since then, the band have continued to tour stadiums the world over, with Roth’s voice holding up remarkably well as he approaches his sixtieth birthday.