David Lee Roth says working with Eddie Van Halen was “better than any love affair”

David Lee Roth has said that working with Eddie Van Halen was “better than any love affair”.

• READ MORE: Eddie Van Halen, 1955 – 2020: RIP to a fire-fingered guitar colossus 

Despite often locking horns with his longtime bandmate during his time in Van Halen, the former frontman expressed how much he missed the late guitarist, who died in October 2020 aged 65, on his latest edition of The Roth Show podcast.

“My dear departed Ed,” the frontman said. “Boy, I miss him. I had a ball with Ed. Walt Disney once said, ‘You know what? My love affair with Mickey Mouse was better than any love affair with a woman I ever had.’ I’ve gotta tell ya: playing with Ed, writing songs with Ed, presenting those songs with Ed was better than any love affair I ever had.

“And some of those songs, I think, might last forever – or until the last syllable of time, like Shakespeare said. They became anthems. Where are they playing ‘Jump’ right now?”

He also reflected on how the pair clashed during the making of their classic hit.

“I remember when he played [‘Jump’] on the keyboard downstairs. I said, ‘No.’ Well, we reflect the times, and the times at that time was guitars, guitars, guitars; and ‘Jump’ was one of those hybrids.”

Roth was in and out of the band and he last played with them in 2015.

Earlier this week, Roth shared a solo version of the 1980 Van Halen hit ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’.

It arrived just a few months after another unreleased track, ‘Nothing Could Have Stopped Us Back Then Anyway’, in which he looked back nostalgically on his time in Van Halen.

Roth originally planned to retire last year and was scheduled to cap off his illustrious career with a farewell residency in Las Vegas, but the shows were pulled due to the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.